Hope Is Not a Feeling. It's a Force.

How courage bridges the gap between despair and hope

When someone begins therapy, they bring different amounts of hope to

the process. Hopes about relationships, the future, careers, and family life. Some talk of specific goals they want to achieve, hoping that these are within reach and working tirelessly towards them, while others bring a variant of “I don’t see the point anymore”. Hope also waxes and wanes during therapy – two steps forward, one step back. Hope followed by despair, and back again. Hope has a cyclical quality to it.

Watching the ebbs and flows of hope left me with the following question: What exactly is hope? How is it different to, say, optimism or fantasies about how things ‘could’ be? How is it that some hold onto hope, while others lose contact with it entirely?

A few weeks ago, I recorded a podcast episode on this topic with Lissy Abrahams, a psychotherapist working with couples who is also active in the political space. Lissy shared that in the hours leading up to the recording, she was feeling anything but hopeful. She had seen something the previous night that threw her: imagery circulating online glorifying an act of terror. Hope for peace went out the window.

I mention this because it is relevant to the topic itself: hope seems to be something we lose and re-find, sometimes daily. And that morning, she had to work to get it back.

As our conversation unfolded, our understanding of hope evolved. Here are some of the thoughts we exchanged:

Hope Is Not the Same as Fantasy

Fantasies about what ‘could be’ tend to be attached to a specific outcome. They have a more fixed quality to them. Hope, as we came to understand it, is something more formless. It does not require the same degree of certainty or direction.

In the consulting room, I see this distinction all the time. Some clients fantasise about a specific future – the day they become successful, recognised, married, rich, and so on. Others hope and expect a specific result from therapy – the day they become happy, not anxious, and so on. This type of fantasy is universal – we all need to imagine what it is that we desire. The trouble with fantasy, though, is that when it doesn’t manifest itself in reality, a deep despair can set in. Fantasies can be clung to as a means of avoiding contact with that despair.

Then, we have those who hold hope in a broader sense. They want things to be better, but are less attached to how. They hold onto the idea that something can change. That openness towards not-yet-knowing is quite different from the fantasies that occupy our minds. It sustains life when things don’t unfold how we imagine they will. Whereas when fantasies collapse, life can feel not worth living.

Is hope, then, a state of mind about what’s possible?

Where Does Hope Go?

This is the question that most interested me.

When people are in despair, where does hope go? To lose hope doesn’t feel like a conscious decision. Nobody chooses to stop hoping. And hope also returns – meaning, did it ever really disappear?

Psychoanalytic thinking offers one way of understanding this. We talk about the good object in the mind: an internal figure, shaped by early experience, that holds a sense of benevolence, love, care, and the sense that something trustworthy exists in the world. When people are functioning well, they can reach for this internally. When they can’t, external reality becomes terrifying. People can’t be trusted and the world feels bleak. Despair feels like all there ever was, because nothing inside is available to offer a counterweight.

From this perspective, hope does not simply disappear. It becomes out of reach, because the good internal object has also gone offline. The task, then, is not to manufacture new hope, but to regain contact with what was always there.

This may sound like semantics, but it’s not. If hope has to be created from scratch, the burden is huge. If it can be re-found, the task is different: more like an act of restoration than innovation.

The Courage That Hope Requires

Here is something I had not quite thought through before this conversation: hope takes courage.

Despair, for all its suffering, has a kind of certainty to it. It closes down possibility, which is painful. But I think there is a degree of relief in that closing. No more reaching only to be disappointed. No more risk. The question of what might happen has been answered in advance, even if the answer is depressing. Hope keeps the future open. And an open future is actually quite frightening.

I was reminded of Rollo May’s observation that courage is not the absence of fear but the capacity to move forward in spite of it. My sense is that hope requires something similar, particularly in conditions of sustained difficulty like illness, political oppression, or the aftermath of trauma. Holding onto hope is not passive; it takes energy.

Turning back to the distinction between hope and fantasy: could it be that hope without courage stays at the level of fantasy? A wish for something better, but no movement towards it. This distinction matters. Insight without action is one of the most familiar obstacles we face: the individual who understands themselves with great precision, and yet cannot seem to change. Hope without the courage to act on it looks remarkably similar.

When Hope Becomes a Defence

There is another side to this, which is also worth naming.

Hope can function defensively – a way of protecting more vulnerable parts of ourselves. Psychoanalytic theory has long been attentive to the way the mind uses wishful thinking to manage the pain of reality. When hope becomes attached to a very specific, fixed outcome, it functions less like openness to possibility and more like a refusal to lose something.

I think of the work of mourning here. For hope to remain adaptive, it has to be able to move. It cannot be so rigidly attached to one particular future that any other future becomes unthinkable. When that rigidity sets in, hope starts to resemble something closer to denial.

The clinical picture of this is subtle: a person who cannot grieve a relationship that has ended because they remain convinced it will be recovered, or a person who cannot consider a change of direction because hope has become fused with one specific version of success. In these cases, hope keeps people stuck.

The difference between generative hope and defensive hope is not always easy to identify from the inside. But a useful question is this: does the hope allow you to move, or does it require you to stand still?

Hope as a Political Act

There is something quite striking about the role of hope in collective suffering and collective activism. When a community is in prolonged despair – when the losses are ongoing, or when the threat feels uncontained – the question of who carries hope, and how, becomes important. In therapy, we sometimes speak of the therapist as a container for hope the client cannot yet reach. A similar thing seems to happen in communities under sustained pressure. The hope gets passed around, held by different people at different moments, because no one can hold it alone indefinitely.

Viktor Frankl’s insight – that meaning can be found even in the most extreme conditions – is arguably an argument about the relationship between hope and action. Meaning sustains the capacity to keep going. The role of hope? To keep meaning imaginable.

Take some of the most extreme examples of political action. People who put themselves at risk for a cause must be more invested in the hope of what they are moving towards than in the fear of what they might lose. Hope is the force that makes action possible in the face of terror.

Refinding Hope

So how do we get back to it, when we have lost contact?

What I noticed during our conversation is that hope is re-found through a series of small things, not some grand act: talking to someone who can hold a slightly wider perspective, taking action and connecting with community, listening to music that carries meaning, going for a swim in the ocean, climbing a mountain only to feel awe at how small we are. We each have ways of connecting with the good internal object.

There is something important in recognising that hope often needs to be worked towards, rather than waited for. This doesn’t mean forcing it to arrive. It just means creating the conditions under which hope can reemerge.

In the therapeutic encounter, I find myself functioning as a temporary carrier of hope. Not because I know the outcome – I don’t. But because I have witnessed, repeatedly, what people are capable of. That accumulated experience gives me access to a kind of hope that the person in front of me may not be able to touch yet.

The work, over time, is to help them find their own source of hope.