Thanks for raising this subject, which I think reeds to be looked at because it affects us all so deeply. As a psychologist and counsellor myself as well as a breast cancer patient , I believe our challenge is to understand that breast cancer throws powerful, primal experiences. These fill us with often-overwhelming emotions and it is vital for us to use this as a chance to learn powerful skills of selfcare and resource management to deepen and strengthen our capacity to live well through difficult times.
It is not healthy to immediately block off hese strong and often distressing feelings by numbing them with either denial or of medication in order to keep up a brave face pretending all is fine when it isn't. It is not a sign of weakness or incompetence to cry or show/feel other signs of emotion at a time like this.
Nor is it healthy to just sit and dwell on our pain and fear and wind up our fear, pain, rage, loneliness, etc becoming deeply agitated and increasingly unable to function.
Instead, we need to give ourselves the care our hearts bodies and minds need at each point. In this way, we can make our way through each part of this experience and bear its strong emotions without being totally disabled by them. We need to learn to use our resources and build our personal skills for comforting and calming ourselves and then for exploring and understanding how it is to be this way, maybe even finding creative inspiration and wisdom within the journey. Our emotions are part of our survival resources, and are helpful to us to direct us into the selfcare we need.
If we understand the goal as learning how to manage where we are and make in into a bearable and even good place, we can then draw on the help of a psychologist or counsellor to build valuable skills to help us live our emotional life more fully rather than help us escape from this part of ourselves.
In our culture, we learn to be very much afraid of any strong emotions, both good and bad. Emotions are seen as mad, bad and dangerous, the precursor to madness or violence. In fact they connect us to what matters and what things mean to us. But they take skill to manage and to make sure we don't just react blindly to them or even worse, wind ourselves up to a state of overwhelm and agitation.
Numbing ourselves with medication or pretending we are not emotionally distressed is not good for us, because the emotion is a necessary part of being alive and confronting the meaning that experience has for us. Medication should not be what we reach for straight away. We should build our coping/being-in-a-difficult-place skills first.
(I am not bagging people who use antidepressants, and believe these drugs have saved lives, but doctors prescribe them almost automatically, ond don't put a plan in place for how to come off the drug later. so you can find yourself on it for years. And I have clients who found particualar antidepressants made them suicidal, more anxious, full of rage etc and these are fairly ommon side effects of these powerful drugs. They can take the edge off a deep depression so a person stops feeling suicidal, but should only be used where really needed, and only for as long as needed. They do have other side effects, eg they stop the biochemicals involved in feeling "love", and your moods go all over the place for a week or two when you start or stop or change your dose.)
The skills to go into and live within our strong emotions, be they fear, love, rage, joy, great grief etc, are not taught. We pick up a grab-bag of ways to handle these things as we grow up, first from parents, then others on the way. Times like this are in fact a golden opportunity to discover what gets you up in the morning when it weighs heavily on you, how to console yourself when you are sick with chemo and waking each hour in a state of distress and loneliness, how to face the horror and fear that you could be dead by the end of the year.
I see this as my own wise mothering part of me taking care of the emotionally-distressed inner-child part of me. I/we need to develop this wise mother and spend time as a listening kind mind who hears the hurting part of us and intuits what will get that child-part through. I call it Mind-mothering. In my current training as an analytical psychologist, working out how to do this well personally and helping others do so too is my labour of love. I also find it exciting to hear all l the brilliant ways people have developed for getting themselves through bad times well.
