Handle You With Care
After finishing cancer treatments, some survivors feel happiness, sadness, relief, confusion, gratefulness and more. Often times they feel conflicting emotions simultaneously, making it confusing to understand how they feel. These conflicting feelings lead to questions, often leading to more questions.
Many wonder what’s next? What do I do now? How do I know I’m making the right choices?
As unique as you are, so is your “what’s next”? Your personal healing path is your own to discover. You can have the same diagnosis, the same surgical and chemical treatments as someone else, but experience very different emotions. We travel through life taking different paths therefore have different life perspectives.
Frequent questions I hear are “How come I’m not doing as well as someone else?” or “Why am I not moving on easier”? (Even sometimes “tell me what to do.”)
These questions can lead to believing they are doing something wrong.
Questioning almost everything after cancer is a “normal phase” of recovery and processing the experience.
Reassure yourself that you are not alone feeling confusion. Life after cancer is not a quick sprint back to our former lives. Sometimes a former life may not be the healthiest one to return to. Perhaps the former family-work-life balance was not really in balance.
A good answer about what’s next is: handle yourself with extreme self-care.
Be extremely generous with your self-compassion. We often think of how this is impacting family rather than ourselves. When we take care of ourselves first, we are better partners, parents, coworkers, neighbors, sisters, brothers…
Good health doesn’t come from medicine alone. Recovery from illness requires more than time. Recovery needs space to carve out self-care. Do a self-care personal inventory and assess where you are:
Are your expectations after cancer realistic?
Do you have small and larger steps for healing?
Have you considered your relationship with “control”?
Have you found tools to keep you moving forward and hopeful about life after cancer?
Find supportive people and practices that nurture yourself. Do yoga, journal, spend time with animals, have conversations with other survivors, be in nature, listen or play music. These are restorative choices and “medicines” also.
Self-care requires the practice of self-compassion. People who cultivate self-compassion generally have better physical and mental health. They are happier, more motivated, and experience less anxiety and depression. Research has exploded around self-compassion and how it relates to our health.
Dr. Kristin Neff, Ph.D. is a pioneer in the field of self-compassion research and widely-admired as the world’s leading expert. As an associate professor of educational psychology at the University of Texas, Austin she has over a decade of research studying self-compassion.
Her research led her to define self-compassion as needing three areas:
self-kindness
recognizing our common humanity
mindfulness
She points out that we need to be gentler on ourselves especially when we are suffering. Although this sounds easy enough, many confuse self-compassion for good self-esteem. They are not equal. Self-esteem is feeling good about yourself. Self-compassion is feeling good about your self even when things are not going your way.
Take a small step today. Pay attention to how you talk to yourself. How kind and gentle are you to yourself? Some of us are better at showing outward compassion than inward.
Handle you with great care after cancer and be generously patient with yourself.