It is often healing for someone to image that they have been successful in thwarting the attack. They often envision being like an unleased tiger who has reacted strongly to rather than passively receiving the abuse. One can hope for the availability of one’s tiger. This is a state of mind and heart often called Agency (Bakan, 1966; Seligman, 2026). We know from many medical studies that a sense of Agency on the part of patients plays a major role in the process of healing both physical and psychological wounds. Often coupled with motivational interviewing (Miller and Rollnick, 2002), the return of control to the patient through encouraging their agency in selecting among treatment options tends to improve the medical outcomes as well as the quality of care as perceived by the patient (Bergquist, Fish and Teurman, 2026).
It appears that Adaptive Hope comes in many forms. It can be spiritually based, engaged as a scientifically based cognitive process, or based in a sense of personal Agency. Adaptive Hope may be nothing more than imagining or dreaming about a successful recovery from addiction or defense against barriers to successful achievement of some goal. In the case of physical abuse, this form of Hope might involve actual preparation for defense if the abuser reappears. This preparation might include a set of self-defense sessions, a series of training sessions in which verbal defenses are learned, or a cluster of therapy sessions in which consideration is given to domestic disengagement, job change and/or relocation.
Whatever the conditions of past life, we often wish to make our current or future life better. Adaptive Hope helps to bring actuality to this desired improvement.
Aspirational Hope
It is now time to turn to Aspirational Hope. As in the case of Adaptive Hope, those feelings of hope that are aspirational come from a base of nothingness. There is nothing to hope for. We are in a state of neutrality regarding the future. It might even be described as a state of limbo, residing somewhere outside of reality. We are drifting on our skiff in the gray waters of limbo without purpose or direction. And then we construct an image of the future that is desirable. We construct hope out of nothingness. As Maslow (1998, p. 3) puts it, “what man can be, he must be.” There is the inherent striving for movement beyond the basic needs of humankind; the push toward what Maslow calls “self-actualization” is embodied in Aspirational Hope.
This form of hope is “autotelic”, (self-purpose) in that it is self-generating and self-guiding. Unlike adaptive hope that is engaged for a specific outside purpose of improving one’s life (such as seeking to overcome an addiction, overcome trauma, or take action against ongoing abuse), the hope based on aspiration requires no motivating force outside itself to be energized. In the case of Adaptive Hope, there is a presenting reality; however, it is often negative (abuse, addition) and, in that sense, is a negative reality rather than nothingness. However, there is also a nothingness in Adaptive Hope. It comes from its overcoming of helplessness (a sense of nothing to be done).
For someone who engenders Aspirational Hope there is a nothingness that awaits creation of a new image of the future. While one’s present life might be satisfactory, there is still a Void. There is still a lingering aspiration. We seek to fill this Void with some change in the way we view and live in our current world and in our future world. Our hoped-for future takes on a new form or even a new outcome. Glimpses of this future provide us with some motivation and guidance. As Abraham Maslow (1968a, p. 214) suggested: “[T}he future . . . now exists in the person in the form of ideals, hopes, duties, tasks, plans, goals, unrealized potentials, mission, fate, destine, etc.” If we are without these glimpses of the future and are without aspirational hope then we remain in limbo (Maslow, 1968a, p. 214):
“One for whom no future exists is reduced to the concrete, to hopelessness, to emptiness. For him, time must be endlessly ‘filled.’ Striving, the usual organizer of most activity when lost, leaves the person unorganized and unintegrated [in limbo].”
