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Health: Finding Your Hope Through Counselling

By Dr. Karen Massey, Registered Psychologist, Emergo Counselling Services

Creating, inspiring, and enhancing hope through the counselling process is an important result of counselling. Hope is a catalyst for making changes and improving yourself. Did you know that when you're in the depths of despair that your counselor can lend some of her hope to you?

As you find ways to "intentionally grow your hope" then happens is that you will focus more on your hope, on your goals and ways to achieve your goals, dreams, or aspirations. Focusing on future hopes takes your mind away from your current problems that have you emotionally stuck. You can become unstuck by creating a multitude of new possibilities that hold the promise of a better future. You then begin integrating by acknowledging both your present difficulties and your hope for change. By emphasizing possibility thinking and an expectation of a better future, you and your counselor will be able to create ways to make the changes happen that you want. You can then emerge out of your problems and get into action.

Intentionally using hope results in no longer taking hope for granted and having the skills developed to emotionally recover, or even prevent feelings of hopelessness in the future. The good news is that intentionally using hope can be learned. Too often we have hope in the background and only draw upon it when we're deep in hopelessness. By intentionally using hope we can learn to use hope in our daily lives and protect ourselves from hopelessness.

Dr. Karen Massey is a Registered Psychologist, with Emergo Counselling Services 403-390-1815 (Calgary, Alberta)