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…”.