My approach to supporting people with cancer

People sometimes ask “What is it that you actually do, Sarah?”

And that’s a very good question.

 Because although I am a qualified Health Coach and counsellor, I am neither wholly one thing or the other. So maybe the best way to describe my approach is to talk about what I bring from both disciplines.

First of all, my counselling background. I qualified as a counsellor back in 1996. I worked in a couple of GP practices and in private practice for about 10 years, when I decided to take my career in a different direction. So I took some roles in the voluntary sector and also in the NHS as a patient advocate, and much later I worked for Macmillan for a short while, running a cancer information service in a local hospital. Alongside that I also did some volunteer counselling in a local hospice. So for about 12 years or so, whilst not a professional counsellor per se,  I continued to use and hone my counselling skills to provide a safe space for people to talk about whatever they needed support with, and to help them identify and make changes to their life.

Then, as often happens to women in midlife, I found myself in the position of needing to take care of my elderly mother on a full-time basis so I left paid work and became her carer. Six months later, I was diagnosed with breast cancer, and a deep dive into that journey is best left to another blog post.

But what I will say in this blog is that when I got my diagnosis I was determined to do as much as I could to help myself heal. I was also determined to turn the “I’ve got cancer” part of my life into an adventure of learning and change, and so it has turned out to be!

So it was from that point that I started to learn all I could about what causes cancer and what I could do for myself to help turn that around. And I learned that there is A LOT you can do to help yourself.

I learned first of all about the importance of an optimal diet and regular exercise. That led me to completely overhaul my diet and, after I finished treatment, started me on the road to completing a health coach qualification. That training filled in the gaps in my knowledge so that I can now support others to change their diet and exercise patterns, as necessary.

But by far the biggest and most far-reaching learning for me was getting to know more about the enormous effect that the mind / body connection has on disease progression. And I am not just talking about the emotions we feel as a result of hearing about our cancer diagnosis, although these are important too.

No, what I am talking about are the thoughts and feelings that we have carried about ourselves for years, often since childhood. All those messages we constantly play in our head about how unlovable we are, how we don’t measure up, or how we can’t do anything right.

These are what I call our mental “wallpaper”, the thoughts and feelings that we have about ourselves that we barely even notice any more, they are so engrained in our psyche. And yet these are the very thoughts and feelings that become set at an early age and form the basis of the stressors that cause our immune systems to become depressed and sow the seeds for disease later in life.

As a counsellor I already knew something about this, but finding out just how powerful our emotions and thoughts are and how profoundly they affect the systems in our body that keep us healthy was a revelation to me, and made a huge difference to my own healing journey.

This approach is slowly gaining ground in the medical profession, although doctors are not taught about the connection between emotions and the body. (They get precious little input on the importance of nutrition and exercise either, but they are making a little more headway in that direction).

There is a new field of medical study called “Psychoneuroimmunology”, but that impossibly long word is simply a more clinical-sounding description of the mind / body connection.

So the way I work with clients is a combination of these two disciplines. My health coach training enables me to more effectively help clients make changes to their diet and movement routines that maximise their body’s innate ability to self-heal. My deep dive into the mind / body connection allows me, with my counselling background and own personal experience, to support clients to discover how their thoughts and emotions might be negatively affecting their health and how they can change those to help them heal.

If you are open to being supported in this way, contact me for a free 15 minute consultation to talk through how I might support you.

If you want to know a little more about this approach, I would recommend a couple of books that were game-changing for me:

“Love, Medicine and Miracles” by Bernie Siegel; and

“When the Body Says No: the Cost of Hidden Stress” by Gabor Mate