There are times when even the word hope feels out of reach. Like it’s something reserved for people whose lives haven’t been cracked wide open. And when you’ve lived through loss (especially the kind that breaks your heart and rewrites your whole identity) people will start offering you advice about “resilience.” About how strong you should be, and about how things will get better.
And sometimes, those words feel like noise.
But this isn’t another piece telling you to stay positive. This piece is for the days when you don’t even want to get out of bed, when you don’t have any energy for positivity, and for the days when you simply don’t want to.
Hope and resilience aren’t grand ideas sold only in self-help books. They’re real traits you can practice, improve at, and welcome into your life. And they begin exactly where you are.
Let’s start with hopelessness (the part no one likes to name)
Before we can even begin to understand the importance of hope, we need to meet it in its absence. Most people want to skip this part of the process, the part where nothing feels meaningful, nothing feels fixable, and you don’t even want a pep talk. You just want a way to keep breathing.
Hopelessness can show up in subtle ways when life gets a little hard, and it can sound like what’s the point? or It won’t matter anyway. It’s exhausting, and it takes a certain number of showing up every day and seeing no change to feel it.
People will say “stay positive,” but you already tried that. What you need is for someone to admit: Hopelessness is a valid response to unbearable pain. There’s valid reasons to feeling hopelessness, and most often it just means that your brain, your heart, your spirit have hit overload.
How it looked like for me: What grief taught me about fighting for hope
My story isn’t tidy. I’m a psychiatric nurse practitioner, but more than that, I’m a mother who’s lost three of her children, and my husband too. When I talk about hopelessness, I’m speaking from the darkest corners of my life.
Click here to to learn more about my journey of hope and resilience
A few days ago, it hit me again. That same quiet, creeping hopelessness. I’d been doing everything I knew to do (working hard, showing up, trying to help others) and still, I wasn’t seeing the outcomes I hoped for. I felt like I was drowning in effort with nothing to show for it.
And what helped me was remembering my own personal journey of loss, all the times I have felt tired, and the efforts I had to get to to practice hope and resilience.
[Insert family picture from the Strength in Vulnerability documentary]
How I climbed out of my own despair
It wasn’t an easy process, but I used my years of education as a nurse practitioner and the losses I have felt to create a system that worked for me, and the same system went out to help thousands of other people too. Here’s what I’d like to share today.
Thought mapping: Making the pain visible (so you can actually work with it)
When I was buried in grief (after losing my son, after the sleepless nights, the trauma, the medical decisions) I was desperate for something more than “talk therapy.” I needed a way to see what was happening inside me so I could stop drowning in it.
That’s when I started developing what would become the Mentally Strong Method, and the first step was something I called a thought map.
A thought map is a way to get your thoughts (especially the messy, tangled ones) out of your head and onto a page where you can finally look at them. You don’t have to write full sentences and you don’t even have to explain everything. You just have to name your thoughts, allow them to exist, and put them down.
Here’s how I do it:
- Write down what’s making you feel hopeless right now.
- Then ask yourself: When have I felt this before? Trace it back, whether to a death, a moment of betrayal, or even childhood memories.
- Let the patterns show themselves, they will emerge if you give yourself enough space.
The day I sat down to do this again, I saw something I hadn’t noticed before: all of my pain centered around unmet results. I had done everything “right”: loved deeply, worked hard, prayed, advocated and still, I kept losing. And you know what realization did? It fixed absolutely nothing, but it named something, which allowed me to start finding ways to heal from it.
What to do when the same pain keeps coming back
Sometimes it’s not the new problem that breaks you, it’s the way it hits the old wound.
After I filled out that thought map, I sat with the question: When else have I felt this same kind of hopelessness?
And it didn’t take long. My mind went straight to Reggie, the decade of medical trauma we went through because of his condition, and all the nights I begged for seizures to stop. And then the other losses, that of my daughter and my husband that followed.
But it didn’t stop there. That same ache echoed back further, this time to childhood. To the absence of a father and the aching question I carried into adulthood: Why am I so easy to leave?
And that’s the hard truth about recurring pain: It’s rarely about the present moment alone. The pain you’re feeling now is often amplified by all the versions of you who have felt it before.
This is why you must trace it. So that you can understand what you’re really grieving. It’s not always just this loss, it’s every loss that taught you life would never feel safe. And the only way to stop that grief from building a cage around your life is to go back, see it clearly, and say: This happened, it still hurts, but I will not allow it to swallow me anymore.
The power of naming what’s yours to carry (and what isn’t)
When everything hurts at once, it can feel like you’re failing at healing. But what I’ve learned through my own pain and hundreds of others’ is that we often confuse what’s ours to carry with what we’ve been handed but don’t have to hold onto.
That’s what the thought map helps reveal.
As I looked at my own map that day, I saw grief, but I also saw spiritual confusion, guilt, anger, and injustice. These are not all the same, and if you try to solve them with the same tools, you’ll stay stuck.
- Grief needs space to be felt.
- Guilt needs to be challenged with truth.
- Injustice may need action or a conscious decision to let go.
- Spiritual conflict needs gentleness, not forced faith.
If you try to fix grief like you fix guilt, you’ll end up blaming yourself for something that just hurts. If you try to force spiritual peace before you’ve named the betrayal, you’ll end up feeling like you’ve failed your faith. If you try to ignore injustice instead of naming it, it festers.
You can’t carry it all the same way.
Once I had it laid out in front of me—what was grief, what was childhood pain, what was present-day disappointment—I could finally begin making choices. And for the first time in my life, I consciously decided to respond with clarity, instead of just reacting from pain that I’d been doing so far.
That’s the real gift of this method. That although it doesn’t remove the pain (and maybe the pain won’t ever go away), it helps you untangle it, so you can stop living inside a knot.
What healing might look like, even if the pain never goes away
There’s some kinds of pain that never actually go away, and the best you can do is to learn how live with it so it doesn’t consume you.
And perhaps all healing really means is giving yourself permission to show up with the ache and still reach for meaning.
Learning to live without tidy answers
There’s a point where you stop needing everything to “make sense” because you realize that some things might never make sense. You won’t ever know why that friend hurt you the way they did, or why your father never looked at you with love. You can drive yourself insane finding these kinds of tidy answers, but real healing happens when you learn to breathe in the ambiguity and still build a life.
Finding purpose without pretending you’re okay
You don’t have to lie to yourself to find purpose and you definitely don’t have to force happiness to do this. Purpose just demands a presence and willingness to do the thing.
You can do meaningful work, be a loving friend, build a beautiful life… and still feel sad sometimes. And that’s okay.
Letting joy exist beside the ache
We can confuse happiness with the absence of pain. It has taken me the wisdom of a lifetime to tell you today that the pain you feel will never go away. It may change its shape and its weight, but it will never completely go away. Hope and resilience means that you allow the same soil that holds your pain to also grow something good. You don’t have to pick between grief and joy, because they are companions.
Redefining hope as “still showing up”
You don’t need to feel hopeful to be hopeful. Sometimes, hope looks like making breakfast, or replying to a text, or saying “yes” to one small thing. Each time you do something that puts a distance between you and your despair, you’re building resilience to show up and keep trying, even when it gets hard.
If you’re in this place too, there’s support here for you
The journey to hope and resilience is a long one, and it’s always nice to have help along the way. Here’s the support I can offer you today.
The Grieve with Purpose course: A gentle place to begin
This course is for the days when the pain of all (and everyone) you have lost envelops your soul and tries to snatch your breath from you. In its bones, it is a story of hope and resilience, and what it means to show up for yourself.
Using the Mentally Strong Method to find your footing again
If the idea of untangling your thoughts and understanding why you feel and behave the you do interests you, then you might benefit from The Mentally Strong Method, a method with its roots in cognitive behavioral therapy. And if you’d like to map your pain, sort the noise, and get back to what truly matters, take a look at the course built on this method.
Want to go deeper? The MS Intensive is a space for real healing
If you’ve made it this far, that’s a sign that you’re interested in more than quick fixes and self-help books. That’s exactly what the MS Intensive was built for.
It’s a 3-day retreat for people who are done pretending everything is fine, and ready to be honest… maybe for the first time. There’s no toxic positivity here, just space to look at your story with clear eyes and start working through what’s actually there.
During the Intensive, we’ll walk through:
- Your story, as it really is.
- You’ll learn how to map your thoughts, organize your pain, and make choices from a place of clarity.
- A gentle unpacking of your grief, trauma, and identity.
- A community that gets it. You don’t have to explain your pain to people who’ve never lived anything like it. Instead, you’ll be in a room full of people who understand what it means to keep going when everything hurts.
If you’re ready to step into this kind of work, you’ll be met with structure, support, and space to breathe. And perhaps it will even show you that healing really is possible.
Take a peek at the MS Intensive
In the end, hope and resilience means not giving up
I leave you with this: hope is a choice you make over and over again, and resilience means showing up for yourself even on the hard days.
Let your story continue and let your healing unfold at its own pace. And if it’s too much to hold alone, come find the support that was built for people like you, people who are still here and showing up.
That’s what being mentally strong looks like.