Can a life coach help Survivors? Post 1 of 3.
The goal of this blog series: How A Life Coach Can Help Survivors is to illustrate that transformation is possible after surviving cancer. The series consist of three posts:
Because being alive is more than being cured.
Transformation is possible.
What is a Life Coach anyway?
Being alive is more than being cured. (Part 1 of 3.)
Treatment is over. Congratulations. Did your treatment end last week? Last month? A year ago? Ten years ago? It doesn’t really matter. Survivorship can be a lonely place. So many questions, anxieties, and fears that feel unspeakable.
Why is that?
Possibly we don’t want to feel like a continued burden to those that love and have supported us through treatment. Instead we want them to know we are cured and we can all get back to “normal.”
Perhaps we struggle to ask questions that spin in our heads during follow-up visits because we simply wished to be seen as grateful to be alive.
Maybe we have a sense of abandonment after we drop from the radar of the medical team that monitored us so closely for so long.
Or could it be that we just don’t have the words to articulate that our world did not change with us, and suddenly feels alien.
“You should never send a changed person back to an unchanged environment.”
A sense of relief and joy washed over me when I first heard these words spoken by Dr. David Drake, a knowledge expert in the world of narrative coaching and healing. “Exactly!” I thought to myself, “Exactly!” Cancer survivors are changed people and we need new tools, knowledge and understanding to help us understand our changed selves. Yes, we are cured, but we feel viscerally that being alive is more than being cured.
I understand.
From cancer survivor to cancer survivor, I understand the challenges you face after treatment. Challenges like the anxiety of not understanding this new body carved by cancer, or the questions you have, but not exactly knowing how to form them or who to ask them to. Or even the challenge of the feeling of wanting something more in this second chance you have been given, yet unable to unearth what exactly that is.
My diagnosis and treatment were almost 18 years ago. Over the years, in the privacy of my home, after everyone else had gone to sleep I would go to my computer and give my blinking cursor something to search for. An effort to scream silently the fears that weaved knots in my mind and my heart. The result of these secret surfing moments more often than not caused additional distress and more questions.
What to do?
Well. In my inability to express my inner fears, body shame and mounting disconnection, I masked them instead. I covered them in cloaks of me as a mother, wife, employee, friend. I worked harder, moving up the ranks to the esteemed senior executive level. I gave more than I had – I was everywhere; at my son’s events, throwing dinner parties, going back to school and volunteering in my “spare time.” I even acquired the nickname “Uberwife”. (Gawd, even typing it makes me cringe.) All the while concealing my needs and desires of wanting something different. Even needing to carve away things that no longer felt right. A mounting desperateness to live more authentically. It was a ruse destined to fail. And fail it did.
The catalyst of the failure was our 25-year marriage ending in a way that completely rocked the foundation of everything I believed to be true. It shattered me. I stood among all of those broken pieces, some of them beautiful, but all with sharp edges.
With a level of bravery, I had no idea I was capable of, I began to pick up the pieces. I learned to soften the sharp edges of me with the help of different therapists and coaches. From the knowledge I was accumulating from my studies in positive psychology, sexual empowerment, meditation, and neuroscience, I was able to place each piece of me back with intention. Covering me with new capes of acceptance, forgiveness and compassion. I understand now that I was empowered with new information and understanding as well as a plethora of tools, practices and interventions that were scientifically proven to enable change to happen. To make transformation possible.
Because transformation is possible.
Read more in this series on Can a life coach help Survivors? Next post.