Cancer

As you may know I have a strong interest in using EFT and NLP working with cancer patients to help them cope with the emotional stresses and strains of cancer so they can be calm, resourceful and determined as they pursue their treatment.

To make articles and information about this work easier to find I have created a new website www.cancerwellbeing.co.uk where you will be able to find cancer related articles, resources and courses.

Cancer Wellbeing is not a new organisation or business, rather a space that I can devote to that area of my work. Practical Wellbeing will continue in it’s present form.

Feel free to have a look at the new website and let me know what you think. If you are in the difficult position of having cancer yourself, or know somebody who is, please direct them to the Cancer Wellbeing site.

Starting later this month I am running the first of the four session Cancer Wellbeing courses in Newcastle showing cancer patients how to use EFT and NLP techniques to ease the emotional burden of cancer.

The course is free of charge to cancer patients.

The course is divided into four parts.

Part 1
Learning the basics of EFT.
How to use EFT to start to feel better and take control of your emotional responses to cancer.

Part 2
Getting over difficult appointments and treatments.
How to turn the trauma of a diagnosis or difficult appointment into just a memory.

Part 3
How to settle anxiety and fear whenever you need to

Part 4
Preparing for appointments and treatment so that you can be at your best.
How to use these approaches for yourself in the future

If you know anyone in this predicament in the Newcastle area please pass this information on to them.

There are only eight places available find out more on www.cancerwellbeing.co.uk

Image by johnnyalive via Flickr

A client of mine is undergoing chemotherapy. Every three weeks she gets injections of three drugs into a drip line inserted into the wrist.

The drugs have to go into the drip line because there is quite a volume of medication and the syringes holding them are big, about six inches long and an inch across, arriving in a plastic tray with the needles, tubes and other bits and pieces.

The day before her second round of chemo  she told me that just the thought of those injections was making her feel very nauseous.

She said: “The syringe is this *$!*%$# long!“. Moving her hands about two feet apart, in the style of a fisherman telling you about the one that got away.

I asked her if the syringe was that big in her mind’s eye. She told me it was. I suggested to her that she shrink that image of the syringe down to it’s actual size. She did this easily. Commenting that the syringe now fitted in the tray.

Then she told me that her nausea linked to the treatment had completely disappeared!

This is an excellent demonstration of a fundamental principal of NLP: How you represent the outside world in your inner world will powerfully affect your subjective experience.

Do some things make you unnecessarily anxious and afraid? How are they depicted in your imagination? Are they too big? Closer than they should be? More vivid in some way? Do they sound louder than they are in real life?  These qualities of our experience, known as submodalities in NLP, can be understood and changed to change the quality of our lives.

In my clients case, changing her representation of that syringe changed the way she felt about it.  It’s a simple enough change to make if you know it’s possible. The best way to learn how to make changes like that is to attend an NLP Practitioner training. Click on the link to learn more about IntegrityNLP NLP Practitioner trainings.

EFT can be used to greatly relieve the emotional aspects of cancer from diagnosis through treatment and living beyond cancer. At ChangeCamp 2009 on June 27th I’ll be giving an hour long presentation where I will describe how EFT can be used to:

• Recover from difficult appointments and medical procedures so that you don’t lie awake at night reliving unpleasant news or experiences.
• Prepare for upcoming appointments so that you can be calm, collected and resourceful rather than a bag of nerves.
• Neutralising unhelpful beliefs about cancer and it’s treatment. Such as the often held belief that ‘cancer is a death sentence’
• Resolve problems about different aspects of medical treatments such as needle phobias, scanner claustrophobia and anxieties about difficult medical procedures.
• Benefit the carers and partners of cancer patients, helping manage their stress and anxiety and giving them some simple ways to help the patient through their cancer experience.

This session is appropriate for cancer sufferers, carers and for medical staff and other professionals who would like to ease the emotional burden of cancer.

To find out more visit www.changecamp.co.uk

Image courtesy of Wolfsoul

Image via Wikipedia

As you may know I’ve been running The Great North Run for a few years now. I use the word running to indicate a kind of wheezing shamble that gets me from one end of the course to another.

This year I decided to add to my repertoire of shambling by running the Edinburgh Marathon (26+) miles the week after my 50th birthday. Let no-one say I don’t know how to celebrate in style!

I’ve decided that I’ll get sponsorship and run for Cancer Research UK. Since I do work with cancer patients and support groups and some of my loved ones past and present have had to deal with cancer it seems like the right choice.

You will see widget on the right hand side of my webpage inviting you to donate. It’s simple, secure, and a lot easier than running 26 miles. Please give generously: it’s going to a good cause and I could use the extra motivation.

Thank you.

All behaviour has a positive intention is one of the presuppositions or operating beliefs of NLP. At first blush this sounds a little unlikely. A cursory glance in the newspapers will show a huge range of cruel, stupid and just plain nasty behaviour.

That’s the point while the behaviour may be all those things the intention behind them was positive in some way.

Just think back for a moment, there has probably been a time when you have done something flat out stupid, if you look behind what you did to what you wanted to achieve I imagine you will be able to find something positive in the intention, even if the implementation left a little to be desired.

Of course this presupposition is impossible to prove but it’s a very useful point of view to adopt when dealing with people.

I heard a very nice version of this principle at work whilst listening to a podcast of a studio discussion between two cancer patients; Leroy Sievers, a journalist with terminal cancer, and Elizabeth Edwards amongst other things a US senator’s wife also suffering from cancer.

An audience member asked a question about ’saying the wrong thing’ to cancer patients. He felt he had put his foot in it some years before with a friend who was dying from brain cancer and he still felt guilty about it after all this time.

“How do you handle the situation when a healthy person says something insensitive?”

Elizabeth Edwards answered .

‘I had a 16 year old son who died in 1996 and I had a lot of people say some incredible things to me. And I got some wonderful advice from someone that had lost a brother, and he said:

“People will say the wrong thing but know that they intended to say the right thing“. ‘

‘And I’ve always kept that in mind however stupid the things other people say and believe me that was not the stupidest thing I’ve heard by some considerable distance. I always know that they meant to say the right thing and I think that all of us keep that in mind ‘

‘And there are times when I don’t want to hear it, when I’m on the campaign trail I’ve had people come up to me and want to give me a hug and say “My wife died of the same thing that you died of [sic]” and I don’t know what to say to that’

The presenter then offered this reframe: ‘It’s just a premature condolence’. Which provoked a laugh from her saying “That makes me feel so much better”.

There’s an interesting summary of an article published in the journal Cancer on the Cancer Research UK website: Emotional wellbeing found to have little influence on cancer survival. In a study of more than a thousand patients with head and neck cancers they found that ‘emotional wellbeing’ did not seem to extend the patients life expectancy.

Those weren’t the results most people would have expected (except perhaps hardened sceptics*). As someone who is interested in working with cancer patients and their carers to reduce the level of emotional stress they experience as a result of the illness I find this study very interesting.

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As some of you may know I’ve been interested in using EFT and other techniques to help the relieve the stress and anxiety of cancer. I think the moment the doctor says “I’m sorry you have cancer” then most people get a huge dose of anxiety and stress to go with disease itself.

I have seen a few individual clients with cancer and done voluntary work with the Northumberland Cancer Support Group. Up to now I’ve always been a bit low key in how I promote this aspect of my work, but I think it’s time to be a bit more explicit about what can be done to help people in this predicament.

From what I’ve seen there is a huge amount of emotional suffering that goes on after the diagnosis. I think EFT, NLP and other techniques can reduce a huge amount of the suffering that goes with the illness. I want to offer these skills to cancer patients and their carers.

If you want to know more about using EFT in cancer care you can find out more on the Cancer Stress Relief page on this site. If you know someone who might benefit from this information please pass it on.