"Hopelessness Is a Feeling; It's Not a Fact"
A lesson from ANOHNI on confronting despair and feelings of sociopolitical doom
I have been struck by the surge in blog posts, social media, etc., guiding readers on how to resist hopelessness. I understand the impulse. Hopelessness is a terrifying feeling, both emotionally and sociopolitically. One Rolling Stone headline this week was “You Can’t Despair. Because That’s What They Want.” It’s a quote from Timothy Snyder, a professor of totalitarian European history, whose 2017 book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century has seen an understandable increase in interest this week.
As a psychologist and psychotherapist, I am going to bristle at anyone telling someone not to feel their difficult feelings, though to be fair I think this is taken out of context. Really Snyder means don’t get lost in despair and don’t believe the despair. He continues by saying, “They want you to think that it’s hopeless. It’s never hopeless.” I agree with Snyder, but I want to challenge the simple framing of resisting and avoiding the feelings of hopelessness and despair.
I was incredibly moved by a clip circulating this weekend from a 2016 interview with musician and artist ANOHNI. In the interview, she speaks about the motivation of creating her song and album Hopelessness:
“I do feel a sense of despair when I look out at things, and often I have felt quite hopeless, which is why I wanted to address the subject of hopelessness and the feeling of hopelessness. It’s been important to me to realize that hopelessness is a feeling; it’s not a fact, and it actually has very little bearing on what’s to come. It’s just my own personal state. As a singer, as a person whose currency is emotion and intuition, I’ve always felt that to move through a feeling - no matter how intimidating it is - is the most productive way of clearing yourself and preparing yourself to make good decisions.”
I have found that artists often communicate psychological and spiritual concepts far better than psychologists (sorry, brethren). ANOHNI is speaking eloquently here about the power of letting ourselves feel our emotions and trusting that feelings are not straightforward insights about the external world, but rather messages from within about our temporary experience and our needs. Her message is not “don’t feel hopeless.” Her message is “feel hopelessness deeply so that you can move through it and understand that things are in fact not hopeless.” Again, not “don’t despair,” but “don’t believe the despair.”
Rather than turn from or deny her hopelessness, ANOHNI describes engaging with it - she channels the feelings into music and lyrics representing the state she sometimes finds herself in. Here is a video I took of her striking performance of Hopelessness at Mass MoCA at the beginning of the month. At the conclusion of the song you see her move her hands in a way as if to clear something out of her, to say “go on” - perhaps a physical representation of letting go of the feeling of hopelessness she allowed herself to return to for the performance.
And in that interview, ANOHNI reminds us of the incredibly important truth that feeling hopeless does not mean things are hopeless. So if feelings of hopelessness aren’t some transmission from the universe/future of an external reality about the world, what are they?
I’ve spent the last week sitting with many people’s hopelessness. One of the powerful consequences of facing our feelings is that we can actually see and understand their complexity and multi-dimensionality if we aren’t avoiding them. This week as my clients (and loved ones, honestly) confronted their hopelessness, we found underlying exhaustion, fear, drive for certainty, grief, isolation, guilt, identity/value conflicts, and even activation of early traumas. There were messages from the body/mind/spirit of needing rest, needing connection, needing to take action, needing to mourn, needing to feel cared for, and needing to prepare. The experiences and needs were different for each of the people I sat with, of course; I can’t tell everyone some uniform thing that their hopelessness means, besides a bunch of other feelings and broadly that there are some needs that likely can be addressed. You get the shape of these feelings and needs by engaging with the hopelessness and despair, not defending against it.
An important note on defending against affect. We aren’t always adequately resourced to experience the full weight of our difficult emotions. And when we aren’t resourced (both internally and externally) enough, emotion can overwhelm us and be harmful: it can lead to behaviors or unconscious coping that get in the way of our responsibilities, values, etc. I am not going to turn on ANOHNI’s song and feel and explore my feelings of despair ten minutes before a session; I’m lacking the resource of time and will be a distracted therapist. I’d prefer to not tune into my fear for the future when I haven’t slept or eaten enough; I’m lacking the resources of physical nourishment and will be overwhelmed leading to shut down or other unhealthy coping. I’m going to avoid exploring my feelings of guilt and internal conflict in the middle of the night when I’m on my own; I’m lacking the resource of community or interpersonal connection that I can turn to if I need to be held during or after and this could worsen my (likely inaccurate/incomplete) beliefs about being isolated. In these instances, our unconscious and conscious defenses against difficult feelings are really helpful. We do what we can to compartmentalize, to set that emotion to the side while we build our resources or simply wait for a time when we know we will be better resourced.
We are best served when we are open to difficult emotions but have some management over our internal experience so that we can move in and out of these feelings with some amount of fluidity and say. This is not an easy set of skills or balancing dance to develop and put into action, especially if we come from families and communities that struggle with this themselves. Setting emotions to the side when needed, but not leaving them there. Recognizing that without adequate internal and external resources, emotions can lead to unwanted and negative outcomes, but also trusting that emotions themselves aren’t inherently dangerous. (For what it’s worth, I do believe psychotherapy is helpful in increasing these capacities.)
So yes, back to hopelessness. I encourage you to think about resources you need in place to really tarry with hopelessness when it emerges in you. Some ideas off the top of my head which may or may not be applicable and relevant to you - you may need to:
strengthen your resolve and understanding that feelings aren’t facts,
build up radical hope through study of resistance and survival in history,
experience something empowering like lifting weights or planting a garden or building a shelf or connecting with community organizers,
have things to look forward to in the immediate future,
employ creature comforts like a soft sweater and tasty food
be in a relational holding environment like psychotherapy,
connect with music and art exploring hopelessness so you don’t feel alone in it, or
do something else entirely that may even be unique to you.
Sort this out for yourself so you have what you need in place to embrace hopelessness as an emotional state to be listened to, experienced, (maybe/mostly) understood, and moved through.
Thank you so much for this!!! ❤️ ❤️ ❤️
This was really, deeply beautiful. Thank you so much for sharing this.