Hopeless: how to regain a glimmer of hope after all

Sometimes you can be at a loss for words. You get a hopeless feeling from certain circumstances in your life. Hopelessness is also something that more people have faced since corona than before. So time to talk about it.

Feeling hopeless

Doctors and nurses also suffered from feelings of hopelessness. This feeling is that no matter what you do to get to a solution or move forward this just isn't going to help you achieve your goals.

In addition, you may hold the belief that everything you could have done has already been done. As a result, you can no longer muster the motivation to come up with something else[1].

Feeling hopeless is often not helpful to your health either. For the elderly, feeling hopeless is often a risk factor for early death. This is also because hopelessness is part of depression , and depression can make you suicidal.

For older adults, cognitive behavioral therapy—either on its own or in combination with antidepressants—can help reduce feelings of hopelessness. In addition, physical activity can also help, even if you’re an older adult dealing with physical limitations or health conditions. If you can find a way to get some exercise, it can make a big difference[2].

You should be especially careful if your feeling of hopelessness is combined with stress, anxiety and depressive feelings[3]. Of course, you may already seek help if you suffer from hopeless feelings alone, but be sure to do so if you are experiencing this combination of feelings.

What’s interesting is that if you’re also struggling with symptoms of depression, your sense of hopelessness is often not grounded in reality[4]. The reality is often more optimistic than you can imagine at such a moment.

So you don't have to be as hopeless as you feel, only yes how do you change that feeling?

Hypnotherapy against general hopelessness

Hypnotherapy is often used to treat people suffering from depression who do not want to use medication. There are certain scales that can be used to measure whether hypnotherapy is effective for depression, and one of these scales is the Beck Hopelessness Scale. In a study comparing cognitive hypnotherapy—a therapy that helps with your thought processes— and cognitive behavioral therapy, it was found that cognitive hypnotherapy had greater effects, including on people’s feelings of hopelessness.

Which was reduced more with hypnotherapy, than with cognitive behavioral therapy. This difference was still evident six months and a year later[5]. So hypnosis can help you suffer less hopelessness in the longer term.

In addition, you might be desperately searching for a solution to a problem. Many people only turn to a hypnotherapist after they’ve tried every other possible solution[6]. This is also true for people who are constantly in a state of anxiety or panic. The sense of calm that normally returns after a traumatic event simply hasn’t come back. With hypnosis, you can often still flip the switch to feel normal again.

Youth trauma and hopelessness

In addition, childhood trauma can also cause you to feel hopeless. For example, you may not feel that you will live a normal life, get married and have a career. These feelings first originated in the childhood trauma, but these feelings can repeat themselves in your adult relationships.

This is because your core beliefs about yourself are formed when you grow up in a healthy environment. For example, you might believe that you can control certain things, that life has some degree of predictability, that you can trust people, and that your parents or others around you will protect you. All of this influences your behavior.

If you’ve had a traumatic childhood, you don’t develop these beliefs, and you may struggle more with distrust, feelings of vulnerability, and similar issues—all of which influence your behavior. This can make it difficult for you to maintain relationships, because your insecurity can cause you to act overly jealous.

Such childhood trauma and its sequelae can leave you feeling very hopeless.

Hypnotherapy can help you regain a sense of control and let go of feelings of guilt, fear, and pain. All of this helps you feel more hopeful about the future.

In fact, hypnosis helps you change the memories that make you feel hopeless. This can be done by performing certain hypnotic rituals. For example, we often work with symbols or equations. For example, you may be asked to imagine that there is a tree and it is associated with the trauma and everything associated with it. Then you may be asked to describe that tree. Then you may be asked to look at the tree, to sit against the tree or to embrace the tree. Then the therapist may ask you something about who you are, where you are, where you came from, what your dreams and desires are and where you are going[7].

These types of rituals can make you more aware that your past is behind you and that you determine your future. It can help you let go of pain and hopelessness and get back in your power.

Hopelessly alone

If you feel hopelessly alone, you’re experiencing loneliness. Loneliness is actually a very subjective concept. People can feel lonely even though they have quite a few social contacts, but if those social contacts don’t meet their need for, say, intimacy or meaningful conversations, they can still feel lonely.

With hypnosis, you can look at the beliefs that cause you to feel lonely, and you can look at beliefs that cause you to find it difficult to seek out people who are right for you, reducing the feeling that you are hopelessly alone.

This can go a long way toward giving you hope for a social life again.

In addition, a pet can also do much to reduce feelings of loneliness[8].

Hopeless Friends Circle

So you can have a social life and still feel like something isn’t quite right. You have, as it were, a hopeless circle of friends. If you’re surrounded by hopeless people, there’s a good chance they’ll rub off on you with their hopelessness. For example, everything they say might be about how badly the Netherlands is doing and how you’ll never be able to build a life here.

Obviously, that doesn't make you very happy.

In addition, you may have certain responsibilities in your life that your friends do not have, for example. Young people who have a caregiving role - for example, because they became parents early or because they are caregivers for one of their parents or loved ones - may experience loneliness due to the misunderstanding of their role by friends who do not have this responsibility[9].

Hypnosis can also help you suffer less with these problems.

Hopelessly in love

Then you can also be hopelessly in love. This can be the case, for example, if you are in love with someone who has already indicated that they don't like you, but still you can't let go of the crush (or the person). Especially if you quickly fall "in love" again when a relationship breaks up or another crush goes unrequited.

You may then be suffering from a love addiction[10].

You can then use hypnotherapy to find out why you feel it is so important to always be in love and why you find it hard to let go of the "pursuit.

Feeling hopeless can come from all kinds of circumstances in your life and in all kinds of areas of your life. If you generally feel hopeless you may suffer from depressive symptoms and it is important to do something about it so that you can see the good sides of life again.

In addition, you may feel hopeless because you experienced a traumatic experience in childhood, which has hindered the healthy development of your core beliefs. With hypnosis, you can then transform the trauma so that you don't keep looking at your past and so that you can instead focus on the future of your life.

In addition, you may feel more hopeless because of your social life. For example, you may find that you have a mismatch with the people who surround you. You don't seem to respond to the same things and conversations still feel empty for some reason.

Or you may completely lack a social life. In that case, hypnosis can help you find new friends who are a better fit for you.

Slightly beyond your social circle is also that you may be hopelessly in love. You may then find it difficult to get over rejection, or you may quickly fall in love with someone else again. Even then, hypnosis can help you figure out why this is so for you and how to deal with it differently.

Want to know exactly how hypnosis works? Then come to a free online master class.

Or sign up for one of our seminars or training courses.

Also pin this handy infographic as a reminder:

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