Hope for Ukraine ~ Hope for Us All

by Dr. Heidi Zetzer

When facing mortal danger and risk of death or injury, rallying, organizing, and fighting is the right thing to do.  

We stand with the people of Ukraine who are facing mortal danger and fighting an invasion that, if successful, will decimate their country and destroy their sovereignty. 

In times like these, hope is needed. There is much to do. 

A prominent theory of hope (Snyder, 2000) provides a useful description of its ingredients: 1) goals, 2) pathways, and 3) agency.  Goals are the aims we want to accomplish.  Pathways are the steps needed to attain our goals and it is optimal to have more than one pathway. Agency is the belief, grounded in lived experience, that we can take steps to attain our goals. 

However, facing an army or cumulative trauma or systemic oppression or ongoing threat requires the kind of hope that goes beyond these three ingredients. It even goes well beyond a discernible vision of what the future will bring. Such times require “radical hope” (Lear, 2008). 

We are grateful for the printed words of the visionaries(1) who looked forward from and back into the relentless history of oppression in the U.S. and around the world, and conceived of the concept of radical hope. 

This kind of “hope allows for a sense of agency to change things for the greater good-a belief that one can fight for justice and that the fight will not be futile.” Radical hope “transcends one’s ability to envision and understand what the future holds” (French et al., 2020, p. 26). 

This kind of hope requires a community, knitted together in the belief of its collective resilience and connected by a faith in others’ commitment to a common good. 

Radical hope includes action. It is moving forward with faith in a peaceable outcome, even when we cannot see it yet. 

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(1.) French, B. H., Lewis, J. A., Mosley, D. V., Adames, H. Y., Chavez-Dueñas, N. Y., Chen, G. A., & Neville, H. A. (2020). Toward a psychological framework of radical healing in communities of color. The Counseling Psychologist, 48(1), 14-46. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0011000019843506

Lear, J. (2006). Radical hope: Ethics in the face of cultural devastation. Harvard University Press.

Mosley, D. V., Neville, H. A., Chavez-Dueñas, N. Y., Adames, H. Y., Lewis, J. A., & French, B. H. (2020). Radical hope in revolting times: Proposing a culturally relevant psychological framework. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 14(1). https://doi.org/10.1111/spc3.12512

Snyder, C. R. (Ed.). (2000). Handbook of hope: Theory, measures, and applications. Academic press.