Hope-Based Mitigation Process

The therapist's first assessment goal is to normalize the client’s experience nonjudgmentally, allowing them to express their experiences in the best way they know how. Therapists can help clients identify, explore, and understand how Pivot Point’s personal or global changes impact their lives. 

Pivot points represent essential life changes due to stress, depression, anxiety, and trauma. Significant events require you to turn, pivot, and think in new and innovative ways. Each of the pivots represents ways we develop new meaning in life. Our changes can represent times when we can increase our hope and positivity. Examples of turning points include graduating from school, getting your first job, getting married or divorced, losing a loved one, having a child, being a victim of a crime, sudden homelessness, incarceration, getting promoted, global crises, and environmental emergencies. The good news is that you can successfully adjust to turning points by thinking flexibly. The Hierarchy of Hope helps you draw on your change experiences to identify goals constructively, create new meanings, and explore your transcendent purpose. 

Therapists can start asking such questions to understand the client’s perspective about the changes happening in their life:

• How do clients describe the changes and their presenting issues?)
• What developmentally appropriate language do clients use, and how do they best express themselves?
• How do clients describe the nature of their Pivot Point?
• How do clients believe the Pivot Point is affecting their lives?
• How do clients want to transcend the Pivot Point? 
• How did it prompt the inclusion of negative habits into the person’s lifestyle? Can the negative habits be transcended? 
• How are clients experiencing change (job, personal, relationship, control, meaning, etc.)?
• How can clients create new meaning from their experience (e.g., a shift in priorities, etc.) to maintain hope?
• What keeps clients stuck and unable to move forward?
• How do clients conceptualize change?
• Why are clients reluctant to change?
• How can clients be more proactive in meeting their needs?
• What negative emotions (stress, anxiety, trauma, depression) does the client experience?

Therapists can then conduct a Hope Audit, a formal hope assessment, or a general discussion about how the pivot point has depleted hope in five specific NEED areas. The areas mirror an upside-down Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. You can conduct a Hope Audit using three different methods:

1) Interview: The therapist can interview clients and ask questions such as the following.  

· Meaning: How have clients lost a sense of meaning and hope in life? How can clients begin to make a meaningful contribution to the world?

· Engagement: How have clients become less engaged in life? How can clients develop or rediscover skills and talents that will lead to a path of hope?

· Accomplishment: How can clients begin to feel good about themselves so far? How can clients begin preparing for additional future successes?

· Relationships: How have clients' relationships changed? How can clients develop additional meaningful, collaborative relationships?

· Control: How have clients lost a sense of control in life? How can they regain this control so that they are more hopeful? 

This assessment evaluates where clients are currently functioning. It can also help therapists choose appropriate activities to help their clients mitigate problems.

2) Continuum: The therapist can determine, for each of the five categories, how clients’ levels of hope (Meaning, Engagement, Accomplishment, Relationships, and Control) can be interpreted using the following continuum:  

0 = Hopeless

5 = Hope

10 = Extreme or Transcendent Hope

Therapists can use the Hope Scale to assess three areas of clients’ functioning. The Hope Scale is reproducible and included in all Positive Psychology—The Hope Series workbooks, available at www.wholeperson.com. The Hope Scale can then be used as a post-test to assess improvement.