Activating hope in times of unravelling ACT I V E H O PE
Chris Johnstone
Resilience specialist, CollegeOfWellbeing.com
I trained as a GP, then for many years worked as part of a specialist mental health team treating people with alcohol dependence. These days I teach online courses about wellbeing, active hope and resilience. My books include Active Hope (co-authored with Joanna Macy and translated into several languages), and Seven Ways to Build Resilience.
David Peters interviews Chris Johnstone about the role of hope when things fall apart, either in our lives or in the world.
DP – Hope is a central theme for this edition and also of Active Hope, the book you co-authored with Joanna Macy. How do you see hope and why is it important? Something I’m deeply interested in is what help us more fully engage in life, with its ups and downs, and challenges, in ways that contribute to wellbeing not just of ourselves, but also of the world around us. Hope is part of the story here. But it is not straightfoward – because while some aspects of hope can be enlivening and draw us more into life, the opposite is possible too. For example, if we think we need to have hope before we can follow a purpose, what happens when we lose hope? Do we give up on our purpose too? At a time when so many people struggle to feel hopeful about the future, whether their own, or that of the world around them, we need a different approach.
DP – so what is active hope and how is it helpful? The word hope has different meanings. In the question ‘are you hopeful?', you’re asking someone about their assessment of how likely something is. Is it going to work out? 30
or not? Do you have your hopes up or not? Compare that with the question ‘what do you hope for?' Here you’re inviting them to tell you about their desires and preferences. Active hope is more to do with this second meaning and it involves three key steps. First you start from where you are, being fully present to the reality of your starting point. Then, you identify what you hope for from there – what’s the direction you’d like things to move in? And third, you take steps that way, you’re active in the process of making your hoped-for future more likely.
DP – how has this perspective been useful in your work as a medical doctor?
For much of my medical career, I worked with people with severe alcohol dependence. When someone stops drinking, and begins recovery, there’s all kinds of hopes generated about how things might go – both for the client and also for any helping professionals involved. When a relapse happens, those hopes get dashed and that can be hugely painful. I often saw clients who, after repeated relapses, felt such a sense of hopelessness that they’d say, ‘What’s the point? I keep failing. It’s not going to work, I can’t do it'. One told me he’d given up
giving up, because it was too painful to keep on trying when each time he fell flat on his face. Yet working in groups, other clients would say things like, ‘I was like that a few months ago, and then something changed. I hated being so disappointed with myself, I hated how I felt, being so out of control, I reached a point where I’d do anything to get well. I learned I just had to take it a bit at a time, sometimes even five minutes or an hour at a time. Doing that, I got through a whole day, then another one. Building on that, things gradually changed.’ There’s something here about having a light at the end of the tunnel, then losing that light, then finding a way. How do we keep going even where we’re not sure where the light is? Active hope starts from the recognition that whatever you face, there’s different ways it can go. Even if there’s no light at the end of the tunnel, there will be different versions of being in a lightless tunnel, some of these better than others. To represent this, I use an image I call the spider diagram. If the body of the spider represents the present moment, then each leg is a different way the future can go. What’s the best way things can go from here? What’s the worst? And what’s most likely? These questions point us to different legs. Active hope
© Journal of holistic healthcare
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Volume 16 Issue 2 Summer 2019
