By Cinda Morgan, Executive Director of Handful of Hope
THE SPARK OF HOPE
You never know when an idea will hit you on the side of the head and change the course of your life. I’m a child and family therapist by profession, and throughout my career I’ve worked with children in foster care. I’ve always been passionate about helping these children because, by and large, they carry heavy burdens due to the choices of others. Obviously, if you’re reading this, you have strong feelings about wanting to help children who have been in the foster care system, too. And you may have had a thought that changed the course of your life, as well.
A few years ago, I was sitting in a professional conference where there was some talk about resilience. I thought, “Children in foster care need more resilience.” They needed more than what I could offer as a mental health therapist. And that’s where Handful of Hope, a nonprofit organization designed to boost resilience through increasing positive emotions, began. I’ve been researching and developing Handful of Hope for the past nine years.
Children in foster care demonstrate amazing resilience because they have already survived many difficulties, but a stream of hurtful and confusing experiences can lead to the belief that things will never change. Particularly harmful to children in foster care is the belief that things will always go wrong. It’s called learned helplessness and is the conviction that nothing you do will make any difference. It is giving up. It is having zero hope things will change or that you can make a difference in your own life, at least in some areas of your life. Children who have many hurts need resilience to help them overcome the destructive assumptions of learned helplessness, but they aren’t the only ones who could use a surge of resilience. Parenting is a marathon, so aid stations that provide nourishment are vital to help you maintain your energy level, too. And if you are parenting children from hard places, you might experience some vicarious learned helplessness yourself.
THE POWER OF POSITIVE EMOTIONS
Think about your day so far and some of the emotions you’ve felt. Did you feel joy at seeing a friend? A moment of gratitude? A bit of optimism? These are positive emotions. They may not seem like much, but groundbreaking research has found that if we can increase our positive emotions by just a little bit, it increases our ability to bounce back from difficulties and be more resilient. You don’t have to eliminate negative emotions to get the benefit. And you can add these research findings to your day in simple ways.
Before I get to some ways to increase your positive emotions and boost your resilience, I want to help you understand how we know that positive emotions really will lead to greater resilience. The resiliency effect of positive emotions was demonstrated in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Just prior to this tragedy, Dr. Barbara Fredrickson had completed a research project that looked at the connection between increased positive emotions and resiliency. After the shock of 9/11, Dr. Fredrickson despaired about the relevance of positive emotions in the face of such a tragic event. Interestingly, a few days following 9/11, Dr. Fredrickson bounced back from her own sense of hopelessness, regained her equilibrium, and quickly obtained the necessary permissions to conduct additional research on the same group of participants. Her hope was that she might discover something valuable about positive emotions in the midst of this national tragedy.
Indeed, she did. Dr. Fredrickson’s research showed that those who experienced higher levels of positive emotions prior to the attacks not only showed fewer symptoms of clinical depression following 9/11, they even emerged emotionally stronger than before. It is important to note that the people with higher positivity didn’t just plaster a smile on their faces in order to block feelings of negative emotions. All of the participants experienced elements of despair, sadness, fear, and hopelessness—the tragedy took a toll on everyone. And those with more positivity didn’t just switch out their negative emotions with positive ones—they experienced positive and negative emotions side by side, like a chocolate and vanilla swirl ice cream cone. But those who had a higher ratio of positive emotions bounced back stronger than before. They recovered more quickly from the trauma and they had an increase of gratitude, optimism, life satisfaction, and even a greater sense of tranquility.1
Resilience is amazing. It is the ability to bounce back from something difficult. It is the difference between falling flat on the sidewalk and falling flat on a trampoline. Both involve going down and even hitting hard, but there is a world of difference between the two in how you rebound.
DOES POSITIVE THINKING LEAD TO RESILIENCE?
The answer to this question may surprise you. While I don’t want to knock the benefits of positive thinking, there is something different that happens in your body when positive thinking actually leads you to feel positive emotions. In fact, research has found that just having positive thoughts does not reduce our cortisol levels. Actually feeling positive emotions is the key to undoing our stress.2
Consider the efforts of my friend, Lisa, to shift her emotions during a low point in her life. In one week, Lisa opened her own business and was required by her landlord to supply “sweat equity” and help with the remodeling or she would lose her lease, her 40-year-old brother died of kidney cancer and left behind his wife and three children, and her dentist told her she needed a root canal (she didn’t have insurance). The news about the root canal was the last straw. Lisa made it from the dentist’s office to her car before bursting into tears. The combination of her grief and the other stresses of that week was too much for her. As she described it, “I had no positive emotions or positive thoughts or positive anything.”
While sitting in her car, Lisa had a moment of clarity and knew that if she went home, she would wallow in her feelings of despair and hopelessness. Then she flashed on an idea. A 12-year-old neighbor girl was in the local children’s hospital awaiting a serious operation. Lisa, who liked to make jewelry, took her supplies to the hospital, where the two of them made stretchy bracelets. Lisa could have found and focused on a positive thought, such as noticing how her family rallied together to support her brother’s family. But instead Lisa decided to take action in order to divert her overwhelming feelings of hopelessness and fear. She engaged in an act of kindness, and this ended up boosting her positive emotions. Armed with increased positivity, Lisa’s hope was restored even though she continued to mourn the loss of her brother.
Positive emotions act like an emotional immunization or an emotional flu shot against discouragement, despair, and depression.3 We all experience disappointment and adversity, but with the vaccine of positive emotions, the symptoms are not as bad and do not last as long. Perhaps the most surprising finding from Dr. Fredrickson’s post-9/11 research is that positive emotions create a springboard effect: After we go down, we can actually bounce higher than we were when we started. Some call this post-traumatic growth.
HOW ONE FOSTER FAMILY BOOSTED RESILIENCE
A fourteen-year-old girl, Ashley, was removed from everything that she knew and everyone with whom she was familiar because of the choices of her parents, who abused drugs. Ashley was plopped into a foster home with her younger brother, to whom she had always been more of a mother than a sister. Because of her past experiences, including the kind of trauma that most people only see on television but with which foster parents are intimately familiar, Ashley didn’t trust others and didn’t believe that there could be good things in her life that would last. Her foster parents participated in the Handful of Hope resiliency program. In the beginning, when her foster parents presented ideas and activities related to the core concepts of the resiliency program, Ashley was very cranky about the whole thing. She said, “I’m not grateful for anything.” She couldn’t even think of a food that she liked. As she experienced the security of a stable home life, and as her foster parents persisted in teaching the concepts designed to increase positive emotions, a shift occurred in Ashley. Her foster mother came up with the idea to have a poster of different categories of things family members might be thankful for. One of those categories was food. The first positive thing Ashley said, albeit reluctantly, was, “I’m grateful I had a peanut butter sandwich today.”
As her foster parents were teaching about courage, they were also packing up boxes to move the family, including Ashley and her brother, to another state. This disruption in her life, even though she was staying with a family that she was growing to love, hurled Ashley into a tailspin. It felt like her whole world was crumbling again. “You don’t care about us. I’m running away and there is nothing you can do about it,” she shouted at her foster and soon-to-be adoptive mother. Ashley’s understandably frantic reaction to the move threw her younger brother off kilter too. He became anxious and scared as he looked to Ashley for how to react. Ashley’s foster mother quietly said to her, “Sometimes we choose to be courageous for someone else.” In a matter of hours, Ashley chose to display heroic courage about the upcoming move, and she embraced a little more hope.
Ashley’s hope for something better started from a beginning no bigger than a grain of sand. She became noticeably happier and more optimistic. Now Ashley even creates and teaches her own activities that promote gratitude, growth-minded, generosity, courage, or connection. For one such activity, family members were asked to name one gift of generosity or kindness they had received as they each took turns hanging ornaments on their Christmas tree.
Ashley’s hope, a result of her increased positivity, started when she had a different internal experience—a meager amount of the positive emotion of gratitude. Certainly, Ashley’s foster parents wanted something more for her than her negative emotions could generate. If you think about it, parents and business executives want the same thing: different results. Parents want a different bedtime result from their preschooler. Supervisors want a different revenue result from their sales force. However, both parents and professionals often get stuck trying to just talk others into a different result. Effective change comes from focusing on providing new experiences. If you want a different result, you start with a different experience. And those experiences don’t need to be big. Changed experiences spark a shift in perception or understanding that leads to different results. Somehow, Ashley sensed the power that occurs from creating different experiences and eventually delighted in designing positivity-building experiences for her family.
A BABY STEP TO INCREASING RESILIENCE
The place to start is to create a family gratitude journal. Like Ashley’s family, you can divide it up into categories or you can just ask family members to write or draw something they are grateful for each day. And then talk about it together. That little micro-experience done once a day or once a week can start increasing your family’s positive emotions and resilience.
As stated above, Handful of Hope is a resilience program designed to help children, young children, teens, and adults adapt, grow, and thrive—even when they face challenging or less-than-ideal circumstances—by building resilience through increasing positive emotions. There are five core concepts in Handful of Hope—one for each finger—that are used to increase positive emotions: gratitude, growth-minded, generosity, courage, and connection. Each of these concepts has been shown through research to increase positive emotions and help individuals flourish. So just being armed with knowledge of the research about positive emotions and resilience, you can make micro-choices and create micro-experiences to increase your positivity and that of your family. If just a sliver of hope is enough to shift you into motion, then a handful of hope is enough to see you through the ups and downs of life. It doesn’t take a mountain of hope or even a mound of hope—a handful is sufficient. Within each of us is the capacity to thrive when we have a little leavening of hope.
Footnotes:
- Fredrickson, B. (2009). Positivity: Top-notch research reveals the 3 to 1 ratio that will change your life. Random House Digital, Inc.. p.. 97-119 and Fredrickson, B. L., Tugade, M. M., Waugh, C. E., & Larkin, G. R. (2003). What good are positive emotions in crisis? A prospective study of resilience and emotions following the terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11th, 2001. Journal of personality and Social Psychology, 84(2), 365.
- Moskowitz, J. T., & Epel, E. S. (2006). Benefit finding and diurnal cortisol slope in maternal caregivers: A moderating role for positive emotion. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 1(2), 83-91.
- Martin Seligman introduced the idea of immunizing children psychologically in his book, The Optimistic Child. Martin E. P. Seligman, Karen Reivich, Lisa Jaycox, Jane Gillham, The Optimistic Child (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1995), 5.