Don’t Look for Hope, Create It

Pain and trauma are an inherent part of existence. But there are times when they exaggerate their power within you. They become more and more of a deception instead of the reality they were when the pain happened.

Pain and trauma weigh you down to a specific point in time. But you are not that child, that adolescent, that version of the adult you were at the time. You are here. You are now. You are not the same person you were when you were bullied or otherwise victimized. You have hindsight. You have growth. You have the freedom it can bring.

Pain and trauma tell you that you are defined by powerlessness. Hatefulness tells you that it is bigger, angrier, and stronger than you. But hatefulness was never about you. It was about someone else’s pain and trauma. It was about someone else who felt so small and so powerless that they resorted to destructiveness against you. They felt like they didn’t have the power to stand up to who hurt them so they took a stand in their powerlessness against you, never knowing who you are because they are too lost in lies of powerlessness about their own self.

In his book Let Us Dream, Pope Francis says that, “Humankind has a mandate to change, to build, to master creation in the positive sense of creating from it and with it… we’re – if I can stretch the word – co-creators.” I believe we have the power to create hope where we previously saw none. Pain and trauma tell us over and over that we are small and helpless and destroyed. But if we are so destroyed, why does pain have to continue to plague us and prevent us from healing? Because we are not destroyed. Pain, in some manner, becomes a lie that says we must define ourselves by our most traumatic moment. But we can create a perspective, a redemption, a new reality for ourselves, within ourselves, where we are the victor who overcame the heartache that those who hurt us were not able to overcome.

When we were hurt, we were just an object to that person. It was never about us. It was about someone needing to take their pain out on someone and we were convenient. But we can choose to be a human being. We can choose to see our authentic self, to see our inherent value, and to create hope by grasping this good news that those who hurt us were not able to grasp.

And if you are the one who hurt someone, this applies to you also. You don’t have to remain the person defined by hurting someone else. You can create a new belief system where you know you have value, where you know you can define yourself by a new beginning instead of your past. You can take your power back from those who hurt you to the point that you felt you had no other option than to hurt others. You were lied to by those who told you they were more powerful than you. You can create a new version of yourself defined by the truth of your inherent value and by your worthiness to experience a higher quality of life within yourself.

Hope does not have to be searched for or found or built upon. Hope can be created. You can be the one to create hope within yourself. You’ve got this!

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This Post is republished on Medium.

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Photo credit: iStock