Hope-Focused Interventions in Substance Abuse Counselling

Abstract

Hope is a vital component of psychological healing and plays a critical role in counselling. With despair so prominent for individuals with serious substance abuse problems, the question arises as to how to foster hope in such clients. There are recent suggestions in the general counselling literature that some of the work in counselling involve moving the topic of hope to the forefront and openly approaching the concept of hope with clients. This article describes several hope-focused interventions that can be used to explicitly explore hope in substance abuse counselling.