Written By: John Perez, Licensed Professional Clinical Counselor
It’s been over a year since the “I stand with Natalee” movement began, a movement aimed at bringing awareness to the awful reality of child sexual abuse in our community and awareness to the flaws and struggles in the justice system for both victims and their perpetrators. This work is hard. This work is bleak. But at the end of the day, this work needs to be done.
I’ve had the unique opportunity to be involved with the Strubbe’s on building knowledge about the effects of trauma, and to offer hope to survivors and their families. Hope; it’s an interesting concept. It isn’t tangible, and it is hard to measure. Hope is a feeling. Sometimes, it seems it is all we have left. As a counselor working with mental health, I encounter numerous feelings and emotions. Some are destructive. Some bring life. But emotions are typically temporary, and my work as a counselor involves helping you become aware of and learn to manage your emotions. The goal is not to erase emotions, nor is it to have them run rampant.
But hope is different. Merriam-Webster defines hope: “to cherish a desire with anticipation: to want something to happen or be true.” Did you know that hope is the only emotion I actively choose to try to instill in my clients? Hope can be more powerful than happiness! Happiness can come and go, but when hope remains, our lives have a sense of meaning and purpose. Notice that the definition of hope has 3 different and distinct “feelings”; cherish, desire and anticipation. Hope is often times not based on fact, but a hunch. A feeling. And most feelings can be misleading, because of their temporary nature and their capability to skew our capacity to think rationally.
But hope is different. It has the power to motivate. It has the power to energize. It has the power to keep us steady and resolved. Hope truly is an anchor. And the anchor is not meant to stop or prevent the storm, the anchor is meant to steady the ship during the storm. This powerful tool comes at a price though, and the price can sometimes be heavy. That price is patience.
You see, hope requires us to wait. In our fast paced society, where everything is given to us almost immediately, the art of waiting is dwindling. It is easier to be impatient than it is to be patient. Yet hope requires us to wait. There are some of you reading this that have had your worst nightmare come true. There are some of you reading this that may still be in shock and disbelief about what has been disclosed. Your child, or quite possibly you yourself, have been handed an unspeakable evil to endure. In this moment, I intend to offer you hope. Hope that the future can be brighter. Hope that things can get better. Hope that there are still decent people in the world. Hope that you and your loved ones can recover and heal. Unfortunately, these realizations don’t happen overnight. There is no magic phrase that brings you to this place in an instant. So the steep price to pay for the hope in a better future is the opportunity to wait and work for that better future. It took about a year for legislation to be written and to pass in North Dakota. That was just a single step in the journey for Natalee. We now have hope, but we also have to wait for these laws to begin to correct some of the injustices in our system.
Your loved one’s healing is a journey through time. I see it happen in my everyday work! People do recover, people do get better and people do heal! It is a process though that cannot be forced or rushed, it cannot appear through the push of a button or out of thin air. It takes patience. It takes sacrifice. It takes work. And all of that can seem daunting and overwhelming. The only thing that can tie this together, that can give you a sense of meaning and purpose throughout this difficult time, to steady the ship throughout the storm, is hope. So face the day with courage and with resolve. Face the week with the knowledge that you are not alone and you don’t have to do this alone. Face the months with patience and empathy. Do this, and you can face the next few years with hope.
My desire is that you consider the price of hope, and be willing to pay that for your better and brighter tomorrow.