Dealing with a diagnosis of a disease or cancer can be filled with a wide range of emotions. Denial, fear, guilt, sadness, grief, anger, confusion are some common emotions felt throughout a health diagnosis.
I have worked with hundreds of clients from the very young to the very old that have dealt with cancer and chronic diseases. I have seen people struggle and find their diagnosis challenging and defeating. I have also been witness to watching people survive, thrive, heal, and live healthy, happy lives.
I have composed 4 characteristics of people that have thrived after a cancer or chronic disease diagnosis:
- Empowerment:
- Our Western Medicine model for cancer and chronic disease can be unempowering to say the least. Doctors or other healthcare providers can make us feel like victims to our own bodies. Like our bodies have set out to fail us. Most people that have overcome grave diagnoses radiate with empowerment.
- These people are eager to learn and and become their best health advocate.
- They don’t believe in just one person’s truth because they know that ‘truth’ is a loose term that is based around others experiences.
- They find their own truth and believe they know what’s best for their body.
- They use other providers, healers, supporters and educators as their guides.
- Hope:
- These people have hope. If there’s a silver lining, the empowered healers will find it.
- They believe in the power of miracles and believe there is a higher truth to their journey which they are ready to take.
- These people trust their journey, through the ups and downs, and they believe that they are being guided to do what is right for them.
- Positive Attitude:
- These warriors believe in the saying, “where my mind goes, my energy flows”. Often times, my cancer patients will omit telling their negative friends or family that they have cancer, or they will drop those people from their life completely while healing.
- These survivors know that they need a tribe surrounding them that believes in what they are doing.
- They know there’s no time for anyone that cannot “hold space” for them as they are on their health journey.
- Most of these people start their day with gratitude – a 20-30 min. practice of verbally or mentally making a checklist of everything they are grateful for (sun, flowers, organs, senses, shelter, access to clean water, and more).
- These people usually end their day with the another round of gratitude.
- Meaningful Action:
- These healers realize that in order to thrive, they have to work towards improvement in all aspects of their life – mind, body & soul.
- The people that heal and respond the best to therapies are the people that are making their thoughts conscious, and working on all 3 aspects of their life. I’ve never seen someone radically heal that hasn’t worked on all 3 areas simultaneously.
There are so many ways to start healing on this journey. Yoga, meditation, nutrition, sleep, stress reduction, forgiveness, and other modalities are also great ways to help heal our systems. Surrounding ourselves with people that lift us up, will keep us positive while we take this adventure deep inside of ourselves.
Keep going, keep searching, keep healing.
With love,
Stephanie Grutz, ARNP, FNP-C