123. From Hopeless to Hopeful: Simple Creative Shifts

“I would sooner live in a cottage and wonder at everything. Then live in a castle and wonder at nothing.”  Joan Windmill Brown 

Hope is not just a feeling — it’s a practice, a mindset, and a vital ingredient for healing and growth. In today’s episode, Dr. Amy Backos explores the psychology of hope and how we can intentionally cultivate it in our lives.

You’ll learn:

✨ Why hope is the first and most important step toward feeling better
✨ How solution-focused thinking rewires your brain for possibility
✨ Simple actions (like celebrating small wins!) that spark hope and momentum
✨ The neuroscience of awe — and why it feels so transformative
✨ Creative practices to connect with wonder, from museum visits to land art

Plus, Amy shares behind-the-scenes inspiration from organizing a donation drive for I Support the Girls — a beautiful example of community action that restores dignity and hope for women in need.

If you’re craving a sense of optimism, connection, and meaning — this episode will help you take creative action and share hope with those around you.

🔗 Links & Resources:

• I Support the Girls
  – learn how to donate or organize a collection in your community
• Modern Creative Woman Retreat – Oct 11, San Francisco
  – join us for a day of creativity, connection, and inspiration

Transcript

123. What are you hoping for? September 15, 2025 

 “I would sooner live in a cottage and wonder at everything. Then live in a castle and wonder at nothing.” This quote from Joan Windmill Brown starts us off today, and we are talking about cultivating that feeling of hope and wonder and all that is necessary for us all right now. 

Welcome in, my friends. I'm so glad you're here at the Modern Creative Woman podcast on this audio creativity journey. We have a lot to cover today, and I want to share with you some of the behind the scenes kinds of things that therapists learn about instilling hope. And I think you'll be able to use this to help yourself and the people around you feel better. I'm so excited to be hosting an event this weekend. That's donations for an organization called. I support the Girls, and I'll drop the link in the show notes, because maybe it's something that you would want to participate in. The organization is about a decade old, and the woman that started it was doing her volunteer job at a women's homeless shelter, and she realized that most of the women did not have bras, and she saw a woman using a belt to hold up her breasts. And this really touched her. And she thought, this is a way that she could help. The organization is now across the United States, and they rely on representatives in different cities to start off collections and then help the next woman do a collection. So I met when the ambassador of San Francisco, she did the last benefit, and she gave me a lot of details about why this is so incredibly important. And there's an aspect to it that is about dignity and appreciation and just the sacredness of being a woman and having the things that you need to take care of yourself. This organization offers each of us a way to engage in community, and the idea that we can support other women by getting together with our women friends and doing a simple donation. You can make purchase of new underwear and bras. And there they're inexpensive at places like Ross and Marshalls. You can also clean out your jar of gently, gently used, gently worn bras, and they accept hygiene supplies. The idea that came about where she's supporting other women in collecting for women is such a great idea, because together we can gather so much more than just one person, and one donation sometimes doesn't feel like much. But when we come together, we really can make a huge difference. It was not at all complicated to organize and put together, and I really want to encourage you to take action in ways that feel comfortable to you. And this felt really comfortable and simple to organize around San Francisco. So check out the link in the show notes. See if it's an organization you want to support. I'm happy to chat with you more about it, and you can get in touch with your local representative where you live. If you're in the United States and there's many, many organizations just like this that could use your help and you could use community action to support yourself and one good deed usually begets another. There's a lot of ways that coming together with women for a good cause to collect for charity can give you new inspiration and new ideas in how you can participate in other community actions and activities that promote justice and fairness and equality. 

I'm also very excited to be getting ready for the Modern Creative Woman Retreat this fall. I have always found attending groups and retreats in person to come together and be creative as one of the most powerful, motivating activities that I have invested in. And I love going on my solo writing retreats. Yet getting together with a group of women has been transformative in my personal and professional growth. I will drop the link in the show notes, and I would love to see you on October 11th that it's a daylong retreat and it takes place in San Francisco. And if you're looking for a way to connect with women and figure out how to feel good and be able to spread that around, this is for you. I want to take a little dive into what we know about Hope. So let's get into it. I think we all need a little inspiration and hope these days. Luton's Yusuf and Everglow in 2015 describe hope in a very specific way. These researchers describe hope as a positive state of mind and one in which we are pursuing achievable yet challenging goals. And yet sometimes we can feel a little bit hopeless. There's a very specific approach to cultivating hope, and therapists all learn that this is the first and most important thing to feeling better is believing that something better is possible. I talk and write a lot about solution focused thinking, and the idea that we view the world through a lens of how can we imagine the better future that we want? Rather than focusing on problems and trying to solve them, we shift our attention. We move our gaze just a little bit to how do we want the situation. And what that does in our brain is it takes our mind off the problem itself. Because if all we do is sit around thinking about the problem, that's all we're doing. It's when we start to imagine that there's a different way of being that's positive and happy and exciting and interesting and safe and healthy. The way that we can think about building hope is having strong relationships, and it fits that we have a relationship with ourselves and with others. And talking about community always leads us to the idea of hope connection. Another key aspect that relates to hope is having our own agency, and that's when we believe in our own ability to make changes, reach achievable goals. And the idea of agency is such a cool thing. Your hands are your agents. They move things around. Your mind can be an agent of change, being an agent for positivity, being an agent of encouragement. All of these help us feel hope. You know this wouldn't be a modern Creative Woman podcast if I failed to mention meaningful activities, value based behaviors, and that is a strong predictor of if we feel hope that when we pursue things that bring us joy, purpose, and a sense of connection, we feel hope. One technique for focusing on hope in our mind is highlighting our strengths and our past successes. It's telling a good story about. Maybe something didn't go the way we wanted, but we tell a good story about how we learned from it. Strengthening our social support is a huge part of this. Remember, walking with women is shown to improve so many aspects of our emotional and physical health. Celebrating our progress is something that so many women deny themselves. When we're able to celebrate little wins, small accomplishments, it tunes our mind into the idea of hope and happiness and achieving small goals. It's unnecessary to wait until the very end of a project to celebrate. You can begin a painting and think it well. It needs more work and celebrate that you got it started. You can take an action step towards whatever it is on your to do list or on your dream list, and instead of looking at your to do list and saying, but I have so much more to do, you want to say, I'm so glad I got that done. I'm proud of myself. These simple ways of adjusting how you think, how you look at the world, have a huge impact on yourself and others. As mothers, we need to share hope with our children. As partners. We need to share hope with them and the communities that we live in desperately need. The idea of hope right now. Starting a new project. Looking up a new recipe. Putting some plants in the garden or planting a tree. These are all actions that will help us have hope. Starting a collection for I support the girls is an action that I'm taking because it's hopeful. It's encouraging to me and to the woman who will receive the donations. The idea of hope relates quite a bit to the feeling of wonder, and these are both complex, transformative emotions. Then they shift our attention away from ourselves, or that navel gazing rumination that we can sometimes get into and feeling hope and feeling wonder in. That way of curiosity supports our healing. It allows us to be open. It helps us reorient to life, especially if we're feeling particularly down. And remember, art is such a powerful tool to help us feel better in the moment, to have more hope and appreciation. The psychological dimensions of these complex positive emotions, they involve attention and perception and thinking. That cognitive process that looks often really different from our usual mind that is run away with worry. Feeling, wonder and Appreciation gives us the disruption. We usually need to stop that runaway freight train of cognitive distortions. And of course, it enhances our creativity and openness to experience. There's quite a bit of neuroscience research on the experience of awe, and it activates as a this default mode network suppression. Basically, it reduces our ego focus, stops us from thinking about ourselves, centering everything around us, and wondering why everything's so terrible. So when this part of our brain is activated, this default mode, network suppression. So when suppression happens, all of this is happening in our prefrontal cortex and the insula. What happens is it releases dopamine and oxytocin. And these are the feel good hormones that foster connection and insight. They just feel so good. So when we interrupt our negative thoughts with more positive, appreciative thoughts, guess what? It feels good. It gives us that hit of dopamine. And this is more like true happiness, not like the scrolling kind of dopamine you get. Scrolling. Instagram. An art museum is a wonderful place to cultivate hope and wonder and a. Specifically because art is provoking really, these new perspectives and emotional depth. You spend a little bit of time looking at a piece of artwork. You start to feel good. You enjoy it. Spend more time looking. You'll enjoy it more and more. If you are headed off to a museum date, have a look at their website and look at some of the pictures that are on the website. And then intentionally go find those images to see in person and the act of looking before you go. Helps you appreciate it more when you're there. These encounters with art that really moves us, that the kind that just feels sublime and even ambiguous art. These kinds of art can really trigger awe. And of course, the symbolism that you see in artwork is it's just so full of metaphors and representational things to the artist, but to you as the viewer. And these kinds of symbols attract the unconscious. They're speaking directly to our unconscious. When something lights us up, you need to look a little bit longer. Healing also happens through the emotion of hope and wonder and awe. When we have that experience of awe. Looking at artwork, looking at a beautiful vista. It creates distance not just from our ego, but from our traumas. And it does that by connecting us to something greater. And these kinds of experiences where we see something truly beautiful and breathtaking. Help us psychologically break these rigid narratives about ourselves or our life. We make contact in the present moment with beautiful scenery. We're focused on that, and we're unable to pay attention to negative self-talk if we're focused on the beauty. And of course, these feelings are meaning making for many people, the experience of awe and wonder help them change careers, helps them know it's important to them. Commit to a relationship or end a relationship. Have insight into how they can participate and help people who need help. The meaning making and spiritual insight, and of course, the emotional reset that comes from feeling awe and wonder. It simply can't be beat. Researchers have really enjoyed looking at the emotion of awe, and they've identified the signs. You probably already know this, but pausing, holding your body still. Silence. Maybe tears or laughter, eyes getting bigger. And many people really struggle to describe that feeling of awe. And sometimes it even can feel completely joyful or a little bit frightening. The responses to a moment of awe really vary from person to person. You know it when you feel it, when you think about wonder and how being curious about the world. It reminds us that there's mystery and beauty and possibility. Even when things seem to be falling apart on the outside, those things are still constantly available for you. And it's not a good idea to ignore these things or save them for when the world is all right again, because there'll always be something that feels challenging or difficult, but to feel good, it's taking care of you, which ultimately is taking care of others. The more you can focus on your own feeling good, the better you will feel and the more that will spread around. In a time when many people are struggling. When you take care of yourself, take the time to do that. You will be contributing to others in so many unseen ways. Certainly, our therapy can really unlock our healing and invite new ways for us to be present. You know my favorite watercolors? I always post video of me painting with these Viviana watercolors. It's so joyful for me to paint. And it those little video clips I put up on Instagram are me painting for ten minutes. Just do it on a break. It's not necessary for you to take a long time to cultivate these positive emotions. I found this quote from Eleanor Roosevelt's I think at a child's birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift would be curiosity. And I absolutely agree. The idea of being curious is what advances civilization. It's what connects us to other people. It's how we meet people. It's how we find our favorite books and our favorite pieces of art in our therapy. The way we focus on cultivating hope and wonder and are nature based. Art making is great. Doing some land art where you're arranging rocks and sticks, you can make a mandala in the dirt. You can use organic materials in your art making. Another way to do this is working with scale. Thinking about miniature or monumental work, huge giant sculptures or little itty bitty. You can do visionary or dream based art. I love abstract and symbolic expression through artwork, painting and clay really lend themselves to symbolic expression and remember that speaks to our unconscious. It may not be clear to us consciously, but we find some meaning in it. And it's working kind of behind the scenes in our unconscious and of course, visiting an art museum. Let me know how these ideas resonate with you, how you cultivate hope, and how you're sharing hope with people. I believe it's one of the most important gifts that we can give other people right now, and sharing our gratitude for them. Of course, the idea of hope rings so important to me right now, and cultivating a sense of optimism that things will work out is a real gift to other people, and it makes you feel good. I'll leave you with a story that I tell my graduate art therapy students that the best thing you can do for yourself, and for everyone in the class and everyone you live with and everyone you know, is take exquisite care of yourself. When we start to fall apart. It can have a ripple effect and negatively impact our community. When we're wrapped up in complaints or upsets, it leads us down a path of inviting others to complain as well. And I am not at all saying that we should hold it all in and not share our problems. Of course, we need to talk about what's going on in our life. Yet, what I know for sure, me as a human being and what the research says is when we talk about hope and act in helpful ways, we feel better. It is the quality that many people attribute to their survival of terrible circumstances. The hope and belief that things would get better kept them alive in many circumstances, and allowed them to never give up. So if you're unsure what your role is right now in difficult times, this could be your role cultivating your own hope and then sharing it with others. So now that you know about hope and how it intersects with that feeling of wonder and awe, how will you take creative action? Let me know in the show notes and I am excited to talk with you again in the next episode.