One apocrypha describes how Bach returns to Weimar from a trip of several months, and finds him at home with tragic news: while he was away, his wife and three children died. Of course, he cannot know that he will have a very happy second marriage and that he will have a total of twenty children. Desperate, he goes to his study and, like a great believer, begins to pray. The first words that cross his lips are: "God, if only I don't lose my joy."
No matter what happens, some people manage to do it - not to lose confidence that they will solve problems, overcome crises, get well, wait for better days. As dark as it is, they see the light, not at the end of the tunnel, but within themselves. Whatever the suffering, they have no doubt that they have already won. There is always hope, despite everything, optimism is unbreakable, and the feeling that a solution will be found and that the fight must not be given up - that the good in the world is strong enough and will win in the end - is alive.
THE HEALING POWER OF HOPE
There is nothing unusual in the fact that hope is, since Paul's epistles, one of the three most important supports of the Christian faith (although not as powerful as love). This is completely logical for a religion that brings the idea of linear time and the last ("terrible") judgment. Historically older religions offered comfort and hope through the idea of cyclical time, eternal circulation, return, and therefore reincarnation, but Christianity needed some new form of victory over death. Hope, therefore, was closely related to the belief that, no matter how difficult earthly life may be, the savior will return and open the gates of heaven, so that after a time-limited suffering, eternal grace will follow. Hence, hope is symbolized by an anchor, a reminder that the believer has found his root, which no storm will be able to uproot and then envelop him in darkness.
Despite the opinions and attitudes of numerous philosophers and artists, psychological research indicates a very clear connection between optimism and subjective well-being. This, apparently, happens thanks to the influence of optimism on a wide range of phenomena: people who describe themselves as optimistic suffer significantly less often from mental disorders or cardiovascular diseases, cope better with problems, cooperate better with others, are more social, even remember better. Or, if we look at it from the opposite angle, one of the two problems that come down to what we are used to calling personality disorders is a pronounced, chronic suspicion of other people and the expectation that relationships with them must have negative outcomes.
It is inevitable that a feeling like hope is built on the foundations of previous experiences - the more positive they were, the more steadfast the optimism becomes. And there lies another type of responsibility of parents and everyone who deals with small children: it is not only about how they take care of them, but also about children's perception of how adults relate to people from their social environment, as well as how much and how they persevere in the struggle with life's challenges. If parents are too caring or too protective, anxiety can become stronger than hope, to say nothing of families where suspicion and pessimism are instilled in children directly and explicitly.
(WITHOUT)HOPEFUL AND (reset)ENCHANTED
These attitudes are certainly influenced by broader social trends, as generations that grow up during wars, enslavement or long economic crises certainly have a harder time nurturing hope for a better future, especially if adversity lasts for a long time or even across generations. In this sense, the situation with the status of adjectives related to hope in the Serbian language is very interesting. While all Western languages, as well as Russian (and certainly many others), have two different words for those who are full of hope and those who are without any hope, we only have hopeless, and since it is obviously an antonym, the only thing we can conclude is that it is an adjective hopeful somewhere, along the way, over the centuries, disappeared.
Regardless of political history, many people are terribly afraid of hope, and the reason for this is quite obvious. Hope can easily be followed by disappointment, and great hope can be followed by deep disappointment. Thus, every psychotherapist knows many people who have given up, surrendered, do not expect anything and do not dare to allow themselves the hope that it could be better. However, without it, there can hardly be an impulse to fight, so here hope is somewhat strangely similar to courage. In particular, it seems that the young generations are no longer ready to take any risk of injury or disappointment, and without that there can be no hope or relationship, in the professional, and even more so in the personal domain.
AFTER THE RAIN
For psychological practice, therefore, the questions about how it is possible to instill hope in children and how to help adults to regain it are important. The reason is that psychotherapists meet incomparably more people who have sunk into despair, almost complete listlessness, which is not always possible to remove, so that some of them even commit suicide after a long struggle.
Part of this problem is explained by research on different types of mammals, which are now old. It turns out, namely, that when the animals feel aversive stimuli (a mild electric shock, for example), they easily find a way out, move to the other end of the grid or discover which lever to press to stop it. The problem arises when the relationship between aversive stimuli and efforts to avoid them becomes meaningless - sometimes it helps, sometimes it doesn't. This experience of the absence of control and the futility of effort, which is called learned helplessness, can bring a feeling of hopelessness to both animals and humans, and even lead to depression.
This is not the solution to the whole puzzle. However, it can be very useful when you think about different aspects of the problem. Obviously, children should be given an experience of predictability, encouraged to show initiative and show what outcomes it leads to. It is also not appropriate for all behavior to be rewarded or tolerated, since then children do not adopt a clear picture of the fact that actions have consequences, but believe that "everything falls from the sky". Small challenges, which a child can overcome, bring the feeling that future problems will also be successfully solved with fighting and effort.
For adults, unfortunately, sometimes whole worlds collapse and it seems to them that "it will never get better, it will never get better", that is, that some traumatic experiences are too strong for us to control, that some losses are irreversible, that, for example, anxiety or panic are stronger than us. At least to some extent, the principle could be similar - establishing predictability in the environment, but also progress in understanding our own mind and why it leads us to those reactions that we perceive as painful and irreparable. And no matter how hard it might be to believe it, hope is rediscovered almost every time, after a longer or shorter struggle.
RISE, SERBIA
A special question is whether entire societies are allowed to hope and how that process could proceed in general, that is, whether there is social hopelessness and depression. It seems that this "social hope" should be present, but it would also be good if it is not overemphasized. Without it, communities would languish, there would be no great effort, especially no innovation or cultural and technological progress. This does not refer to research on which country people feel happiest in, but to the feeling that our efforts will lead to a better life in the immediate future (with which, I imagine, people went to work actions after the end of the war), that there are no occupiers, dictators, senseless laws or such deep-rooted corruption, which will make any initiative, whether individual or group, meaningless.
Then, are politicians allowed to instill hope? We have seen many times here that it is a source not only of dangerous disappointments, but also of manipulation. On the one hand, there is, for example, the perception of liberal America that Obama is too weak after the unlimited enthusiasm for his campaign platform and book The Audacity of Hope. The most drastic example of the second is the dogma called socialist realism in our country - the Soviet imposition on all artists of the obligation to spread optimism and the image that life has never been better, while the gulags were full. And there are also contemporary examples of how someone awakens collective hopes for a sincere fight against corruption, only to then become the center of all corruption in the country.
The very words "Arise, Serbia" may, at least in part, refer to this very topic - discover hope in yourself, so that you can fight again. A logical message after centuries of slavery. But that, unfortunately, should still be said. In Serbia, there is a very strong belief that everything is in vain, that no matter what you try, it cannot be better. To me, however, while I envied everyone who was present at Slavia on May 23, it seemed that this persistence of spontaneous protests must be based on some invincible hope - in people young enough not to be broken by disappointments and whose enthusiasm pours out all around. And also, just so that it is not overlooked that hope must never lead to passivity, that it is only a necessary introduction, encouragement for an unyielding struggle that will last a long time. But which would never have started if there was no hope.
The author is a psychologist
