Your breast cancer diagnosis left you reeling.
The emotions and feelings accompanying the words “It is cancer” can’t be explained to anyone who’s not heard them.
Breast cancer emotions and feelings are intense. Powerful. Icky.
What the hell are you supposed to DO with them?
It depends.
There are as many ways to deal with emotions and feelings as there are people on the planet.
Emotional intelligence (EI) theory teaches us to monitor both our and others’ emotions, sort through and distinguish among them, then use this information to guide our thinking and actions. It also says we’re not in charge of which emotions come at us, but we are in charge of how we respond to them.
Clearly, the creators of EI theory (for whom I have great respect) have never lived through a breast cancer experience.
So how DO you handle those emotions and feelings? Feelings that can linger years AFTER that diagnosis.
The healthiest approach is ridiculously simple, yet for many, impossibly challenging.
Sit with, experience, and feel your emotions.
Isn’t that the craziest advice you’ve ever heard?
I invite you to read that advice once more, and check in with the messages your body is sending.
What are you feeling?
Fear? Anxiety? Panic? Nothing?
For some people, the thought of sitting with emotional discomfort makes them want to do anything but.
They want to squirm. Run. Or worse.
In the work I do (that I wrote about here,) I typically see people handle strong emotions like this:
- Eat them
- Starve them
- Stuff them
- Exercise them away
- Sleep them away
- Self-injure them away
These are all excellent examples of emotions being allowed to hijack eating habits.
You read that right.
Being allowed.
But you, my friend, have the power to disallow that.
There’s a saying I use often; “How you do one thing is how you do everything.”
I’ve not worked with a client yet where that didn’t resonate, and I count myself among those for whom the meaning is strong.
My Food and Breast Cancer Experience
I’m someone who loves order, precision, strong reasoning and rationale.
I was on my high school dance team, for heaven’s sake; we were all about precision.
It took just one team member to unhinge our entire kickline, by executing a lame high kick.
A weak, uneven kickline doesn’t deliver the same visual thrill as a strong, syncronyzed kickline. . .especially when accompanied by perfect musical timing and rhythm.
Have you seen “The Rockettes?” You know what I’m talkin’ about.
I also enjoy knowing there’s a “start here, end up there” directive to pretty much everything.
That explains why I love baking, with all that precise measuring and weighing.
Given my predilection for knowing why or how anything happens in order to fix it, improve it, or organize it, you can imagine my reaction to my un-fixable, un-improvable, and un-organizable breast cancer diagnosis.
It was the exact moment those words “It is cancer” registered in my brain that any semblance of appetite evaporated.
From that moment forward, the anxiety, anger, disbelief and terror were so strong, food was the last thing on my mind.
It wasn’t that I stopped eating completely, let’s just say my lifelong physiological response to stress has never been to order a pizza followed by an ice cream chaser.
For me, no appetite during stressful situations isn’t a control thing, it’s a PHYSICAL response.
I can FEEL it, and I know it’s driven by emotion.
If I tried to make that feeling go away by eating, rather than responding as my body directed me, I’d feel worse!
Honest, Strategic Guidance
I shared my own “food response” to stress to show how sitting with strong emotions – literally feeling and acknowledging them – while acting on your body’s cues offers a healthy, natural way to MOVE THROUGH uncomfortable times.
And you will move through them.
Strong, uncomfortable feelings never last.
They may stick around longer than you’d like (I can easily recall dark days I couldn’t get through fast enough), but they do pass.
When you try to go AROUND those strong feelings, you flirt with disaster, often in the form of the unhealthy behaviors I highlighted above.
I encourage you to be kind to your body when those strong emotions creep up. It’s working hard to bolster itself while under siege.
Try to help it along with as much self-care and love that you can.
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This information is for educational purposes only and is not intended as medical advice. Please consult your dietitian or doctor for guidance specific to your needs.
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