Where’d the Hope Go?

What does hope mean to you?
Is it woven from fairy-tale endings and effortless abundance?
What does hopelessness mean to you?
Is it shaped by doom and an impassable abyss?

I want to bring you to the moment I realized how crucial it was to help the individuals I work with define these concepts for themselves—and, more importantly, to recognize how hope and hopelessness operate in their everyday lives.

A little about me: when it comes to helping clients overcome the dysfunction that OCD and anxiety create, I’m as relentless as a dog with a bone. If you tell me you want to achieve a goal, I spend every session thinking about all the possible ways to help you build the confidence to reach it. And when you do, I become, as my sister fondly calls me, "the number one foam finger fan." Picture it: the corny sports fan, waving that giant foam finger, proudly showing just how much they love their team. When a client tells me they’ve achieved or surpassed a goal, my instinct to celebrate their accomplishment kicks in immediately.

Yet I’ve noticed a not-so-uncommon pattern. Many times, when clients reach these milestones, they seem uneasy. Instead of excitement, there’s what I’ve come to call an "apprehensive sadness"—a discomfort where I am certain confidence should be. This troubled me because, at this stage of treatment, at the very least, a sense of mastery should be emerging. Yet the discomfort lingered.

Then one day, I asked a client what they were hopeful for.

They couldn’t answer.

It wasn’t because they didn’t know what they wanted or believed in. It was because speaking their hope aloud felt like facing the toughest exposure on their hierarchy. Somewhere along the road of living with OCD and anxiety, hope had quietly become one of the most triggering actions—and one of the most important exposures for us to focus on.

This was the moment Hope-Based Exposure (HB-E) was born—a term I coined to describe the process of using hope as a tool within the exposure model. Operationalizing hope was both intuitive and daunting at first. We needed to define fear—in this case, fear related to hopelessness—so we could make hope-based exposure truly effective.

I’m deeply grateful to the clients who embraced this work in its early stages. Seeing as I could not offer them a roadmap, they were willing to explore this new approach in the hope that it would lead to the confidence we were striving for. In many ways, our first attempt at hope-based exposure was, in itself, an act of hope.

Through interviews and functional analysis, I identified three common denominators among clients engaged in this work: fear of disappointment, punishment by perfectionism, and magical thinking.

To break it down further, these individuals weren’t just avoiding hope; they were protecting themselves through hopelessness in an attempt to avoid pain. For some, they wanted to avoid the difficult sensation of disappointment—so remaining somewhat hopeless kept them outside of disappointment’s grasp. For others, hope felt like a jinx—a temptation to believe in something good, only to have it taken away. In many cases, they felt undeserving of hope, as if they hadn’t done enough or perfected their work to be deserving of hope. These three fears, or what I call "distortions of hope," have in my anecdotal research become common threads among those struggling with hope. Some people resonate with one, while others identify with a few or all three.

If you resonate with any of the above but do not consider yourself someone impacted personally by OCD, I’d tell you I’m not so surprised. As I’ve now been utilizing HB-E for several years, I’ve recognized that its variables and themes are not synonymous with OCD as much as they are with the human condition. To be hopeful, to have hope, to make the choice to hope is an incredibly risky thing in a life where we know that bad things can happen. As activist and educator Mariame Kaba promotes, “…hope is not an emotion, it’s not optimism, it’s a discipline.” Such a discipline is overwhelming for all the reasons I noted and more, but I believe HB-E could be a tool we can use to facilitate such a discipline in our lives.

At this juncture in my work, I knew I only had half the recipe by way of understanding what drives our behavior to avoid hope. Now I needed to figure out how to engage hope in a tangible and operational sense. Further, I needed to make sure that the work being done could still fit the exposure and inhibitory learning model. At the end of the day, I believe that experiential learning is the best way we start to believe in something. And for that reason, I’ll invite you to experience your first HB-E:

I want you to think about something you really care about. It doesn’t matter how far it may be from you; it doesn’t need to be tangible; it could be as abstract as a feeling. Make sure it's something you recognize that you desire and would want to take ownership of if it were to be placed right in front of you. Maybe it's even something you love. This is your hope statement.

Now try to repeat the following sentence out loud to yourself:

I have no way of knowing what is going to happen, the future is unknown,
AND yet I hope that __(insert your hope statement here)__. I guess I’ll see what happens.

The thing about hope is that when you understand what it is—that it's not wishful thinking, that it is not reassuring—you realize that it's operational on its own accord. Hope doesn’t promise you anything, and yet we still have the ability to choose it. Hope is a positive regard for the uncertain future, and that does not change the fact that the unknown ahead may not pan out the way we are hopeful for. For anyone who felt a ping in the chest, stomach, or throat—or found themselves unable to say the above sentiment out loud—I want to commend you for leaning into the uncertainty of the future with the agency of hope. Again, Mariame Kaba speaks the truth of such actionable, hopeful uncertainty best:
“In the world we live in, it is easy to feel a sense of hopelessness, that everything is bad all the time, that nothing is going to change ever… I understand why people feel that way. I just choose differently. I choose to think in a different way, and I choose to act in a different way.”

My hope is to help others choose differently when their fears of disappointment, being enough or jinxing what they care about gets in the way. I plan to engage with more exercises here as well as starting a weekly ‘hope exposure day’ on my instagram. Please come follow along for the first round of this - on Thursday 31st at @counselingwithcarly. There is a lot more to this story that I’m so excited to continue to share, but for now, what I’ll say is this: For those living trapped by fear, hope is not an antidote; it's a tool to help you break free of that sense that you cannot live out loud in what you care about in spite of fear and hopelessness. You’re still going to get bumped, bruised, and disappointed. But you’ll also allow yourself to feel love, connection, openness, and creativity in the journey. And who knows?

Maybe you’ll find even more than what you’re hoping for.