Honouring Hopelessness: a Gateway to Authentic Hope

My experience as a registered nurse in palliative care and holistic counsellor/psychotherapist, working with people touched by life limiting illness has taught me that ignoring our worst-case scenarios doesn’t prevent them from happening but leaves us unprepared, reeling from shock and anchorless. 

A few years ago, a lecturer, commented that sometimes hopelessness was a more useful conversation than hope. I spontaneously started crying. Someone had said what had been floating on the periphery of my awareness. This stark truth had moved me. For many years I had felt the incongruence of a health care system that denies hopelessness yet feeds it at the same time, through guarded communications, uncomfortable silences and ongoing ‘futile’ 

Don’t misunderstand me; I’m not blaming our healthcare system. Rather, I am acknowledging the broader cultural limitations we face in creating space for hopelessness. And to share another way, that welcomes all experience with love and compassion.

Firstly, my definition is broad. Hopelessness could many experiences such as sorrow, despondency, misery, pain, fear, resignation, distress, acceptance, anger, withdrawal and many more but for clarity, I will use hopelessness. 

Hope and hopelessness are often seen as opposites, negating each other. We are encouraged to cling to hope, to see the light, to move forward. But what if true hope requires us to first sit with hopelessness? What if denying our hopelessness only distances us from the truth of our own experience, leaving us trapped in a fog of unacknowledged fear?

Hopelessness is not an enemy. It signals that something matters deeply to us, that we are facing uncertainty, loss, or an ending that we cannot yet reconcile. To pretend that we do not feel hopeless at times is to silence a part of ourselves that longs to be heard.

When we deny hopelessness, we remain at war within ourselves. We push it down, repress it, or try to drown it out with forced positivity. But in doing so, we do not erase it; we only deepen our suffering. The fear remains, lurking beneath the surface, clouding our vision and making genuine hope feel distant or unattainable.

To live in true hope, we must allow space for hopelessness. We must sit with it, listen to it, and honour what it has to say. This is not an act of despair, but an act of courage. By acknowledging our hopelessness, we create room for something deeper—acceptance, surrender, and the possibility of transformation.

Hope, then, is not about erasing hopelessness but about integrating it. When we acknowledge both, we allow ourselves to hold the full truth of our experience. We recognise that hopelessness is a visitor, not a permanent state, and that within its presence, a new kind of hope can emerge—one that is rooted in reality rather than illusion. When we honour both, we are no longer lost in fear, but present to the ever-shifting landscape of being alive.