https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=RdxOcFtJgXU
Over four years ago I ended an abusive relationship to protect my unborn baby. It was a very ugly breakup. When the dust settled I lost my entire life savings. I’ve since been trying to put my life back together but I’m struggling with depression. Raising a child of my own is a challenge and I’ve lost hope that I will be able to recover financially. What advice do you have to help someone regain lost hope? Well, look, it’s very difficult to have hope without a vision and I mean that technically. So hope is a positive emotion. There’s a neurobiological system that mediates positive emotion and you feel positive emotion primarily when you’re moving towards a goal and so that means if you don’t have a goal you can’t experience any positive emotion and if you can’t experience any positive emotion you can’t have any hope. So then the question is well how do you develop a positive vision so that hope can be restored again in your life and I’ve put together something online that helps people with that, helps people step themselves through the process let’s say in the absence of professional therapeutic engagement. So it’s called the Future Authoring Program and it’s at selfauthoring.com and the first thing it asks you to do is to allow yourself to daydream essentially, to imagine, to play a game in a way with your own imagination. The game is this, it’s imagine that it would be okay existentially speaking if things worked out for you. You have to allow yourself that privilege, the privilege to believe that any excess suffering on your part is unnecessary, that it would be acceptable for things to work out for you. Then you have to have the faith that that might be possible and that it would be a good thing and then you have to ask yourself what it is that you would want if you could have what you wanted and so that’s where the daydreaming comes in and you have to confer with yourself like you would confer with someone you don’t know because you don’t know yourself that well. So you might say well if I could have what I needed and wanted to put myself in a position that would be good for me, good ethically in five years, what would that look like? And then you let your mind envision, that’s the daydreaming, to literally imagine, allow yourself to imagine what it is that you would want need if you could have what you wanted and needed and then to write for 15 minutes about that and then to write for 15 minutes about how miserable your life could be if you let your bad habits take the upper hand then that kind of gives you poles in your life, right? You have something to aim at upward, that’s the hope inducing element of it, you have something to avoid that can help you get your anxiety and even your anger on your side. Then the program asks you to develop a more specified vision in seven different domains of your life, like if you could have a relationship what would it look like? If your family was well constituted what would that look like? What friendships would you like to have? What are your career goals? And again you have to imagine that, you have to imagine and write that down and you don’t have to do it perfectly and you don’t have to be correct, you just have to elucidate the vision and I would say in your situation too you said you end an abusive relationship, it was a very ugly breakup and you’re in financial trouble. It’s also quite likely that there are memories pertaining to that breakup, unresolved issues and an unresolved issue is a problem you haven’t solved that are still plaguing you and I would guess that partly because that’s how you opened your question and so in the self-authoring suite there’s also a program called past authoring that helps you essentially an autobiography and often before you can move forward and envision what the future could be you sort of have to know where you are just like if you’re trying to navigate with a map you have to know where you’re positioned on the map before you can chart out your course to wherever you’re going and my suspicions are that your concept of your life also requires some updating and you could do that with the past authoring program. Now you don’t have to torture yourself with these programs you can hit at them 15 minutes a day or 20 minutes a day and as I said don’t be afraid to do them badly the important thing is to get a first draft down you’re not going to be able to write a perfect representation of your life or your future in any case and so there’s no point getting perfectionistic about it but you need a vision right and that will give you something to work for and that will restore hope technically speaking.