Britt's Blog

April 19, 2025 – Hope matters. Several years ago, I was fortunate to attend a conference focused on the role of trauma, particularly in domestic violence. One of the things we learned was that hope is crucial in helping victims of trauma recover. To those who have been rigorously trained to focus on specific action steps, that may sound kind of weak or vague. But the conference leaders broke the concept of hope down into specifics that made lots of sense.

Given all that’s going on now in 2025, trauma seems like an increasingly common experience. The American government is seizing people without charge or due process and shipping them off to a horrible, permanent prison in El Salvador. Even if ICE hasn’t come for you or your family, even if you haven’t lost your job because of DOGE, even if your school or university hasn’t been defunded because it didn’t let the government tell it what to teach, all of these and other developments have led to an increasingly anxious environment for anyone paying attention.

I don’t know the line at which mere anxiety morphs into trauma, but I know that we can’t afford to lose hope. Let me break down what hope really means. I owe these insights to a professor from the University of Oklahoma named Dr. Chan Hellman.

Dr. Hellman found that hope requires two things: waypower and willpower. “Waypower” is a word created to denote a credible mental strategy or pathway to achieving a goal. You know what you need to do. “Willpower” is the ability to do it, to direct and maintain the mental energy needed to put your plans into action.

All of us have goals. I might have a goal of having a million dollars. For me to actually go out and get that million dollars would require a credible strategy. Sitting in my easy chair and waiting for the money to show up would not be a very credible strategy, or at least it hasn’t worked for me so far. Obviously, there are far more credible strategies available. Most of them involve work.

And that’s where the willpower or agency comes in. Even if I have a good strategy or plan, I have to be able to focus my energy enough to carry it out. It takes both: a good plan, and the ability to execute the plan. If you’re missing either waypower or willpower, all you have is a wish. A wish is not the same thing as hope.

Dr. Hellman says that when you put waypower and willpower together, you have hope. People with lots of hope often imagine several different pathways to get them to their goals, so that when they hit barriers, they can switch to a different path or strategy and work that one. They don’t have to give up the first or second time they hit a barrier.

The danger of autocracy is that hope becomes a vanishing commodity. One reason is the experience of trauma. Even in calm political times, trauma routinely happens due to injury or illness, abandonment by a parent, neglect, physical abuse, sexual abuse, verbal and emotional abuse: they all are forms of trauma with impacts that last a lifetime. People with significant trauma have statistically high rates of depression or mental illness, alcoholism, heart disease, and other kinds of dysfunction and illness. Hope seems impossible, in part because trauma has robbed them of the energy and focus needed either to formulate a plan or carry one into action.

Rage is having the energy and focus to execute a plan but finding all your plans blocked.

Despair is lacking the energy or ability to act, even if a good plan is available.

Apathy is what one feels in the absence of both a plan and the energy to use it. It’s the opposite of hope, which is having both a way forward and the energy to act.

If I find myself in the CECOT prison in El Salvador, I am crammed into cells so crowded that I can’t even lie down. If I protest, I am beaten severely or worse. There is no way to appear before a court to plead my case. There is no way to escape. At first, in addition to likely fear, I feel rage: I have the energy to act, but all my pathways are blocked.

But the oppressive trauma eventually takes its toll. I lose my sense of myself. Over time, I lose the energy needed to resist. I simply exist, with no visible path to normality and no energy to pursue any path that might present itself. I no longer care; I simply seek to avoid pain where I can. This is the stage of apathy. I can no longer risk caring what happens to me. I might even feel that death would be a release.

Our news cycle every day brings word of some fresh offense from our federal administration. The president and his minions have disemboweled or crippled entire agencies. No one answers calls at Social Security, so though I paid into the system for decades, I can’t get the income I was promised throughout my career. I may not be able to get life-saving surgery because the administration has crippled and reduced Medicaid and Medicare. I can’t trust that my vote will be properly recorded because someone is working to corrupt the system (the same people who undermined confidence in the system before). Tariffs are causing prices to rise so that I may not be able to run my business, feed myself or my family adequately, or maintain my home. I fear losing my job, and my neighbors have already lost theirs. Fear and distrust rule.

I submit that one of our most important tasks now is working to create hope. Yes, we need to know what we can do to fix this situation. We need credible strategies for moving forward. Write or call your elected officials. March and protest in ways that send a serious message, nonviolently of course. Donate to candidates who seem promising, as opposed to those who just make promises.

Perhaps more important, even before any clear paths forward present themselves, we need to keep up our strength and energy. Stay in touch with friends and support each other. Be active in a congregation or other social enterprise. Exercise. Eat well, or as well as you can. Plant a garden. Develop a new skill. Do something to keep focused so that when a path forward appears, you can take advantage of it. Don’t give in to despair. Be well.

Some will say I’m overreacting. Frankly, I hope they’re right, and that the next few years will be brighter than I predict. But the current actions of the Trump administration threaten the very rule of law in America. He has built a personality cult, throwing his followers metaphorical red meat that is most often a distraction from the more important issues at hand. He has assembled the most unqualified and unknowledgeable cabinet of shameless lickspittles in American history. None of them exhibit the least understanding of moral principles, let alone technical realities. There is only what the dear leader wants. And even more troubling, something like a third of the American public supports all this, along with more than half of Congress.

If this pattern continues, we are all in for significant trauma of one sort or another. It’s crucial that we keep the faith, supporting each other and building our resilience, focusing on the elements of our own wellbeing outlined by Dr. Hellman:

• Positive relationships

• Purpose and meaning in life

• Sense of accomplishment in life

• Positive emotion

It’s crucial that we look for paths forward, for ways to preserve or restore democracy whenever we have the chance, and that we act on them.

In other words, it’s crucial that we keep up our hope. The apostle Paul famously told the believers in Corinth, “Now abide faith, hope, and love, these three…” The greatest may be love, but each builds on the other, and we desperately need all three.

Let’s do this.