The Yin and Yang of Life
The Duality and The Dark Side of Hope

In order to have all that is available in life we have to be alert to what John Irving, in The World According To Garp, famously referred to as the undertoad: the forces and things that can pull us down or hurt us. If we want to enjoy nature, we need to be aware of the wildness and predatory side of the forest or the ocean or the jungle or the empty lot on our block. If we are not tuned in to the dangers, they can take us down.

If we want to revel in the joy of relationships, romance and sexuality, we need to have our litmus paper handy so we can weed out the insincere or psychologically toxic people. Otherwise we might wind up with a nasty disease or be on the wrong side of someone's emotional shiv.

If we want to see the world, we need to know where not to go. Most of us will not do well if there is a war on or if a hurricane is predicted. We also have to make sure we take into account the health standards and problems of the places we are visiting. Maybe we ought not drink the water; maybe we need to get inoculated.

Our innocence must be swathed in understanding. Our enthusiasm must have peripheral vision.

This is all true in the wonderful realm of hope.

Hope is the magic ingredient which fuels our long distance run down the path of life. Without hope we would surely wither and give up long before our time. But what happens if we hope for things that can never be? That would be the yang to the yin of hope's positive energy. There is a dirty little secret few have dared to whisper about: the wrong kind of hope - what I think of as the dark side of hope - can stall us, leave us walking in endless, fruitless circles, and eat up our precious lives with repetitive disappointment. We can get stuck in an endless loop of hope for what is certain to elude us.

Why and how does this fundamental life-giving force get corrupted and become a vampire of our possibilities?

In my twenty-three years as a psychotherapist I have come to understand that some powerful forces which are unleashed in order to protect us when we are young, can turn on us as adults and transmute into obstacles to happiness and fulfillment. When a young child is faced with a bleak and deeply insufficient world - one where her mother or father (or both) are cruel or insensitive to her needs or just severely incompetent as parents - what is she to do? A child has to have certain basic emotional needs fulfilled in order to both survive and thrive. She needs to be loved and appreciated and to have at least one parent who is pretty consistently available to soothe and nurture her, to reflect a sense of joy at her existence. And she needs, in a profound and indisputable way, to receive empathy and compassion; kindness and interest. Sometimes, in truth more often than we really want to know, these elements of a healthy self are not available in the immediate environment of a baby or a toddler or a child across all cultural and socioeconomic strata.

So the question arises: What can a child do? Can a little boy go find another father if his father is distant or humiliating? Can he find another mother if his mother is narcissistically incapable of seeing what his true needs are? No. There is really only one successful strategy for the child to employ.

Hope.

On a deep internal level, one that does not rise to conscious awareness but one which affects how our little boy or girl behaves, he or she can hope against hope that their parents will become the loving, caring people they need them to be. In fact, this hope protects the child from the most dire psychological outcomes of despair which can be disabling depression and even severe and permanent mental illness.

Hope is the child's savior. And because it truly is, we can barely stand to think of hope in any negative light. Our minds want to turn away (perhaps from this page) and deny the duality of hope.

Fast forward to the future of this child's later life. She is now an adult looking for love. Will she get hooked into hoping that a manipulative and insensitive partner is going to change? There is a good chance that might happen. Because the kind of hope that saved her has become a habit of her mental construct. She reflexively re-ignites hope no matter how brutally her needs are rejected; no matter how consistently she fails to receive the respect and admiration and tenderness she deserves. She can continue to crank up hope...sometimes forever. And thus, she is repeating her childhood. But this time hope is not her savior, it is the instrument of her demise. And in a cruel twist, her maintenance of this dark side of hope keeps her from investing hope in the people and places that would bring her joy.

Counter to almost everything we are taught to believe in and exalt, and with the massive added force of intolerance and resistance from our can-do culture, a dose of hopelessness - when the situation really cannot be improved under any realistic circumstances - is what is needed. But the majority of us would rather cut off a limb than embrace that much maligned sensibility. Our friends and our family and our movies and our literature and our politics and just about every aspect of our lives collude to keep us from letting hopelessness in.

We are scared silly that hopelessness will grab us around the ankles and pull us down into the swirling depths. Can it really be that we have to willingly open our door to a feeling we collectively deplore?

Yes. It is often the only way out. It is often the only way to get free of that friend of our childhood that grew up bad.

Most often a therapeutic guide is needed to help transform powerful underlying beliefs and to help sort through the automatic thinking that produces reflexive behavior. But we can change, that is our power. We can relearn old ingrained ways of being in the world and we can grow stronger by letting in feelings that were previously too dangerous. The process will unfold when there is now someone who really sees you and sees through the much practiced Kabuki of our self-image into our authentic self. To finally have that reflected back with compassion is a powerful source of growth and change. Hope, that true friend of a life that is full, will no longer be misdirecting us and sending us round in painful circles. It will become the infusion of true energy and possibility which we can ride on and trust to bring us into a future that is nourishing and satisfying and fulfilling.

Karen Krett has been in private practice as a psychotherapist in Manhattan for twenty-three years. She has recently completed a work of non-fiction entitled The Dark Side Of Hope: A Psychological Investigation and Cultural Commentary.