For as much as people cling to the old wives' tale that a "positive attitude" is the key to surviving cancer
, Aragon makes some very strong, persuasive points about how you need way more than the illusion of a "positive attitude" to take care of yourself. She also points out that acknowledging how you really feel, even if it's negative, can be far more effective and healthier in managing your life with cancer.Her four-part plan for emotional coping includes:
- Guilt Has No Room in Your Survival Plan
She asks "Did you find yourself feeling guilty after your diagnosis? Did you think that maybe if you had only eaten a healthier diet, or exercised more often, or reduced more stress, you wouldn’t have ended up with the disease?" and then recommends that survivors "face the guilt monster, stare it down, and cast it aside."
- Faking Your Emotions Never Works
Aragon brings up all the old standbys: trying to smile "when you least feel like it," family/friend pressure to “be brave and stay positive.” Then she reminds readers that "squashing your emotions is bad for you. Not only do those emotions stay with you, they can actually reduce your body’s ability to fight off the cancer." When Cancer Hits shows ways to "approach negative emotions in a healthy way, so you can more easily return to real positive emotions."
- Tools to Help Accentuate the Positive
Aragon talks not about drugs and pills, but about things like making plans "to make yourself feel good" via things like spending time with friends, massages, movies, music, etc. She goes over "all kinds of ideas for activities that help you process difficult emotions and find your way to feeling even just a little bit better."
- Don’t be Afraid to Seek Help
Aragon takes the idea of support groups, complementary therapies and counseling head-on, and explains why she thinks trying to go cancer alone is not only bad for our health but "dangerous to your recovery. You need support, and not just someone to help clean the house and make the meals. You need someone to talk to, someone who understands, and you need activities that really go to the core of what you’re experiencing."
We hear a lot of cries on this forum for support and help.
This book can help, and this chapter on Emotional Coping might be worth the entire price of admission.
Aragon isn't a shrink. She's a survivor of non-Hodkins Lymphoma, with which she was dx'd at 16.
But he did pretty quickly come to the realization that if I couldn't laugh about dying, then I would already be dead...and accepted that sometimes, laughing is coping.