A friend recently wrote me a moving letter: ‘Had a big shock in October. I have breast cancer. Eighteen months of treatment ahead. Everything should be fine, and, in fact, my health’s looking pretty good. But, the truth is, I live in constant fear of the cancer returning. I’m not living, just surviving.’
What happens when an illness, despite being successfully treated, leaves us with a memory so troubling that it robs us of our will to live? It can be a sign that we have experienced our illness as if it were a psychological trauma — rather like a violent robbery or a rape. Any experience of utter powerlessness leaves an emotional scar. The memory can be so intense that it colours everything, even long after the event, with a sense of powerlessness. It can leave us with the feeling that life no longer has anything good in store, that we have lost our place in the world. And this is what robs us of our energy, of our connection with others.
If they persist, these feelings of despair can even weaken our body’s defence systems and leave us more vulnerable to the very illness that
we fear. A remarkable study from the University of Berkeley in California has shown that it is possible to predict the risk of illness by looking at patients’ answers to two questions: ‘Do you feel it’s impossible to achieve the goals you’ve set yourself?’ and ‘Do you feel your future is hopeless and things won’t get better for you?’ People who replied ‘yes’ to both were three times more likely to develop cancer in the following six years, and four times more likely to suffer from a cardiovascular problem, such as a heart attack or brain haemorrhage.
Yet often this feeling of despair is an illusion. It can be the result of past failures that we have never managed to put behind us (at school, in relationships, or at work) or of other people’s judgement (sometimes including, unfortunately, our own doctor’s), when they don’t believe we’re strong enough to influence our own fate.
It’s 11 years since I received the news that my own cancer had returned. I know what helped me move on from that first crushing feeling of helplessness: first, I had to deal with significant traumas in my past that had left me feeling powerless (I did it with Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing therapy in the course of a few sessions). Second, I had to learn how to strengthen my body’s defences, over and above the conventional treatments I was following, with nutrition, physical exercise and relaxation techniques.
Anything we can do, after a diagnosis of a serious illness, to regain some measure of control over our body and our emotions frees us from despair and helps build our physical strength to fight off the disease and re-engage fully with life.
Photograph: Jupiter Images
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