Posted on by

Places                                                                The translation is available (February 9th, 2025)

“The violation of these [personal] data, through access to them, collection, processing, disclosure or publication, usually constitutes a total violation of the private sphere and dignity of the person. It is a loss of control over the person’s data, which is essentially equivalent to a total loss of his or her autonomy.” Christina Akrivopoulou

“Besides, what  // do you think poetry is deep down? It is the pollen  // of the things of the universe. The pollen in actions,  //  the pollen in pain, in light, in joy, in changes, // in progress, in movement.

Life and the psyche  //  in an eternal reflection in time.

So what do you think; deep down, poetry is a human heart burdened with all the world.”  Nikiforos Vrettakos

Today’s post includes four new drawings of places in Greece and references to a book by Nikiforos Vrettakos, from POTAMOS Publications, as well as an article related to the constitutional right to the protection of personal data by Christina M. Akrivopoulou.

Α. The Naked Child (1939) by Nikiforos Vrettakos from POTAMOS Publications

Nikiforos Vrettakos was born in 1912 in Laconia. He spent his childhood and adolescence between Ploumitsa, Krokei and Gytheio. He went to Athens in 1929 to start university studies, which he didn;t complete due to financial difficulties and health problems in the family. He did various jobs to survive. Two of his plays “The War” and the lyrical drama “Two People Speak for the Peace of the World” were persecuted and banned, the first by the Metaxas dictatorship and the second by his political comrades.

He took part in the WWII war and the Resistance. After the coup of the colonels in 1967, he self-exiled himself in Switzerland, from where he traveled throughout Europe participating in radio broadcasts and poetry festivals, while he was honored by various European universities, and edited his autobiographical narrative Οδύνη / Anguish, which was published in 1969 in New York.He returned to Greece after the dictatorship ended.He received many awards and honors, and was nominated four times for the Nobel Prize in Literature. He died in 1991 in Ploumitsa.

His work comprises of poetry, but also, prose and translations, and is characterized by lyricism, intense dramatic writing and social reflection, love for nature, life and humans.

Concerning poetry, Vrettakos says:

“To this poetry, then, little by little and without realizing it, I gave my soul. And without being certain that I am a poet, I now know that I am nothing else. It would be enough for me if I were at least certain that through this poetry, I did my life duty…”.

The presentation on the back cover of the book The Naked Child says: “The Naked Child, despite its many autobiographical elements, is not a purely autobiographical work. Nikiforos Vrettakos, wanting to confess his reactions and emotions in a certain period of time – the era of childhood – within a certain environment, fictionally recreated all of his material. The two central heroes are the composite of many faces that represent good and evil in the years of his first acquaintance with the world. His ultimate goal was to convey the painful reality of the blows his sensitivity received.”

Excerpts from the book:

“At first the children gathered around us and looked at us strangely with their hands behind their backs. I, they then said, looked like this animal and our Margie looked like that. When we left they put us in the middle and followed us all the way to our house. [……..] Their hatred grew darker and one day they declared an all-out war on us. Holding hands, Margie and I were walking home alone from school. A group of children, who seemed to have fallen from the trees, tangled their hands in our hair and dragged us down. When they left, crying, I shook Margie’s uniform and walked behind her, looking around in fear.There was not a soul to be seen. The flock had already disappeared as if it had flown into the trees.” (1919 / p. 16)

“I’m not cold, I hurt, something else. A garment that is outside the clothes, or inside them. I can’t tell you. It’s not the clothes, it’s not the fire.” {p. 74}

“This damn old life is worth everything. To breathe and rejoice, forgetting that you have flesh and bones. You think you have the sea inside you, the sun, the whole world. What more do you want to live in this world without hating?” (p. 27).

Β. The article by Christina M. Akrivopoulou (PhD in Constitutional Law, lawyer and professor of law at the Hellenic University of Athens) to which I will refer today, concerns the right to the protection of personal data through the lens of the right to privacy.

Akrivopoulou explains that while the right to the protection of personal data may not be identical with the right to privacy, the value of its recognition is found in the value of protecting the individual’s privacy, which lies in its ability to provide the person with negative, defensive protection from any invasion or intervention in their private space, as well as from any kind of oppressive, manipulative, controlling or paternalistic behavior that may aim to limit the person’s freedom to develop their personality and autonomy, to shape, and to enjoy relationships and choices through which they define themselves.

In this context, Akrivopoulou claims, the protection of the right to privacy ensures each of us, like an invisible shield, the protection of our identity, our dignity, and our ability to adopt alternative forms of life, from any critical, manipulative or degrading behavior.It allows us to protect ourselves from behaviors that are driven by prejudices or that lead to conformity.Essentially, the value of privacy lies in the fact that it renders the individual “free, autonomous, self-empowered and independent in the constitution of his or her self”.She adds that under the cover / shelter of this negative-defensive protection, “privacy positively allows persons to freely shape and develop thier personality, sexuality, communication and expression, as well as the way in which they present themselves to others, and as a result allows a person to create a coherent, distinct identity based on a set of moral principles and values ​​that they have autonomously chosen”.

The author explains that the value of privacy can be defined more clearly by examining the consequences of its loss. And this is where the role of personal data protection appears crucial, since the particular nature of personal data facilitates the loss of control of the person over his privacy, and this loss “leaves the person naked, vulnerable and puts at risk the core of thier autonomy, their identity.” She notes that “personal data” could be defined as the data that allow direct connection with its subject and that in theory and legislation are characterized as sensitive personal data, such as genetic, biometric and medical data, for instance.

Data concerning the health or hereditary diseases of the person, sexual orientation or ethnic origin, therefore, contain information about the person that is linked to their privacy, and “cover an inner sphere of the person in the sense of that particular space for shaping their autonomy and private choices, as a field of preparation for their externalization, expression and communication with the social and public space.”

The article also examines the possibilities that modern technology provides for the creation and circulation of “branded” information, what we call sensitive personal data, and how it enhances the possibility of such threats. Akrivopoulou tells us that if in the past simple conventional information could be disseminated quickly; modern technology and the use of the internet allow its circulation in zero time, beyond national borders and to millions of anonymous recipients. She writes: “Modern information can be collected, stored, compared, identified and processed through the use of modern information technology, a practice that is currently facilitated by the operation of more and more private, state and supranational ‘data banks’. Above all, modern technology allows the creation of ‘branded’ information, thus transcending the human and physical dimension of the human self, breaking down the privacy of the individual and ultimately the person into a mosaic of information, into what, very aptly in American theory, they call the digital man.

The protection of personal data is therefore important because the loss of privacy brings about a series of negative consequences, such as: the adoption by the individual of a more conformist [fearful] form of life and the limitation of their diversity, individuality, expression and creativity, all the way up to the loss of self-respect, social marginalization, isolation, stigmatization, financial loss, insecurity, exposure to discrimination (e.g. in the workplace, study or health contexts, public life, etc.), exploitation or manipulation. Essentially, the violation of this data constitutes a loss of control over the person’s data, which is equivalent to a loss of their autonomy.

You can read the entire article at: https://www.constitutionalism.gr/wpcontent/mgdata/pdf/412akribpoulou.pdf

Posted on by

Places

& Books

“Memory returns // with rubber sandals, // as if the footsteps stick  // to the same stones.”  Vasilis Vasilikos

“Then the silence breaks, little by little, or suddenly one day, and words burst forth, recognized at last, while underneath other silences start to form.” Annie Ernaux

“The trauma-related issues with which the client presents for help, I now believe, are in truth a “red badge of courage” that tell the story of what happened even more eloquently than the events each individual consciously remembers.”  Janina Fisher

Places

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Let this beautiful world be perpetuated  // by recycling tomorrow within its sources like the time I was born as if it emerged, every morning, for the first time, from the rosy gauzes of its birth….”   Nikiphoros Vrettakos

The distribution

“Most likely, no one will ask me what I did with my soul / psyche. However, I owe a response before I end my rhyming // monologue. ……Well, // I cut my psyche with painful scissors into small // sheets, small pieces of paper, small lightnings // and I distribute it to passersby.” Nikiphoros Vrettakos

Books

The Years by Annie Ernaux

“By retrieving the memory of collective memory in an individual memory, she will capture the lived dimension of History.”  Annie Ernaux

As I wrote in a previous post I only came across Annie Ernau’x work recently, and since then I’ve read several of her books, but if I were to recommend only one it would probably be The Years, which to some extent contains references to events from her other books. Critics have heralded the book as Ernaux’s masterpiece, her brief Remembrance of Things Past. When I put the book down I felt that Ernaux had by weaving the personal with the collective created a wonderful tapestry, and had managed to “capture the reflection that collective history projects upon the screen of individual memory.” One could say it is a memoir, but a different kind of memoir that succeeds in presenting “an existence that is singular but also merged with the movements of a generation.” Ernaux situates her own story within the story of her generation, a nation, the world, while also reflecting on the book she is writing as she writes it. She presents memories and reflects on memory.

Ernaux has succeeded in writing both personally and collectively. She writes: “Family narrative and social narrative are one and the same.” Her book is sociological, political and cultural and contains her memories of historical events, of popular culture, of discourse, and the subtle transformations of language and culture through time. It is written in short vignettes and it is permeated by subtle irony and sarcasm. She blends memories, dreams, facts and reflections on remembering and writing. The narrative spans a timeframe of over sixty years, from her birth in 1940 to 2006, and it moves from her childhood and working class upbringing in Normandy to her years studying and then teaching French literature in a lycée, an illegal abortion, moving to a Parisian suburb, being married, divorcing, becoming a writer, raising children and becoming a grandmother, her parents’ deaths, her sister’s death before she was born.  It contains descriptions of photos and family meals at different life stages.

Meanwhile, she manages to take us on a journey through more than six decades of national and global history and cultural changes:

WWII and the post war climate, the genocide of the Jews, the rise of capitalism and consumerism, the stark reality of thousands of children dying from diseases like diarrhoea, convulsions, diphtheria, and tonsils being removed from “children with delicate throats, who woke screaming from the ether anesthesia and were forced to drink boiling milk,” and then a different reality when children are being “vaccinated, monitored, and presented each month at the town hall’s infant weigh-in,” abortion rights and what it was like when abortions were illegal, feminism, the first man on the moon, the war in Algeria, the cold war and the nuclear threat, May 1968, the Greek juntas,  Czechoslovakia, Vietnam, Cambodia and the massacre at the Munich Olympics, the anti-Pinochet demonstrations after the assassination of Alliende, Kennedy’s assassination, Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost, the fall of the Berlin Wall, unemployment, immigration, the refugee crisis, the explosion of consumerism: “the profusion of things concealed the scarcity of ideas and the erosion of beliefs,” fashion trends and advertising slogans, advertising becoming society’s cultural educator providing models for how to live, behave, and furnish the home, AIDS, the mad cow disease, terrorist attacks, September 11, advances in technology, the mobile phone, “a miraculous and disturbing object,” the changing tenor of coupledom and parenthood, French presidential elections and presidents, the abolishment of the death penalty, the 39 hour week, books, magazines, TV programmes and paintings, writers and artists, films and film stars, and singers and songs, poems and lyrics, Edith Piaf, the Beatles, American music, Briggite Bardot and James Dean, Camus, Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Simone Veil, Marguerite Duras, Virginia Woolf, Kafka, Dostoevsky, Lawrence Durrell, Primo Levi….., philosophers, critics, and sociologists: Bourdieu, Foucault, Barthes, Lacan, Chomsky, Baudrillard, Wilhelm Reich, Ivan Illich……, the switch to the euro, the free market, the economic crisis, the homeless becoming part of the urban landscape, Ayatollah Khomeini’s pronouncement of a death sentence on Salman Rushdie, women in the world veiled from head to toe, conflicts in Lebanon, Iran, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Africa, whose suffering never seemed to end, the United States, spreading its branches over the face of the earth…….

She records shifts in language, discourse and culture. Now, she writes:

“the injunction to ‘pamper oneself’ came from every quarter,” and we were inundated with explanations of self, new words like ‘frustration’ and ‘gratification’ and new ways of being that emphasized “feeling good about oneself, a mixture of self-assurance and indifference to others.” Collective introspection provided models for putting the self into words. Identity became an overriding concern that was something one needed to “rediscover, assume, assert, express – a supreme and precious commodity.” Consuming became “a kind of ethic, a philosophy, the undisputed shape of our lives…. a sweet and happy dictatorship that no one contested.” We lived in a profusion of everything, “objects, information, and expert opinions” and “with all the intermingling of concepts, it was increasingly difficult to find a phrase of one’s own, the kind that, when silently repeated, helped one live”……

The narrative is like a rollercoaster ride through time, Ernaux manages to capture the ineffable passage of time, and with her layered narrative to reveal the “lived dimension of history.” She avoids using “I” and uses the “we” of a chorus instead. She uses the French pronoun on, which Alison Strayer often translates as we. She shifts to the third person “she” to refer to herself, the writer or when describing photos of herself and family, for instance. This use of “she” creates a dispassionate, detached ambience and exudes a kind of neutrality. The absence of the “I” allows for a progressive depersonalisation of her narrative.

Extracts from the book:

“Each time she begins, she meets the same obstacles: how to represent the passage of historical time, the changing of things, ideas, and manners, and the private life of this woman? How to make the fresco of forty-five years coincide with the search for a self outside of History, the self of suspended moments….. Her main concern is the choice between ‘I’ and ‘she’. There is something too permanent about ‘I’, something shrunken and stifling, whereas ‘she’ is too exterior and remote…..

It will be a slippery narrative composed in an unremitting continuous tense, absolute, devouring the present as it goes, all the way to the final image of a life. An outpouring, but suspended at regular intervals by photos and scenes from films that capture the successive body shapes and social positions of her being – freeze-frames on memories, and at the same time reports on the development of her existence, the things that have made it singular, not because of the nature of the elements of her life, whether external (social trajectory, profession) or internal (thoughts and aspirations, the desire to write), but because of their combinations, each unique unto itself.”

Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors  by Janina Fisher

“Emotional healing of traumatic wounds has to be attachment-based. Like long-lost young relatives, the alienated disowned parts must be invited to the table and welcomed into the heart and mind and arms of the client.”  Janina Fisher

Janina Fisher is a clinical psychologist, who has specialized in trauma treatment. Her book focuses on trauma and how to treat it. With her treatment model she strives to integrate a neurobiologically informed understanding of trauma, dissociation, and attachment, in language that is accessible to psychologists and therapists, but also, trauma survivors and the public in general. Summarily, her approach to trauma focuses on transforming the relationship to one’s self through replacing internalized emotions and others’ projections with compassionate acceptance, developing dual awareness, which is the ability to stay connected to the difficult emotional or somatic experience while also observing it from a slight mindful distance, repairing early attachment failures and ruptures in the present, and integrating past and present.

Fisher’s approach uses the Structural Dissociation model to understand trauma symptoms, which claims that when trauma occurs, the personality splits into what she calls the “going on with normal life” part of the self and the trauma-related parts, which reflect our basic survival instincts and responses to threat, and which are formed as coping mechanisms to deal with traumatic experiences. She identifies these parts, which have contributed to survival, as the attach, fight, flight, freeze and submit parts. These animal defense survival strategies that reduced the level of harm or enhanced survival become split off automatic responses activated by trauma-related stimuli later in life.

Trauma often results in the adult self or the “going on with normal life”part of the self blending or identifiying with different younger parts and their emotions and inclinations, rather than being aware of a larger self that contains parts. As a result, being unable to recognize parts by the roles they play and to differentiate emotional experiences that belong to the past from those related to the present, people can get triggered by stimuli or events in the present and hijacked by automatic and conditioned ways of responding to threat or distress. We now know that the causes of people’s difficulties are not just the original event but the reactivation of implicit memories by trauma-related stimuli that automatically mobilize the emergency stress response.

Fisher writes: “Without education about the phenomenon of implicit memory and a prefrontal cortex capable of taking in this new information, post-traumatic dysregulation, hypervigilance, impulsivity or shutdown will be repeatedly reinforced by the simple phenomenon of triggering.” Therefeore, the ability to differentiate being triggered and being threatened is key to recovery. She claims that it is necessary to first focus on recognizing and working in present time with the spontaneous evoking of implicit memory and animal defense survival responses rather than on creating a verbal narrative of past experiences.

Fisher claims that the theory of Structural Dissociation (Van der Hart, Nijenhuis & Steele, 2006), rooted in a neuroscience perspective and well-accepted throughout Europe as a trauma model, describes “how the brain’s innate physical structure and two separate, specialized hemispheres facilitate left brain-right brain disconnection under conditions of threat. Capitalizing on the tendency of the left brain to remain positive, task-oriented, and logical under stress, these writers hypothesized that the disconnected left brain side of the personality stays focused on the tasks of daily living, while the other hemisphere fosters an implicit right brain self that remains in survival mode, braced for danger, ready to run, frozen in fear, praying for rescue, or too ashamed to do anything but submit.”

Additionally, the development of left brain dominance is only achieved very gradually over the course of the first eighteen years of life and the corpus callosum that makes possible right brain-left brain communication, also develops slowly (Cozolino, 2002; Teicher, 2004, cited in Fisher, 2017). Thus, writes Fisher, in the early years of childhood right brain experience is relatively independent of left brain experience, lending itself to splitting should the need arise.

Her model to treating trauma is also influenced by Pat Ogden’s Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, Richard Schwartz’s Internal Family Systems model, which applies equally to all human beings, not just traumatized individuals with dissociative symptomatology, as well as, clinical hypnosis and mindfulness-based therapies. Mindfulness is used to help people develop dual awareness, so that they can “unblend” from trauma parts, which are stuck at the time they were formed. The goal of the approach is for the personality to gradually integrate and for the trauma symptoms to subside as people get to know their self better and are able to increase their inner and outer sense of safety.

She also recommends specialized training and trauma education for therpasits and clinicians in this area, as she believes that trauma should be a speciality because the treatment of trauma requires specialized knowledge, skills and interventions. The book provides a solid grasp of ways to work with traumatic attachment, and with post traumatic and dissociative symptomatology. She provides a number of practices and interventions to create an internal sense of safety and compassionate connection to all parts of the self.

Finally, one point I’d like to make is that like many theories and books in the field of psychology the focus is rather individualistic.  There is no mention to how society can often reinforce trauma and further impact people’s lives. Also, a lot of trauma or interference with development and maturation in childhood and adolescence take place outside the home. In his book, The Myth of Normal (chapter 10), Gabor Maté writes: “Suffice it for now to say that the quality of early caregiving is heavily, even decisively, determined by the societal context in which it takes place. As we will see, children are increasingly set upon by an accumulation of potent influences—social, economic, and cultural—that overwhelm and, in many ways, subjugate their internal emotional apparatus to imperatives that have nothing to do with well-being; that are, in fact, inimical to the healthy growth of the mind. “Such growth is becoming seriously endangered by modern institutions and social patterns,” according to Dr. Greenspan. “There exists a growing disregard for the importance of mind-building emotional experiences in almost every aspect of daily life including childcare, education, and family life.”

Often the field of psychology maintains understandings and practices that draw attention away from the material and social underpinnings of psychological distress. Perhaps it is necessary to reconceptualize people and their symptomatology or traumas not as isolated phenomena seprate from objective reality or surroundings, but as interpenetrated by and interwoven with the political, cultural and socio-economic realities that they reside in. In doing this, therapy would facitlitate the deeper understanding of how personal traumas are interwoven with sociopolitical realities. Including this level of processing would facilitate deeper healing, accelerate the process of recovery, and increase people’s capacity to both feel and be safe.

Ηaving said this, I think the book is definitely worth reading, especially for people working with trauma, since it is sensitively written by someone with decades of experience in this area. It has some valuable comments on diagnoses and diagnosing and is rich in information on trauma and its legacy. Finally, it provides many examples and clear guidance of how to implement interventions and practices to treat complex trauma.

Extracts from the book:

“…. from a neurobiologically informed perspective, they [the symptoms] are “survival resources” (Ogden et al., 2006), ways that the body and mind adapted for optimal survival in a dangerous world. In the worst of circumstances, our survival resources save us—at a cost.”

“Dissociative splitting is a mental ability, not just a symptom. The ability to quickly retrieve information and act on it automatically and efficiently, without interference from emotion or intrusive thoughts, is central to the medical professional’s ability to save lives. Dissociative splitting is also a prerequisite for the athlete on whom the team depends at a critical moment; it contributes to the ability for peak performance enjoyed by actors, musicians, public speakers, and politicians. Dissociation becomes pathological only when it is unconscious and involuntary, under the control of triggers. As a mental ability, it can be used consciously, thoughtfully, and voluntarily. The goal is not to “cure it” or prevent it but to help clients use it wisely in the service of healing and recovery.”

“The better the quality of our early attachment experiences, the greater our capacity to tolerate distress as we develop into adulthood. Our capacity for affect tolerance, self-soothing, and achievement of an integrated sense of self later in life is dependent upon the self-regulatory or self-soothing abilities acquired during the first 2 years of life (Shore, 2003), including both the ability for interactive regulation (to be soothed by others) and auto-regulation (the ability to soothe ourselves). Affect tolerance in adulthood appears to be directly tied to the smooth acceleration, braking, and deceleration of the autonomic nervous system (Ogden et al., 2006) developed in very early secure attachment relationships.

“We come into the world with innate drives to attach, explore, laugh and play, bond with our social group, and nurture the young. Even as young children, we have a developing brain that offers us such resources as curiosity, compassion, creativity and wonder (Schwartz, 2001). We also have the mental ability of imagination: if all is lost, we can still dream, still imagine a life we’ve never known. But, under chronic conditions of neglect, trauma, or frightened and frightening parenting, our bodies organize to prioritize the mobilization of animal defense survival responses and anticipation of danger (Ogden et al., 2006; Van der Kolk, 2014). The “luxuries” of normal attachment, exploration and learning, play, even sleeping and eating, take a back seat to hypervigilent attention to potential triggers and a readiness for defensive reactions.”

Posted on by

More hope for this New Year

“One could argue that hope is part of all New Year’s resolutions, because they all entail wanting a better future for ourselves, for our families, for our communities, and for the world. Really, the essence of any New Year’s resolution is to experience hope for something better.” Jamil Zaki

“Their values and principles – don’t rely on anyone but yourself – gave hope to no one but them, while we dreamed of ‘another world” Annie Ernaux (The Years)

“Hold on to possibilities for life in circumstances that discourage hope” David Denborough  (Retelling the Stories of Our Lives)

Hope through different lens

Over the holidays I read a book review by Jill Sutie of Jamil Zaki’s book Hope for Cynics, which analyzes how hope is a better response to life’s challenges than cynicism. Zaki is a professor of psychology and the director of the Social Neuroscience Lab at Stanford University. His research supports that hope is “a more activating, muscular emotion than cynicism or despair, and that hope is necessary for focusing our efforts and creating positive change.” It is also argued that hope can be deliberately cultivated through our overcoming biases and

Zaki distinguishes hope from optimism, whcih is the belief that things will turn out well, which can often be a mismatch with reality. Hope he argues is the belief that things could improve and that we don’t know what the future holds, and therefore, our responses and actions matter. Hope is not about ignoring problems, but a way of facing and tackling problems. Hope also allows for envisioning a better future and is a good frame of mind for facing adversity.

As for the benefits of being hopeful, according to research findings, people who are hopeful versus cynical do better in many ways. Their mental health is better, their relationships tend to be stronger, and they tend to strive  and achieve more. They’re also more likely to engage in civic action and social movements. In the article there’s also reference to “hopeful skepticism”. Zaki argues that we often think that the opposite of being cynical is being gullible and naïve, believing that everybody is good until we get taken advantage of, but he clarifies that that’s not the opposite of cynicism because in reality cynics and gullible people  have more in common than we think.They both start with a conclusion, either that people are terrible or that everyone is good and decent, and then try to support this conclusion by only paying attention to whatever evidence confirms their belief or bias. Skeptics, on the other hand, avoid generalizations and think more like scientists. They don’t make quick assumptions about others and events, but try to find evidence about when, with whom, and in what situations they can trust and feel hopeful. This attitude seems to be far more adaptive.

In relation to the News, Zaki believes we would all be better off seeking websites that include positive news with news about real events and social problems, but also about people in communities striving to address those problems in creative ways. We can stay informed without  consuming sensationalistic, negative depictions of what’s happening in the world, not just because that’s not good for our health, but also because it’s half the story. Fear has replaced rational debate or empirical evidence and is used by those who seek to persuade or exploit or the insecurities and fears of people.

Finally, Zaki suggests that the best way to maintain hope. is to think globally, but hope locally, in other words, to focus on the parts of our lives and the world where we feel we have some agency and where our actions could make a difference.

However, important as hope may be for our individual lives and our communities,  it doesn’t come easy for many people. Poverty, oppression, trauma, and other factors, can affect one’s beliefs about the future through loss of hope and limited expectations about life, anticipation that normal life events won’t occur or even fear that life will end abruptly or early.  In Janna Fischer’s book, Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors, which I’m currently reading, there are several references to how hope has been undermined for many people, often early on in life and how it can be difficult to reclaim or sustain hope: “… he’s afraid it’s not safe to have hope” or “let’s be curious about how she lost her hope,” and elsewhere, she writes that a frequent deterrent to restoring a sense of hope and safety comes from parts of our self that are  skeptical, hypervigilant, scared or unable to trust. Therefore, it may be necessary to learn to cultivate hope or reclaim one’s capacity to hope because often early trauma, life struggles and events, result in our associating hope with fear or despair.

Ross Ellenhorn believes that a big aspect that gets missed is the interplay between hope and disappointment, and how repeated disappointments or losses create associations between hope and fear or what he calls “fear of hope.” He argues that often in therapeutic contexts the concept of hope is neglected, and this gap is substituted with a lot of diagnoses and focus on a person’s traits, and what’s wrong with them, rather than exploring their life circumstances, what’s happening around them, how they’re experiencing the world, their aspirations and resources, and so on. Fear comes from the experience of disappointment and helplessness, and if this happens often enough, over time, people develop a deep sense of hopelessness, and link hope with fear. Subsequnetly, suppressing hope or disconnecting from feelings of hope, in some sense shutting down their existence, provides temporary protection from disappointment and grief.

Ellenhorn conducted research and found that fear of hope is not just fear of success or failure, nor only anxiety or depression. Fear of hope may be related to the above, but it’s something more. He mentions that we might be missing something if we only see this issue as a trait, and not also as the state of someone dealing with profound experiences of disappointment. It’s not just “depression”; it’s situationally based. They also found that what often seems like hopelessness is actually fear of hope, and that fear of hope and hopelessness are not the same. In therapy or other similar contexts reclaiming hope is about helping someone rebuild a sense that they can make things happen in the world. They have to have some sense that they can actually master their lives.

This approach also focuses on the relationship between hope, disappointment, and what goes on in our early years. Ellenhorn believes that fear of hope might be linked to early attachment. People who fear hope seem to be more anxiously or / and more avoidantly attached; however, intensive longitudinal research studies would be required to show a later link to fear of hope.

As I end this piece today, my wish for this New Year is that more hope be available to people, and may there be more circumstances and contexts that will allow for the cultivation of hope.