Blog 1: Struggling with Fear, Anxiety, Emptiness after Cancer? I can help.
If you are new, I’m Dr. Deborah Butzbach. For 20 years, I have had the pleasure of caring for cancer patients as a radiation oncologist, and recently, I also got a life coaching certification. This is helping me care for my patients even better, and now I am branching out to share my wisdom with all cancer patients. So, welcome! If you are looking for more help, you can find it in three places: My Website, Best Life After Cancer Podcast or my Facebook Page and private group: Best Life After Cancer MD FB Page.
It makes sense that people have lots of negative emotions after a cancer diagnosis. The most common ones I see are grief or loss, fear or anxiety, a sense of pervasive emptiness, or guilt. Grief most commonly involves the loss of the life you thought you were going to have, now replaced by one with a new medical diagnosis, physical limitations and mental challenges. In many cases this is also grief over significant changes in your body, especially in women post mastectomy or colon cancer patients with a colostomy. Fear or anxiety usually focuses on thoughts about a possible recurrence or development of metastatic disease. Emptiness I believe comes when the warrior who fought the cancer is no longer needed after treatment, and the person you were before is nowhere to be found. Guilt may be from the worry experienced by family, or not being as able to care for your children. These are all real, and can be worked on. For sure, you can figure this out alone, but with my experience as an oncologist caring for cancer patients for more than 20 years, we can figure it out together a lot more quickly. The first step we have to take is learning to allow these emotions instead of resisting them, reacting to them or avoiding them. What does that mean?
RESISTING: Resisting an emotion is stuffing them down and denying them. The more we resist emotions, the stronger they become – it is like trying to hold a beach ball under water forever. The thing about emotions, when we suppress them, they always come back as soon as we stop suppressing them, and are usually stronger. Most people have experienced a food urge at some point in their life. If they keep pushing down the urge, it keep coming back, bigger and bigger, until finally most people eat the food just to shut up the emotion. If we let the emotion be there, not forcing it down, seeing it and feeling it, it will slowly fade on its own.
REACTING: When some people are feeling negative emotions, they at some point “explode”. They might take their frustration out on a family member, yelling and screaming, or they might explode in a fit of crying and wailing. If we react to our emotions by screaming at others, it gives us a release, but doesn’t process them, and they build back up. Again, the goal is to let them be there. Future blogs will tell how to work through processing them, but for today, I just really want to bring to light the ways people MAY be dealing with emotions that are not useful.
AVOIDING: Avoiding emotions is the most common way Americans, at least, deal with emotions. Many people use food or alcohol to tamp down and decrease the intensity of feelings. Some people distract themselves with incessantly play games on their phones, scroll Facebook, shop, and a small percentage of people avoid emotions with drugs or porn. If we fill up on food or drink, or distract with our phones, we don’t feel the emotions for the moment, but again, they come back as soon as we stop.
Feelings, or emotions, are a sensation in our bodies. These feelings cannot harm us in any way, even though they feel extremely uncomfortable and sometimes even emergent. Allowing them is a way to start to process them, which leads to them becoming less intense with time. To learn more about this topic, listen to my first podcast, linked here: https://anchor.fm/deborah-butzbach
