Meandering Michele’s Mind: Belief vs. Hope in PTSD Healing
Monday, February 22nd, 2010 • Uncategorized •
I’m just going to dive right in and say: I don’t think I ever hoped I would overcome PTSD. When I received my diagnosis I don’t remember feeling hope at all. By then I’d been hoping for too long that I’d be released from the psychological and physiological hell in which I lived. After 25 years of struggle hope was a passive thing I was waiting for to rescue me.
To have hope that my life would be returned to normal would mean I had a plan, which I didn’t. When I received my diagnosis I only had belief: I believed there was a way out.
At the beginning of my healing then, for no good reason at all I believed I could heal. I believed in the power of my most authentic self. I believed in the strength that lay dormant in me. I believed in the courage of my soul. I believed in the possiblity of the universe. I just believed because belief made success feel like a foregone conclusion.
Slowly, I educated myself. I researched and learned and tried to think things through. I struggled on my own. Sought professional guidance for clarity. And then plunged into a worse psychological place than I’d ever been. Still, I believed.
Eventually, I defined a path I thought would work for me. That’s when I remember hope coming into existance. I hoped my ideas were right. I hoped my actions prevailed. I hoped the treatment I chose was effective. I hoped I was on the right path. At that point, my belief that healing was possible joined with my hope the strategy would work. Eventually, my belief and hope paid off.
What’s meandering my mind today is the curiosity of how you perceive belief vs. hope. Do you rely on one more than the other? Do they have different effects, strengths, purposes?
According to Merriam-Webster Dictionary:
Belief = to consider to be true
Hope = to desire with expectation of obtainment
Are they one and the same? Is one more important than the other?
Share your thoughts with me….
(Photo acknoweldgement on Flickr.)
Tags: healing, Meandering Michele's Mind, ptsd, symptoms
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Good point, Michelle. I think that hope becomes belief once we put some fuel behind it in creating a plan of action. In addition, I discovered that when my plan wasn’t working, I was lacking “confidence”…that firm belief, knowing and feeling of certainty.
Be blessed today!
Good stuff here…as always!
This is a good thing to think about, I do believe you need to have hope and belief at the same time, and I feel there both important.
“What’s meandering my mind today is the curiosity of how you perceive belief vs. hope. Do you rely on one more than the other? Do they have different effects, strengths, purposes?”
I should really read your question before answering…I think I was a tad off topic in my initial response….I think that in the beginning I had both belief and hope that I could find healing, although along the way I lost both for a time I think. When I started looking at this again down the road I discovered that I could not believe if I did not have hope – so in my case I think that I had to find hope again before I could firmly believe that I could do this thing and find my way.
How thought provoking!
In my experience, I had neither hope nor belief initially. I knew only that I was tormented by terror daily and that I had to do something. My action and forward movement was motivated by desparation.
After receiving a diagnosis of PTSD, I sunk further, experienced greater terror and torment. I encountered despair. Finally I found a group of individuals that knew what I was going through and could illuminate guide posts along my path. This group offered me hope.
Belief is a bit more challenging. It means you have faith and have stopped allowing fear such a prominent place. It also means you have given up on the concept of linear time and “milestones” or products related to healing. It means you have accepted that healing occurs in it’s own time, that it is a process, that it occurs along the way/as a part of the journey. In this acceptance and surrender, belief is then possible, faith and knowing are possible.
Do I have hope and belief now? Yes! Does that make me any less susceptible to having days where I want to give up? Absolutely not! In fact, it seems that when I’ve had a period of calm & a relative freedom from intrusive symptoms, I then experience, even more intensly, a series of significant symptoms that takes me some time to recover from. My therapist says this is an indication that I am moving along in the process, that I am doing well, that I am stronger. My brain tries to convince me that it is a setback, that all the work I’ve done has made no difference, that I will never “get better.” But then, the larger part of me knows better than that. I have hope and I do believe!
Kris:
Desperation was the prime motivator for me initially. Hope/Belief is about moving toward something, desperation is about moving away from something. That Desperation had a tinge of hope/belief about it – that I could find a way to make it all stop. Desperation kept me looking.
These days I still cycle. Every time I work on some stuff I’ll find that I’ll have a blip as things get a little worse for a while and then improve once more. Working on stuff seems to allow things to surface which causes the blip. They then disperse and the cycle continues.
Over time the blips get smaller and the number of ‘good’ days increase and the number of ‘reasonable’ nights increase and so on.
After a row of good days I’ll think “maybe I’m almost cooked” and then I’ll hit a blip and it’ll be “I guess not quite yet”.
@Mike; I had to laugh at that last sentence you wrote:”After a row of good days I’ll think “maybe I’m almost cooked” and then I’ll hit a blip and it’ll be “I guess not quite yet”.” —What a wonderful way to look at this journey that we are on!
Also – I totally agree on your point of the difference between desperation and looking back and hope and looking forward. As long as I was living in my head, in the past I was stuck. But once I was able to see things as they were (something that just “is” and that the past is one of those things I cannot change) and move into viewing things in hope, looking toward where I wanted to BE, it was so much easier to develop the belief that there was a solution.
@Kris; a very wonderful point about hope and belief being the basis for this forward movement but not the end of the road: “Do I have hope and belief now? Yes! Does that make me any less susceptible to having days where I want to give up? Absolutely not!”—-So true! I often thought “well, shouldnt I be done with this by now?”. The key for me was to realize that healing from trauma is not a “one stop shop” where we can just pull healing off the shelf and say “I’m done!” but rather it really is that journey. As long as I keep in mind that this is a process rather than an event it makes it so much easier to travel this path.
Hope keeps me on the road, belief helps me hang on to the hope when things are dark.
When I was diagnosed it had been almost 40 years since the precursor event. Hope and belief never entered the picture. I was just doing what I was told to do. That was six years ago. My family is still together, in the same house and weekly therapy, plus meds, continue. I’m one of those who thinks that PTSD is a lifetime gig, and that to avoid triggers is to withdraw from society. That I believe. But when I look at some of my results, I have to agree with Kris. Years ago we had a saying: “Sometimes you eat the bear; sometimes the bear eats you.” Rather like one of the 3 main questions in Brain Rules: “Can I eat it; can it eat me?” I don’t think I’d be connected to this website if I didn’t have some hope, at least for improvement, but for a cure? Sorry, not a chance.
[...] @HealMyPTSD Taking the hope/belief conversation further: I had no hope. But I did have belief I could heal PTSD. [...]