Cancer – Embracing Our Emotions

Many of you may feel like being in the midst of this pandemic has you stuck between a rock and a hard place. What’s worse — delaying cancer testing/treatment or risking Coronavirus exposure? Having to choose between two evils, you must try to anticipate and minimize your risk. 

Medically speaking, this is unknown territory, so I strongly recommend that all of you make decisions about your personalized cancer care with your medical oncologist. Here is a resource that may help to facilitate your communications. 

There is a reason we have a spectrum of emotions that can range from fear, sadness, anger, and sorrow to happiness and joy. There is no need to put up a facade and deny any of these feelings. Doing so may make things worse and make us feel fragmented. Allowing all these feelings to coexist and being in touch with them will facilitate integration, healing and inner peace. I had previously outlined a few examples of mature coping styles, but only you know what will soothe you most. If emotions are causing you or your loved ones debilitating pain or dysfunction, please reach out for help! 

I think the trick is not trying to keep the joys and the tragedies apart but you kinda gotta let them cozy up to one another, you know, let ’em coexist. And I think if you can do that, if you can manage to forge ahead with all that joy and heartache mixed up together inside of ya — never knowing which one is going to get the upper hand — well life does have a way of shaking out to be more beautiful than tragic.

Dr. Nathan Katowski (by Gerald McRaney) in This Is Us.

When you are aware of all your feelings, you can choose how to approach and act on them.  Embracing fear without letting it paralyze you, but allowing its energy to cautiously propel you forward can help you to express the best version of who you can be so you can love and honor yourself and the world. The hope is that a new (and better) normal will be born out of the Coronavirus tragedy — at global, national, local, and personal levels! 

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