This
week our discussion explored our guilt and the sense of responsibility we feel
for the worry and pain our loved ones experience as a result of our diagnosis
with primary, or secondary, breast cancer.
Guilt
can be one of the strongest emotions we experience - we feel guilty for
bringing this disease into the lives of our families and its impact on our
husbands, our partners, our parents, our colleagues, our employers. We feel
guilty for exposing our families and friends to worry, fear and uncertainty. Those
of us who are mothers are haunted by our sense of having allowed an unspeakable
horror into our children’s lives; those of us who want to be mothers feel
guilty that we may be unable to give our partners a family.
Some
of us described feeling as though we had failed our loved ones in some way.
Rationally, we know we are not to ‘blame’ but we can’t help but wonder what it
was we did, or did not do, that might have caused us to develop breast cancer.
We find ourselves questioning our life-style choices, our experiences and
asking whether they could have contributed to our diagnoses. The questions that
follow us are: why me? why not me? where did I go wrong? did I bring this on
myself? Is this a punishment? We find ourselves taking on responsibility for developing
primary breast cancer, for facing side-effects and complications, and if our
cancer returns, for developing secondary breast cancer.
Naz
explained that we are not as well-equipped to cope with guilt as other
emotions. This is because guilt carries with it a strong emotional and
cognitive component that justifies this emotion. Usually, our cognitive brain
systems regulate or down play emotions that run high, but with guilt, our
cognitive systems often serve to re-affirm our guilty feelings. This is one of
the main reasons that feelings of guilt can last for a long time - for years
post trauma.
Unwittingly,
the expectations and reactions of others can re-affirm our guilty feelings. We
are advised to - ‘stay strong’, ‘be positive’, ‘your family needs you’, ‘you
need to keep going because of them.’ But often we don’t feel positive or strong
and these 'sympathetic' comments increase our guilty feelings, we feel we
shouldn’t complain, we are supposed to feel ‘lucky’ - because we have a ‘good
cancer’, because we didn’t need chemotherapy, or radiotherapy, or haven’t had a
mastectomy.
The
media, we decided, plays a role in exaggerating these unrealistic expectations:
are you strong enough? Brave enough? Tough enough? to ‘battle cancer.’ Women
with secondary breast cancer described their emotional anguish as a result of
the unspoken, offensive subtext that accompanies these messages - that they
were somehow not strong enough or brave enough to stop their cancer coming
back. The reality is that our power in influencing cancer outcomes and
recurrence is very limited. So we feel doomed to failure. Yet we suffer in
silence, unable to talk openly about the realities of secondary breast cancer.
Those
of who have finished active treatment described how we want to meet the high
expectations that we and others hold of ourselves. But we are exhausted, thrown
into an ocean of uncertainty, trying to find a safe harbour to shelter from the
storm of cancer which can be a long and turbulent. We want others to
understand, to empathise, but we find ourselves mute and numb, unable to
communicate how we feel and what we are going through. Some of us described
feeling ‘survivors’ guilt’ when we have lost friends as a result of breast
cancer.
So can
guilt ever be made to disappear?
We can
try to prioritise our own needs. We can share our vulnerability so that others
see our interior experience as well as the tough image that we project
outwardly. We can remind ourselves that we have very little control in the
development of this disease. We can forgive ourselves.
#ResilienceDiscussion
