How to stay hopeful in a violent world

How do we stay hopeful in a violent world? The last few weeks have been very difficult in our country with the back to back mass shootings in Buffalo, Los Angles and Texas. We also hear every day about violence in our own local communities. As we hear about this violence and watch the news coverage on television or social media, it can lead to real feelings of despair and a sense of hopelessness and helplessness.

It can be both hard to watch these graphic images, as well as hard to stop watching these images. And it can cause us to ruminate about these situations in our minds over and over again, as we learn more facts about what happened to the people involved in these tragedies.

We want to know if anyone was hurt, and if we they were, then we hurt. We share in the pain and we go through the mourning and grief even if we didn’t know these individuals because of our common humanity.

So how do we stay hopeful even when we experience grief? How do we stay positive and not negative when we hear about violence every day? How do we keep bitterness in check and believe there is still some good in this world?

The answer is when we believe in the value of hope. Now when we talk about hope we are talking about that feeling of trust and expectation that good overcomes evil, that life overcomes death.  Hope is active not passive. It moves us to help others and help ourself when difficult situations occur.

Studies have shown that  hope helps us with our mental and physical health. We gain an ability to be resilient and overcome setbacks in our life.

To learn about these studies and  the source of this hope, go to the listen tab of this website (MichelleMCastelli.com) and click on podcast episode #39.