HOPE, SAFETY AND LOVE

by Fonya Lord Helm, PhD, ABPP

 

Hope is one of the most powerful feelings a therapist and the person who comes to therapy can engender in each other.  Hope is an important part of the sense of safety that must be created in the work, and hope helps provide the optimism needed to try new approaches.  It provides a change of perspective, so the challenges look different, like the changes we see in the patterns when we turn a kaleidoscope.

 

Hope, safety and love are closely related.  With the establishment of safety, hope and love become agents of change; they provide a sense of purpose and hope that is lacking in isolated individuality, which can be lonely.  Love involves connection, often only unconscious, to the loves that have gone before in life, and in this way love even relates to childhood love for parents and other family members.  Love also can operate in therapy and appropriate loving feelings form the basis for a good working relationship and exchange of feeling with the therapist.  Powerful unconscious connections create love’s energy and enthusiasm, and even can provide enough of a sense of safety to make it possible to take the initiative to begin a new grown-up loving relationship in real life or totake the initiative to begin a new job or creative project.

 

A loving relationship includes the hope that the new lover, therapist or creative project will be able to heal the hurt endured in the relationships that went before.  Healing the hurt is exactly what an analyst or therapist offers to do, and a new job or creative project is empowering and can overcome previous disappointment and hurt.  The sense of self gets stronger, even though it is not realistically possible to heal all hurt.

 

Sustaining a loving relationship or dedicating ourselves to a particular job or creative project involves planning for the future, and hope is a necessary part of this process.  The best kind of hope is steady and leads eventually to a realistic appreciation of what this future can provide and deliver over time.  Realistic hope includes honest and kind self-criticism—more like a deep understanding of the limitations of oneself and other human beings.  Realistic hope is patient, and includes an acceptance of aging, the ending of life and a transfer of hope to the next generation.