Accessing Hope
Some participants identified the hope focus of SHARP-PWP as beneficial suggesting that a commitment to supporting group members in finding hope challenged the negative pallor that often dominates personal, medical, and social stories about Parkinson’s. As one participant put it, “hopefulness [is] a strength to take into a situation, even a nasty situation like this”. Accompanying hope and learning to find hope some participants also identified positive emotional experiences. One participant reflected, “I appreciated the opportunity to talk about our experiences as people with Parkinson’s but not in a gloomy dismal kind of way”. Another commented, “So you have to start imagining your future with this disease, what do you want it to be? Yeah, very useful”. Still others commented on the skills developed in learning to live their Parkinson’s story with hope, “confirming … that there’s more than one way to look at things”. One group member offered an example remembering, “when we made our lists of hope … comparing how you say a sentence one way [and] compar[ing] it to saying it another way. One [sentence] could be hopeful … and one concentrates on not being hopeful…”.