HOW TO HAVE HOPE
By Lesley Alderman
One of my patients showed up at her virtual psychotherapy session last week looking tired. She had always been ambitious and concerned about injustice.
During
this session, she sighed when talking about a meeting where her colleagues complained about unfair treatment. She said: “I don’t know why they bother getting upset, when it feels like nothing matters.”
I was concerned by her disengagement. But then a colleague sounded similarly worn down. She had spent the pandemic helping her third and fourth graders with remote school while trying to keep her small business going. She confided to me: “I haven’t followed the war in Ukraine at all, I
simply don’t have the bandwidth.”
To an unusual degree, people are weary.
During the spring of 2020, just as the pandemic started, the question my patients asked was, “when do you think things will go back to normal?” Now, no one talks to me about a return to normal. There’s an unspoken recognition that the chaos we are experiencing might be with us for a long time.
Patients who had been concerned about national and world events and visibly frightened during the pandemic,
now seem exhausted. The murder of George Floyd was horrific, and mass shootings are increasingly common. Now it feels like we are all in a relentless game of whack-a-mole, but in this case the rodents are existential threats.
I’m noticing that many of my patients are experiencing a deficit of optimism, and are overwhelmed about important issues that are beyond their control.
I’m calling it “hope fatigue...Read More
