Integrating the Clinical Hope Curriculum into Trauma Therapy with College Students: The HopeNation Campus Approach

When people experience any kind of traumatic events in their lives, one of the negative effects is the impact on their ability to remain hopeful or be able to anticipate good things to come. Generally, hope is described as the belief that positive outcomes are possible, even in the face of adversity. Scientists, (e.g., Rand & Cheavens, 2009; Snyder, Rand, & Sigmon, 2002) define hope as an individual’s self-perceived ability to generate pathways toward attaining desired goals. They consider hope as a means for the person to motivate himself or herself to take necessary action to travel along goal-directed pathways.

In trauma therapy, cultivating hope is essential for clients who may tend to focus on avoidant goals due to their experience of adversity. Therapists can guide individuals to identify their goals and develop pathways which will incorporate the steps towards achieving their goals as well as identifying possible barriers to goal achievement and how to overcome them. Cultivating the ability to sustain the motivation or agency to move along the pathways should be the driving force behind any good treatment plan.

As an organization that provides trauma-focused, somatic-based interventions to help college students work through their past traumatic experiences, HopeNation Campus firmly believes that hope is a major component of the work we do. Based on our experience working with campus students who have experienced trauma, we developed a clinical hope curriculum that is succinctly integrated into the client’s healing journey from intake through discharge.

Clinical Interventions Integrating Scientific Hope

Some of the ways therapists can intervene with clients while integrating scientific hope include:

• Assess the client to get baseline hope score using the Hope scale.

• Provide psychoeducation about the components of scientific hope: goals, pathways and agency.

• Encourage the client to start a hope journal at initiation of service and to use it throughout their time in treatment.

• Monitor the client’s agency score.

• Encourage the client to set goals for the program, explore the pathways to accomplish the goals and engage them in exploring their motivation/agency throughout their therapy process.

• Engage the client in identifying trauma-based (negative) cognitions and in changing them to hope-based (positive) cognitions.

• Be attentive to when the client’s despair turns to desperation which can lead them to pursue pathways that are dysfunctional for themselves and others.

• Evoke hope talk with questions, reflection, summarization, reframing, and positive affirmation.

• Designate and allocate time to engage the client in the Hope curriculum at each session.

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Implementing the Clinical Hope Curriculum

Working with college students requires the therapist to be strategic in covering all the bases within a stipulated time frame. This is because of their busy academic schedule and the fact that the therapy process must be accomplished within the time frame of the academic calendar. HopeNation’s clinical hope curriculum progresses through eight sessions that coincide with the average number of EMDR sessions provided to college students during a typical semester by setting goals and measuring progress along the way.

1st Session after Intake: Understanding Hope: To provide psychoeducation about Hope along with psychoeducation about trauma and EMDR or Brain Spotting, and to engage the client in developing their hope-centered goals.

2nd Session: Goal Setting: To engage the client in exploring/reviewing the specifics about their goal number one using the Hope-Centered Goal Worksheet.

3rd Session: Pathways: To engage the client in exploring their pathways to accomplish goal number one.

4th Session: Strength Building: To engage the client in strengthening their adaptive neural network.

5th Session: Social Connection: To engage the client in identifying their social connections and belonging in their healing journey.

6th Session: Gratitude: To engage the client in recognizing how they are already using hope; acknowledge and celebrate what they have accomplished in the present.

7th Session: Nurturing Agency: To engage the client in exploring their motivation, meaning and purpose and how to use these to transition their pathway strategies into thriving hope.

8th Session: Future Tool Kit: To engage the client in exploring some ways to maintain hope by pivoting if and when necessary.

How does the EMDR therapist aid in the relationship between Hope, Healing and future planning?

• The therapist empowers the client by providing them with psychoeducation about trauma and eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR).

• Using the adaptive information processing (AIP) model, the EMDR therapist helps clients explore their negative cognitions regarding the traumatic memories and to articulate their preferred positive cognitions engendering and stimulating hopefulness.

• The therapist collaborates with the client to identify treatment goals and develop Target Sequence Plans based on presenting problem.  

• The therapist engages the client in learning and practicing affect management resourcing and engages the client in trauma processing to facilitate healing.

• The therapist engages the client in integration of new insights/perspective into current situations and in learning necessary life skills for the future e.g., use of positive self-talk, time orientation – focusing on what they have rather than what they don’t have.

• The therapist engages the client in recognizing their feelings and to also attend to their thoughts and needs, and to learn communication, assertiveness, listening, boundary setting, relationship and other types of skills necessary for growth.

• The therapist encourages the client to focus on post-traumatic growth and to develop a mental health maintenance plan.  

To produce tangible outcomes in trauma treatment of college students, it is critical that the therapist puts in place a structured strategy to integrate hope into the therapy process. The therapist could accomplish this through assessment, psychoeducation, and by engaging with the different concepts around scientific hope: goal setting, pathways and agency. Doing this would lead to the outcome of the client having an appreciation of the present, embracing gratitude, reinforcing their inner strength, and successfully progress to post-traumatic growth.

✓ Medically Reviewed By Casey Merrill LPC-MHSP