How to Hold Hope and Despair if You’re Queer in 2025
It’s February 2025 and things are SHIT, if you’ll pardon the phrase. How are we holding onto both hope for the future, and sitting with the despair of how bad it’s gotten for our queer and trans communities? Is that even possible? In this article, I’ll explore three strategies from DBT, a type of therapy that was designed to make peace with things that are unbearable. The only way we’re going to get through this political situation is together. Let’s investigate three ways to balance our own hope and despair, so we can keep showing up for each other.
Holding Emotions with DBT
Let’s start with some need-to-know info on DBT. This is a type of therapy designed in the 90s to help suicidal and desperate people survive crisis. It works by reducing emotional pain in the short term, and helping you build a life worth living in the long term. It was created by Marsha Linehan, who’s been open about her own struggles with despair and hopelessness.
The letters in DBT stand for Dialectical Behavior Therapy. Balancing hope and despair at the same time is exactly what “dialectical” means! Dialectics is a school of thought about holding onto multiple true things at once, even if they appear to conflict on the surface.
How DBT Can Help
We know that the tools for DBT work because of the piles of quality research we have. Like this 2024 study that got published in the National Library of Medicine, which found that DBT provides an “optimal therapeutic response in the reduction of self-injurious behaviors, suicidal thoughts and attempts.”
The trouble with DBT and queer life is that DBT was not designed with LGBTQ+ people in mind. How can we take some of effective skills from DBT and make them work for trans youth, and bi babes, and our community at large? Adapting DBT to make it work for queer people is what I’m all about. I’ve written a lot about it:
The Stages of DBT Treatment: Road Map for LGBTQ+ Clients
Managing Anxiety in LGBTQ+ Adults
4 Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) Skills Bisexual People Need To Know
That’s my background on DBT. But will it work for you, when it comes to holding space for hope and for despair? Here are some skills to try out.
Skill 1: Contributing
Contributing is a technique for how to hold onto hope when despair threatens to overwhelm you. Living in the United States of 2025 means constant bombardment of bad news and political attacks, and it seems like there are crisis moments like every hour. Diving into the Crisis Survival section of the DBT toolbox, we come upon this idea of “Contributing.”
We need a skill like this because when faced with an immediate crisis, we often shut down, isolate ourselves, and go into “survival mode.” This makes accessing our support networks or even texting our friends for help seem daunting. (If not outright impossible!) We can get overwhelmed and hyperfocus on how each new development might impact our safety, until we lose sight of the big picture.
The Contributing skill is about interrupting our survival mode and our focus on our individual pain. It works by re-focusing us on other people. For example: if I’m on hour three of a morning doom scroll, and I put my phone down in order to make a card for my friend’s birthday, that’s Contributing. If I find an afternoon free for doing some volunteering, maybe with LGBTQ+ orgs like Gay For Good or the Queer Detainee Empowerment Project (QDEP), that’s Contributing!
Doing something kind for other people is what Contributing is all about. It can be as small as a “did you get home safe?” text or as big as a weekly volunteer gig at your local Planned Parenthood. I recommend picking something you genuinely enjoy doing already, and then making an effort to do it intentionally. Pick something that brings you joy! Like activist and writer Rebecca Solnit put it, “And when you face a politics that aspires to make you fearful, alienated and isolated, joy is a fine initial act of insurrection.”
Skill 2: Eliciting Different Emotions
The Eliciting Different Emotion skill is another one for holding onto hope during moments of national and personal turmoil. This skill also comes from the Crisis Survival toolbox. The concept is that with emotions like despair and hopelessness, we get completely wrapped up in them. In the midst of despair, we feel like this is all we have ever felt and all we will ever feel. We can’t even imagine an end to the sadness.
The Eliciting skill helps you remember that even painful emotions like despair do have an end. No emotion is permanent. Eliciting works by calling up a different feeling to the surface- any different feeling. By welcoming in a different emotion, you remind yourself that you are capable of feeling more than just numb or hopeless.
How does this work? You don’t have to make yourself feel joy or hope. In fact, if you are depressed, happiness or even contentment can seem unreachable. What you do instead is pull up something that’s going to bring up different feelings for you- any different feeling. Like for example, you probably already have a good idea of what grosses you out, and makes you experience the feeling of disgust. For me, it’s watching pimple-popping videos on YouTube. So when I get lost in depression and I want to use Eliciting to feel something different, I might pull up a super-gross pimple video online, and notice how the feeling inside me changes to repulsion or disgust. All of a sudden, I’m not lost in endless despair. Now I have a hint of a different emotion. And that’s enough to remember times I felt differently, or to shock me back into my body.
You can try this with any feeling that is different from the one currently overwhelming you. I’m not a horror movie girlie, but I have had clients find success with this skill by watching something that’s scary to them. Eliciting the feeling of horror for a time reminds them that they are bigger than the crisis, and that there is more than hopelessness inside them.
Skill 3: Paired Muscle Relaxation
Now let’s get into what a skill for sitting with despair looks like. This can be daunting for lots of the people I work with. There is a real fear that if we welcome in the feeling of despair, we are going to get trapped in it. What if we get overwhelmed, or stuck? This skill, Paired Muscle Relaxation, can help.
Paired Muscle Relaxation works by helping slow our breathing and our heart rate. That way, we have the space to ride out waves of painful emotions. It involves isolating different muscle group in the body. So the caveat before we begin? Don’t hurt yourself or do damage to your precious body with this one!
To start, pick a part of your body where you hold tension, that you can play around with without pain or pushing your limits. You practice this skill by tensing up one group of muscles at a time, hard as you can. Then you release that tension. Repeat this a few times, as many as you need.
It’s called “Paired” muscle relaxation because, if you are able, you can pair it with your breathing. Tense up the muscle on an inhale, hold for a moment, and then release that tension as you exhale.
For me, when I’m using this skill in my own life or teaching it in a therapy session, I like to start with my shoulders. Why? Because on a stressful day, I hold so much tension and pain in my shoulder that it feels like they rise all the way up to touch my ears. For you, maybe it’s the shoulders too! Or your hands, or your lower back, or your butt… no wrong answers!
To use this skill in order to better tolerate despair, wait for a moment that you genuinely, deeply feel it. Then, attune to where tension exists in your body. And if it feels good, tense up that body part on an inhale, and release it on an exhale. Repeat. Then, you can move on to somewhere else on your body. Wherever you need it. We’re not trying to push away despair, we’re trying to ride the wave of it. We’re trying to make sure it doesn’t stay in our bodies. So while you read the news, or talk to a family member who is suffering, or face something unthinkable, tense and release, tense and release, tense and release.
Wrap Up
So there you have it! Two skills to hold onto hope, one skill to sit with despair. My last recommendation for today is to teach these skills to the people you are in community with- because we survive this together. If you run into roadblocks with using these skills, or you want to go a little deeper- see if therapy and if DBT will work for you! You can contact me to do a consult call to see if getting mental health help from a queer lens makes sense for you. There is no shame in wanting backup. Good luck babe!