When you’re in the thick of healing—especially when you’re beginning to see and feel the painful realities of your childhood—it can feel nearly impossible to believe things will ever get better. Even knowing what hope is can feel slippery.
You want to believe in healing, but the path feels long, difficult, and unclear.
Part of why hope feels so elusive is that many of us were never shown what it actually looks like. We were taught to downplay our experiences, ignore them, or escape into fantasy. As a result, hope often gets confused with wishful thinking.
But hope is not wishful thinking.
Wishful thinking is rooted in fantasy. It doesn’t require much of us—no change, no real engagement with reality. It’s the quiet whisper that says, Maybe everything will magically work out if I just try hard enough (or avoid my reality). It’s human and understandable, but it doesn’t hold up over time.
True hope is different. True hope is active.
It’s grounded in the reality that our lives can change—slowly, steadily, one day at a time. Hope acknowledges that the outcome might not look like the picture you once held in your mind, and still trusts that meaningful, life-giving change is possible.
Wishful thinking about your family of origin might sound like: If I just do enough recovery work, my parents and I will finally become close, and everything will feel the way I’ve always wanted it to. But if your parents haven’t done their own healing, that expectation keeps you stuck and hurting.
Hope sounds more like: I’m going to do my healing work, process my family-of-origin trauma, and learn to relate to my parents from a healthier and more grounded place—whatever that ends up looking like. This kind of hope makes space for reality. It honors your growth without requiring someone else to change. It allows for an outcome that supports your well-being rather than a fantasy that perpetuates disappointment.
Holding hope isn’t always easy, though.
There will be days when healing feels heavier than you imagined. When grief rises unexpectedly. When anger feels sharp. When the confusion of Why am I still struggling with this? creeps in.
Those are the moments when hope feels miles away, if you can sense it at all.
Many years ago, I was in that kind of place, and someone said to me, Borrow my hope. Borrow the hope that I have for you. I still remember the relief that came over me—the immense, physical relief of knowing I wasn’t alone and that hope was available to me even when I couldn’t feel my own.
I held on to those words like a talisman. It helped me see and feel that hope existed, even though I couldn’t always see it. I needed someone who could hold the bigger picture when all we can see is the next painful step. We all need that. It could be a trusted friend, your therapist, a fellow traveler in recovery—someone who can stand beside you and see what you can’t in the moment.
The hope I’m talking about isn’t soft or sentimental. Sometimes it’s gritty. Sometimes it asks more of you than you feel like you have. But it’s rooted in truth: healing is possible, even when the process is painful and the progress is uneven.
Hope often arrives as a pinprick of light—barely noticeable at first. But that tiny glimmer matters. It grows, shifts, expands, and contracts, and it stays with you. It guides you forward, one small choice at a time.
So if you need to borrow my hope, borrow it freely. Hold it lightly until you can feel your own.
I believe deeply in the power of healing and transformation. I’ve seen it in my own life, in the lives of people I work with, and in countless others who’ve walked this path before us. Change is possible—I’ve witnessed it over and over again.
A place to start:
If hope feels distant right now, set a timer for ten minutes and write freely in response to one of these prompts:
- Who in my life has held hope for me, even when I couldn’t? What was that like? Or who in my life could hold hope for me now?
- Do I feel any resistance or apprehension at the idea of connecting with hope – even if someone else is holding it for me?
- What stories have I told myself about why healing isn’t possible for me? Where did those stories come from?
- Is there a moment, even a brief one, when I felt something shift—a little lighter, a little clearer? What was happening?
This isn’t about answers – it’s just a place to begin. That’s a lot of what this work is—one honest moment at a time.
Photo credit: Kiriakos Verros on Unsplash