When being diagnosed with cancer, it is easy to feel anger or self-pity, but I have never allowed myself to dwell on these negatives.
01:36 min
CLEAR ALL
Coping with cancer is hard. It is an emotional ordeal as well as a physical one, with known and somewhat predictable psychological responses. And yet, patients often feel isolated and alone when dealing with the stress, anxiety, depression, and existential crises so typical with a cancer diagnosis.
This compassionate book presents dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), a proven psychological intervention that Marsha M. Linehan developed specifically for the impossible situations of life--and which she and Elizabeth Cohn Stuntz now apply to the unique challenges of cancer for the first time.
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Diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2008, Susan Gubar underwent radical debulking surgery, an attempt to excise the cancer by removing part or all of many organs in the lower abdomen.
Elaborating upon her “Living with Cancer” column in the New York Times, Susan Gubar helps patients, caregivers, and the specialists who seek to serve them. In a book both enlightening and practical, she describes how the activities of reading and writing can right some of cancer’s wrongs.
I often must remind myself that anger needs to be understood as the flip side of the roiling fear that cancer instills in patients and also in caregivers.
When I got sick, I warned my friends: Don’t try to make me stop thinking about death.
Coping with anger during cancer can be difficult. And although anger is commonly regarded as a negative emotion, it can have advantages for cancer patients.
Many people living with cancer experience anger. Often, the feeling arises when receiving a cancer diagnosis. But it can develop any time throughout treatment and survivorship.
Intense, persistent, and suppressed anger may have a connection to cancer.
When Jaouad finally walked out of the cancer ward—after countless rounds of chemo, a clinical trial, and a bone marrow transplant—she was, according to the doctors, cured. But as she would soon learn, a cure is not where the work of healing ends; it’s where it begins.
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