Hope and Hopelessness

‘He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how’

Friedrich Nietzche

What is the difference between someone who becomes a victim and someone who faces adversity and even thrives on challenge?  The word that is often used in medicine, psychology and even physics is resilience.  Resilience is that quality that most of us possess to a degree where we can not only cope with, but bounce back from difficult or traumatic times.  Nature Nurture is in the business of understanding resilience, what it looks like, why some people have and others don’t seem to, and how it can be cultivated in an individual.  You see promoting resilience is a bit like making an investment.  From a small seed sown in early life there can be a huge return later on. Scottish government report notes that for every £1 spent in early intervention, £9 is saved when that individual becomes an adult.  A healthy, wealthy society needs individuals who are resilient, confident and creative.  The optimum, but not only, time to develop resilience is in early childhood.

So that’s what resilience is and why we need it, but what does life look like when it’s not there?  The children who join Nature Nurture come from families that don’t have a lot of resilience.

Many of these families have experience generations of despair, alcohol abuse, substance misuse, mental illness or domestic violence.  There is little feeling of hope in these households.  The children born to these families are often vulnerable and set on a trial very similar to their parents and grandparents before them.  Those who don’t have a good start in life, who don’t have their mental, emotional and physical needs met, grow up with the odds stacked against them unless they can develop a sense of hope and purpose.

Nature Nurture has developed a model of what resilience looks like based on the ideas of Daniels and Wassall, and Groteberg.  In our version of the ‘Building Blocks of Resilience’, there are seven domains of health and wellbeing that need to be integrated and strong in order for an individual to experience resilience.  The seven areas are:

·        mental and emotional wellbeing,

·        physical health and wellbeing,

·        social competencies,

·        talents and interests,

·        positive values,

·        creativity and imagination,

·        knowledge and understanding;

 After working with this model for three years I start to realise that the central core of these seven areas is hope.  If an individual cannot experience the ‘why’ to live for then the seven areas of resilience cannot be integrated or strong.  In a little child that ‘why to live for’ is expressed in joy, in the older child it is the motivation or curiosity and wonder that drives exploration and learning. I firmly believe that every human being is born with this innate sense of hope and purpose, but I’ve seen children as young as 2 who have already lost that spark.  I have also witnessed hundreds of children regain their hope and purpose through programmes closely attuned nurturing interactions and free play in natural environments.

 

The powerful combination of real engaged nurturing, free play and exhilarating natural environments gives back the hope and purpose that combats hopelessness.  Intervention that works with these elements is like a preventative medicine that breaks the generational cycles of vulnerability, dependency and abuse by giving back the ‘why to live for’ that is the key to resilience.