This is the first in a series of excerpts drawn from client conversations.

Amy is a Survivor

Meet Amy — a mother, wife, daughter, sister, teacher, and friend. Amy is also a cancer survivor. We began our work together when Amy received a breast cancer diagnosis soon after her 39th birthday. With three children under the age of 4, she was understandably overwhelmed and fearful. Amy’s earliest goals centered on her mindset. She expressed a strong desire to begin treatment from a grounded place of strength and courage  —  an attitude that she had witnessed and admired in other cancer survivors.

*I should note that Amy and I are cousins which is clearly a special circumstance. Specifically, it sped things up a bit. Amy trusted the process because she trusted me, which allowed our work to begin within a week of her diagnosis. Most people are in a state of shock at the time of diagnosis without the mental/emotional bandwidth to begin complementary modalities.*

Dee: Our first session together was pretty close to the time of your diagnosis. If you don’t mind, say a little bit about what was happening with you in those days immediately following your diagnosis. And what prompted you to say yes to my offer of us working together? 

Amy: To say that I was scared and feeling overwhelmed is an understatement. I was obsessed with fear and couldn’t think of anything else besides “Cancer, I have cancer, it could kill me, what am I going to do?” I felt helpless and had no idea what I could do to try and for the lack of a better word save myself. When you offered hypnosis and explained to me how you felt it could help, you explaining to me that hypnosis is a door into our unconscious mind, and to be in contact with my unconscious mind in terms of health could be powerful because the unconscious mind is in control of all our health, I felt like I could gain some control. I felt it was an empowering way for me to participate in my killing of the tumor, I hoped that you could guide me to help direct my bodily system to do whatever it could to help the medicine work, to welcome the medicine in, to direct it to where it needed to go, to help defend and protect other parts of my body from the many debilitating side effects that I may experience. 

I also knew I needed something to help get strength in my mindset. At the time I felt like I always heard of cancer patients being strong and positive and I felt weak and negative. I thought that there was a timeframe that I could get away with this dismal outlook and at some point people, myself included, would be sick of it, but I kept thinking, “I’m going to have to fake it, I’m never going to actually feel hopeful, I’m so scared, for me, but mostly for my kids, how will I ever get past this?” And I didn’t know what to expect with what hypnosis could do for that, but I knew I needed to try something because I couldn’t live like that and fight. That was the other thought, that I needed to be positive not only because it is a more enjoyable way to be for me and for others, but that I felt it would help my treatment if I believed in it and in myself, and I had a fear that if I kept feeling the way I did that I would hurt my treatment, that the tumor wouldn’t shrink. I was terrified that my negative, fearful mindset would have the power to help the cancer, not the cure, and I was stressed out about my ability to switch it on my own, and was thankfully right in that hypnosis after that first session took that away. 

The night after our first session, I was on a call with a therapist. I was sharing my diagnosis and as I was telling him the scary stuff, that the tumor was aggressive, it was grade 3, triple negative, and then I switched to tell him about our first session and I instantly realized that I wasn’t crying, and that I felt strong. I literally was shocked and told him that, “I’m not sure, but I think that it helped a lot because this is the first time that I actually feel fine talking about all of this, maybe it was the hypnosis session that has helped me?” And it turned out that he too has been a patient of hypnosis for the past 40 years or something, and he told me that he thought that it was the hypnosis and advised me to continue doing it because it would help so much.

(to be continued)