and what of hope?

Small nods, slight movements, silence and barely a word between us in the eighteen months of treatment. Each week we sat quietly, both almost nodding off in the overly warm room. Sometimes they rearranged the art materials, laying them out neatly as though expecting others to join us; other times they painted broad strokes on paper, the colour chosen matching that of the table causing the sheet to disappear. It was as though we both spent the session struggling to be obvious, to be known.

I find quiet therapy sessions like these the hardest, with few words to calm my insecurities. I stay still and run through lists of things in my head. I fall back on what I instinctively know; I am here to be a witness. Each time I observe the slightest hint of movement, a look, a flick of the fingers, a change in appearance then I verbally acknowledge this, allowing the client to know that it has been seen and that it has meaning.

I had a sense that my client’s living situation was a struggle, or maybe worse. I felt empathy, and sometimes quite sad; no change appeared possible. Flourishes of creativity disappeared after one session and we went back to silence. I tried to elicit verbal responses. They only appeared to know the word ‘yes’ or slience. I increasingly tried to provoke a ‘no’ as this appeared to be the role of the silence. I really wasn’t sure. One week I went on holiday and returned to numerous phone messages. In my absence the client had spoken to a carer, and said a definitive ‘no’. Their living situation was abruptly changed. Someone who was believed to have little sense of being able to influence their own life had taken control with one simple word, they made it happen.

Many of my clients live in situations that may appear hopeless, born with or acquiring learning disabilities that are incurable, without being ‘normal’ in a society that worships normality in all it’s banality. When I meet them I have no obvious sense that things can get better for them; hope can appear elusive. However by just walking across the threshold into the art therapy room my clients show me something of themselves. It is subtle, almost invisible, but it is there. Is this hope? A resilience perhaps that is communicated non-verbally, unconsciously. Sometimes this non-verbal communication can show as behaviours that elicit emotions in others around them. In his book ‘The Child, the Family and the Outside World’ Donald Winnicott describes “a child’s antisocial behaviour as expressing an unconscious hope for management by the wider society, when containment within the immediate family had failed”. Hope is not straight-forward.

One of my Art Therapy lecturers once commented “I see therapy as ‘holding the hope’ for the person you are working with”. Here they appeared to suggest that therapy is about holding an idea of hope for someone who is too overwhelmed, vulnerable or unable to hold it for themselves or indeed see it for themselves, gradually negotiating the passing of this idea of hope across to them until eventually they can walk away full of hope. I hear hope often talked about by therapists.

Now after several years working as a therapist I struggle with an idea of hope that for some appears more about wishful thinking, or the imposition of an expectation upon a client that we can wish for that may never happen, as though we can hope our clients lives into existence. We can all hope for change, as though hoping by itself made anything happen.

Václav Havel (poet, dissident and statesman) shines a light:
“Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”

Not so much as ‘holding the hope’ for others I have come to see my work as recognising hope in myself, and discerning what I need to get me through the day, and what my client might need, paying attention to the subtle language of resilience, a capacity to survive and to then encourage it to the surface. I recognise that like many that come to work in therapy I have held onto utopian hopeful beliefs, a modernist mindset that may not serve my clients well, that may attempt to speak for them. It is perhaps in this constant work of becoming a therapist and encouraging the client to become more of themsleves in which we can truly find hope, a journey in which we both pay attention and play our part regardless of how things turn out.