• Go here for the intro and first essential skill to find hope again.
• Here’s the second essential skill to reignite hope.

Between December 2023 and January 2025, I almost lost hope. It threatened to spread inside my heart like a virus.

As a survivor of childhood sexual abuse and multiple trauma and grief events through the course of my life, I had many resiliency skills at my disposal.

I used them all, fighting the infection that threatened to take me down.

This strategy didn’t work.

Instead, once I leaned into the feelings of despair and hopelessness, the virus’s symptoms began to decrease.

Through this process, two important questions bubbled up to the surface:

• What is hope?
• Where do we turn when we feel there’s no more hope?

This is the 3rd philosophy, question, and skill about reigniting hope.

Hope is a Duty and a Responsibility

First, some words that really inspire me as I continue to read and internalize them:

Is heartbreak real? Yes. Is hopelessness real? Yeah, but I will tell you time and time again, hope is a duty. Hope is a duty. Hope is a duty. Hope is not about how we feel. Hope is a duty. Hope is what we do. Hope is what we do, regardless of how we feel. Hope is what propels us to say this is right and this is wrong, and I am going to stand up for what I believe is right. That hope, that hope is a duty. So I’mma need for y’all to stop with the why did I even hope? Cut that out. Cut that out.
Austin Channing Brown

Hope Question

How am I responsible for cultivating hope in my life, especially in challenging times?

I spent time carefully crafting this question.

Cultivating is a personal word for me. I spent the first year of the pandemic digging into the soil into my backyard, sowing seeds, growing flowers and vegetables, and connecting with all of the feelings that were coming up during that traumatic time.

Cultivating means taking care. Paying attention. Responding to needs. Following cycles.

Hope needs cultivation in order to live, and I am responsible for helping grow it in my life.

Hope Skill

Regulate your nervous system the best that you can and focus on what you KNOW.

For example, I feel alone, but I know who to call for help at this moment. Instead of grabbing onto this feeling of aloneness, call that trusted person to talk through the feelings.

Make a list on paper of what you feel vs what you know. Hang this list where you can see it regularly.

How to Regulate Your Nervous System

There’s no “right” way to regulate your nervous system; instead, there are the ways that work for you. For me, sometimes regulating my nervous system is a simple process that involves connecting to my breathing and the tense parts of my body. Sometimes, I need to cry. Other times, I need more movement and/or talking out loud with a trusted person to feel more regulated.

Here’s a post with a short video I made that explains more about this idea and offers a brief breathing exercise to start practicing feeling safe within our bodies.

Here’s a post that provides two different breathing patterns to practice getting to a regulated state and focus not just on what we feel, but what we know.

Hands down, the EASIEST and FASTEST way to calm a frazzled nervous system (and we are ALL frazzled right now) is to use breathing to your greatest advantage.

Feeling Hopeless &/Or Disregulated? Let’s Chat!

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