The Story Behind It All

I started HOPE in 1987 for the benefit of some of my surgical patients who were facing the life-threatening challenge of cancer. I based it on the human development work I began in 1975 when a close friend introduced me to the work of Earl Nightingale[1] in response to my complaint that I felt the universe was giving me a “rough deal”. In an audiotape my friend loaned me, Earl described the mirroring relationship between my own attitudes and the perceived attitudes in my environment. He called it The Law of Correspondence, and he showed that it was a corollary of The Law of Returns (you reap what you sow) that has been with us for thousands of years.

He pointed out that his studies of the history of success showed that success is always related to one’s attitude, and one has always chosen the current attitude, even if one has forgotten why s-he chose it in the first place. He pointed out that once a choice is made, it does not need to force the same choice on us for all time. If the old choice is not working, choose again!

I was feeling anxious, angry, lonely, and stressed out. I had hit a bottom, and was ready to change. I committed myself to letting go of the anxiety and the anger, especially in regard to certain circumstances that seemed to show up repeatedly; like three months of always encountering traffic at the stop sign at the end of the street where I had my office—even at three a.m. after an emergency operation  in a town that rolls up its sidewalks at 9:00 pm!!

As soon as I made this commitment to holding a different (I chose peaceful) attitude, I drove up to the stop sign in a new state of consciousness (yet anxious about what I might find there), and there were no cars in sight other than mine! One particularly slow-driving man whom I frequently encountered there with a long line of cars behind him never showed up there again, even though I saw him and his cortege in other parts of town for many years afterward.

Coincidentally, one of my patients was expressing the same kind of concerns that I had felt, and I said to her, “Please consider that you are the one who feels and creates your emotions. They are your choice, and if you don’t like them, you can change them. It may just be that if you feel the world is giving you a hard time, you may be the source of that ‘hard time’ attitude.” She responded beautifully! This had a telling effect on her way of living, and it suddenly seemed that quite a few other patients asked for and benefited from that kind of advice. I began in earnest to study Earl’s experiences with the patterns of human success, and shared them with my patients regularly. His work, which can be best described as The Essence of Success[2], provided me with counseling tools that were so helpful that I decided to get more formal training in counseling. In 1985, in response to this intention, I started to study under the gifted psychiatrist, Barry Wood, MD.

After we had been working together for almost a year, focusing largely on Karen Horney's psychology of moves: towards, against, and away from, Barry came down with a serious cancer, which led him to Bernie Siegel through the New York Times Book Review of Siegel’s Love, Medicine and Miracles[3], which he read while he was in hospital. Barry introduced me to Bernie. Bernie told me about his wish to call his ECaP (Exceptional Cancer Patients) groups HOPE groups, but he could not figure out the acronym. When the first HOPE group started in February 1987, the co-founder of that group, Sharon Williams, RN, produced the acronym—Healing Of Persons Exceptional—and the group accepted it eagerly. Having named ourselves, let us now take a deeper look at hope, the attitude....