The creative hopelessness It is a key strategy in new third-generation psychological therapies, especially acceptance and commitment therapies (ACT).
This psychotherapeutic tool involves accepting reality, assuming the facts that cause anguish and suffering. To do this, you must leave behind the strategies of resistance and avoidance of symptoms, assuming hopelessness as an experience that can open new alternatives for action.
Creative hopelessness, an open door to overcoming discomfort
Often, our own suffering-avoidance behaviors lead us to even greater despair and magnify the original problem.
There is no life without pain, it cannot be perfect. Your efforts to combat the pain consume your energy and make you desperate, without being able to overcome the problem. In the end they become a vicious circle that only generates greater discomfort.
To understand it better, we can resort to the metaphor of Hayes et al., (1999): a person who was blindfolded and who fell into a hole with a shovel. The only thing he does is dig and dig with the shovel to get out, with great effort… and each time he finds himself in a deeper hole.
Given this situation, there comes a time when all that wasted effort must be eliminated and leave space to find a new path. Now, without the blindfold, you can respond differently and look for other alternatives. Maybe use the shovel in a different way, wait for someone who can help you to pass by or call for help.
This is what is known as creative hopelessness, a new state that can serve to promote changes and encourage more adaptive behaviors. That is why it is creative because, starting from the acceptance of hopelessness, it can generate new opportunities and the appropriate inner harmony to take advantage of them.
The person does not lose hope of being happy again, but their hopelessness must be focused on the strategies to eliminate the discomfort that they have been using without success for so long.
This hopelessness helps us take a step back and try something different to adapt better. It can work as a stimulus, an opportunity to relate to the world in a different way.
Objectives of creative hopelessness in psychotherapy
The person comes to the consultation with a whole baggage of cognitive distortions, barriers, obsessions, anxieties, etc.
To ensure that the person leaves with a slightly more hopeful perspective, a stepping stone to build on will be creative hope.
- First of all, we must get the person accept negative experiences that are inside you and that you cannot control. Assume failed attempts, leave escapes and obsessions behind to embrace hopelessness and find other paths.
- From there, begins the reorientation of the person through dialogue to find other exits or options in which you find positive reinforcement and true hope.
- It is essential that the person understands that the discomfort they have left behind no longer serves them. However, creative hopelessness can function as an impulse to find new, brighter and more stimulating paths.
Creative hopelessness is used in the first phase of the .
Three central aspects of creative hopelessness
- Values: This strategy allows you to reconnect with your own values, those that you put aside to try to eliminate painful emotions and thoughts.
- Exposure: it is essential that the person accepts exposing themselves to their own feelings of pain, confusion, discomfort, etc. To feel them in his body and be able to register them in his mind to learn not to feel afraid.
- Deactivation of functions and distancing: the cognitive elaborations that you had built in the fight against your discomfort are deactivated. You can no longer continue thinking as before. Now you have a new perspective and new options.
.