How "Hope Therapy" Can Get Us Through Tough Times

Things were going pretty well for Melanie. After struggling with being overweight, she had recently dropped a significant number of pounds. She felt great and looked great, too. People noticed. Despite this success, though, a familiar sense of depression crept back. Once the numbers on the scale were stable, Melanie (not her real name) felt she didn’t have the same focus and direction that accompanied her weight-loss goals.

After meeting with a psychologist, she defined a new mission: to increase her strength and endurance. During weekly meetings over several months, Melanie and her psychologist discussed applying goal-setting tactics and the fact that fresh efforts changed her outlook. As she worked daily on toning exercises and stamina-building drills, the feeling of accomplishment returned. By identifying and striving toward a new ambition, Melanie created a new sense of purpose, her psychologist says.

Conventional psychotherapy has tended to focus almost exclusively on relieving the symptoms of a mental health ailment, such as anxiety or depression, and declaring success. But increasingly, psychologists like the one who worked with Melanie are offering an alternative—hope therapy, a process of identifying goals, then planning the strategies and sustaining the motivation to reach them. An offshoot of the positive psychology movement, hope therapy aims to help people help themselves by working with their strengths.

“People’s emotions often are determined by their expectations for the future,” explains David Feldman, assistant professor of counseling psychology at Santa Clara University in California and a practitioner of hope therapy. “People who believe they can move toward their goals will feel positive emotions; people without anything to work toward feel hopeless.”

Hope, as defined by psychologists, is the belief that you have the skills and energy to make your dreams a reality. But can a sunny buzzword be turned into a technique to help those feeling adrift, ineffective or uninspired? To paraphrase a hopeful refrain from Barack Obama’s presidential campaign: yes, it can.

Hope therapy has shown itself to be an effective tool to combat mild mood disorders, anxiety, lack of enthusiasm and the general sense of feeling unmoored. In fact, the U.S. surgeon general estimates that about 14 percent of U.S. adults suffer from a mild to moderate mental disorder in any given year. For these cases, hope interventions offer relief without antidepressants and other medications or the intensive—and expensive—weekly sessions on the psychoanalytic couch.

The technique isn’t intended to supplant proven treatments for severe mental illnesses. But hopeful people do tend to be physically healthier, more content, better able to cope with stress and disappointment, and better endowed with social ties than their lower-hope counterparts. In short, hopeful people are happier.

It sounds like common sense, and perhaps it is. But it’s also a drastic departure from therapy as usual. “Often when we think of mental health, it’s as an absence of mental illness,” explains hope therapy practitioner Jennifer Cheavens, assistant professor of psychology at Ohio State University in Columbus. “But there’s a dimension of mental health above neutral, when people are flourishing and utilizing their strengths. We aim to help people realize their full potential.”

Hope therapy takes place in either group or individual sessions, and begins with the psychologist helping the client identify a goal. As easy as that may seem, many people struggle to pinpoint what they want, rather than what their boss may demand or their spouse may need.