Finding Your Way through Cancer: An Expert Cancer Psychologist Helps Patients and Survivors Face the Challenges of Illness - Softcover

Kneier, Andrew

 
9781587613562: Finding Your Way through Cancer: An Expert Cancer Psychologist Helps Patients and Survivors Face the Challenges of Illness
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1587613565 ISBN 13: 9781587613562
Verlag: Celestial Arts, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

Cancer psychologist Andrew Kneier has devoted his career to helping patients master the many challenges and dilemmas that come with a cancer diagnosis. From his work with thousands of people in therapy sessions and cancer support groups, Dr. Kneier has distilled the most common questions and concerns into ten free-standing essays that will help you work through whichever issues are most relevant to you, including:
 
• Family Matters
• Cancer as a Gift?
• Learning from Your Emotions
• Five Existential Dilemmas
• Mastering Anxiety                        
• Cancer and Your Life Story
 
Dr. Kneier has developed innovative ways of thinking and coping that have helped his clients and their families come to terms with personal issues and face them head-on. Whether you’re gathering the courage to communicate honestly with your significant other or children or having trouble determining what your prognosis actually means for you, Dr. Kneier will guide you through the questions and answers that have helped thousands of others who have also navigated this challenging journey.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

ANDREW KNEIER, PhD, was the only clinical psychologist on faculty at the University of California, San Francisco, Comprehensive Cancer Center from 1990 through 2006, and has met with more than 7,500 patients one-on-one. As the coordinator of the UCSF Psychosocial Oncology Program, he developed support services and related research. Today, Dr. Kneier is in private practice through affiliation with the Sierra Nevada Comprehensive Cancer Center. He lives with his wife in Grass Valley, California.

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Introduction
 
A woman with cancer once told me she found herself in a new world—a world where the sun, with its warmth and light, was eclipsed by something called cancer. The sky was gray like an overcast winter evening. She felt disoriented and lost. It was a world of cancer treatments, cancer anxiety, cancer dilemmas, and cancer challenges. Her former life was slipping away. She had embarked on a perilous new journey, she said, with no road map to guide her, no sure footing, and no confidence that she could make it through. Seeing her from the outside, you wouldn’t know that she was in a new world. The sun was still in the sky, shining above her. But inside her mind and heart, a troubling preoccupation had set in. There was an in-your-face aspect to all the questions and anxieties that came with the news that she had cancer. Each morning her first thought was about cancer, about what to do and what would happen. Her dreadful thoughts would come and go like the tide of a dark ocean. This was her new journey, one defined with unrelenting uncertainty about her future existence.
 
The essays in this book are addressed to people in her situation. Like many people touched by cancer, perhaps you find yourself in a world like hers, launched against your will on a similar journey of unknown destination. Perhaps your suffering is similar as well: the suffering of anxiety, uncertainty, and the pressure to make the right moves on confusing terrain. You probably have taken the first steps and are now continuing to make your way as best you can as you confront one challenge after another. My aim in these essays is to help you along and help you through. We’ll see if I can.
 
I will address you personally, assuming that either you are currently dealing with cancer or were treated for cancer some time ago and are now suffering from lingering side effects or the uncertainty of whether the cancer is gone for good. Whatever your situation may be, I believe you are suffering in your own personal ways and that the reality of your suffering is what led you to this book.
 
The suffering that cancer causes is our starting point. Underneath this suffering is your basic humanness. That is what makes you vulnerable to suffering in your body and mind, and what gives you a tenacity of spirit to bounce back and create meaning. Suffering has power, but you have power too. Your suffering happens to you, but, in some sense, you happen to it. You do not have to endure it passively or sheepishly.

Cancer causes people to suffer physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Your body can become a kind of battleground, with cancer on one side and medical treatments on the other. You are in the middle, and cancer and the fight against it can take a heavy toll. Often this physical suffering can overshadow everything else. But cancer also causes you to suffer emotionally. At its worst, it can feel like a tidal wave of fear and sorrow, of daunting challenges and impossible dilemmas, a tidal wave that drowns assumptions about the future—assumptions and plans that you used to make without a second thought. Cancer also throws a wrench in the works, in the precious patterns of your daily life and in the execution of plans and projects. We might call this the suffering of life disruption. And there can be spiritual suffering as well. You may try to make sense of your illness or search for a hidden reason or higher purpose behind it. The God of your faith and devotion may now seem silent, distant, and indifferent.
 
Much of the suffering that cancer causes is just plain pressure—the pressure or burden to get the right treatments, have the right attitude, and do the right things to maximize your chances. If your cancer progresses, you may blame yourself for not doing enough of the right things, and you may have the nagging, troubling feeling of letting others down. Your cherished relationships can suffer with strain and misunderstanding, and of course your loved ones have their own suffering to contend with (caused by your illness, creating guilt in you). You hate how your illness affects them, and you want to spare them. For their part, they want to be positive for your sake. Thus you may end up protecting each other from how you really feel. The closeness between you can suffer because of that. All of this and more is part of the package, part of the suffering caused by cancer.
 
For many people, there is a jolting demarcation—of their life before cancer (BC) and after diagnosis (AD). “It changes you forever.” I have heard that countless times.
 
Too often the suffering cancer causes is minimized or trivialized as patients are told to keep a positive mental attitude. A positive attitude can help tremendously, but by itself it cannot cancel out your suffering. You need more than that to comfort and sustain you and to see you through. In these essays, I hope to offer more than just the encouragement to stay positive. I hope to help you find ways to honor and embrace your suffering as worthy of honest acknowledgment, attention, and respect.
 
As you probably know already, people who care about you tend to emphasize the positive or encouraging aspects of your diagnosis, treatment plan, test results, and so on. This is well intended, of course. But in the process, it can gloss over or downplay the worrisome or upsetting aspects, causing you to feel that you should not be too upset—perhaps not as upset as you really are. For example, if your scans are clear, someone may say that your cancer is behind you now, and that it’s time to get your life back. You may know that the other shoe could drop at any moment, and if that happened, you’d be staring death in the face. This is the reality that you are living with, day in and day out, and it may seem that others don’t get it.
 
I think we should call a spade a spade when it comes to the inherent suffering that cancer causes. It is good, I believe, to face up to things the way they are. It is good for others to see, and for you to know, that you have valid reasons for how you feel.
 
When I discuss your emotional distress in the pages to follow, I want to do so in a way that validates it and helps you to understand it more fully and deeply, in all its dimensions and nuances. You may wonder what benefit can come from that. When you were a child and skinned your knee, for example, did it help if there was a caring adult around who knew that it hurt, who let you cry as much as you needed, and who just held you until you were ready to be on your way? And what kind of help was that, if not the help of feeling that your injury was real, your tears were valid, and comfort was at hand for as long as you needed? You were helped to feel these things about your injury because someone else was there to validate the reality of your experience. Perhaps this person also knew the context of this injury, how it came on top of some other recent hurt. When that was acknowledged, you may have cried even more, but felt even more understood and better after this harder cry.
 
Although we start with suffering, we need not end there. I mentioned earlier your tenacity of spirit. You have immense resources inside yourself, and hopefully all around you, to respond with compassion toward yourself and with power toward your suffering. Perhaps you have heard of Viktor Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning. Many of his fellow inmates in a Nazi concentration camp were able to turn their suffering into a personal triumph through a strength of will to endure unimaginable brutality and to refuse to give in or give up. Think for a minute about whether this idea might help you—the idea that you can turn your suffering into a personal triumph by virtue of how you relate...

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Verlag
Celestial Arts
Erscheinungsdatum
2010
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1587613565
ISBN 13 
9781587613562
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
176
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Ten Speed Press
https://crownpublishing.com/

Attn: Andrea T Sheridan 1745 BROADWAY
New York
NY
10019
USA
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar