Archive for July, 2018

Cancer Patients Embrace Forgiveness Therapy and Other Self-Care Strategies

Making the Mind-Body Connection: Self-Care Strategies for Cancer Patients
by Brad Krause 

The importance of the mind-body connection is evident in the increasingly impactful role that mindfulness and spiritual belief play in helping cancer patients improve their quality of life. And a growing number of cancer patients are turning to alternative approaches that draw on the mind’s ability to moderate the body’s responses to illness.

There is a growing body of research, including research done by the International Forgiveness Institute, showing that mind-body approaches in oncological medicine aid the healing process; help patients with advanced cases of the disease cope with their condition and its devastating emotional effects; and help sufferers maintain a happier lifestyle and positive mindset. Self-care strategies and spiritual strength can also help alleviate depression, anxiety and fatigue, and even energize the patient.

Strategies:

Cancer patients have to cope with an overwhelming situation dominated by treatments that are often as unpleasant as the disease. Chemotherapy and radiation therapy cause nausea, weakness, hair loss and other side effects that keep the patient feeling sick. Fortunately, there are many powerfully-effective mind-body strategies that help the cancer patient maintain a healthy and efficacious self-care regimen.

Deep breathing 

Breathing deeply and mindfully helps establish the mind-body   connection. It’s a core component of yoga and many forms of meditation. Deep-breathing exercises relax you, lower your heart rate and blood pressure, and enable you to focus on positive thoughts. Try breathing deeply and center on how it makes you feel. If you prefer, listen to calming music during your breathing exercise. You can also combine breathing with some form of physical exercise, such as walking, biking, or yoga.

Forgiveness and self-forgiveness 

According  to the respected health website WebMD.com, if you can bring yourself to forgive, you are likely to enjoy lower blood pressure, a stronger immune system, and a drop in the stress hormones circulating in your blood. Back pain, stomach problems, and headaches may disappear. And you’ll reduce the anger, bitterness, resentment, depression, and other negative emotions that accompany the failure to forgive.

While refusing to forgive may not directly cause disease, according to WebMD, the negative impact of holding on to painful memories and past wounds can weaken the immune system and make you more susceptible to illness including cancer.

“It’s important to treat emotional wounds or disorders because they really can hinder someone’s reactions to the treatments — even someone’s willingness to pursue treatment,” says Dr. Steven Standiford, chief of surgery at Cancer Treatment Centers of America. “In fact, forgiveness therapy is now an integral part of treatment at Cancer Treatment Centers of America.”

Watch a short video about the amazing power forgiveness has had on one woman’s life and her battle with cancer. “If I hadn’t learned to forgive,” says Jayne Valseca, a cancer patient who was essentially given a death sentence, “I may not even be alive today.” Watch the video here.


          “If I hadn’t learned to forgive, I may not even be alive today.”                                                                                                                            Jane Garcia Valseca


While not a treatment method per se, the act of forgiving yourself can free you mentally and emotionally so that you may best concentrate on healing. When you get cancer, you may blame yourself for smoking, eating the wrong foods, spending too much time in the sun…the list could go on forever. You question every decision you’ve ever made and punish yourself for the actions you did, or did not do, that might have contributed to your disease. By practicing self-forgiveness, you will gain an inner peace and the freedom to look to the future instead of the past.

Meditation 

Meditation is another self-centering exercise in which quiet and inner stillness focus one’s awareness. Meditation can help cancer patients manage nausea, pain and stress, and aid the body’s ability to heal by improving sleep and mood. Mindfulness is key to self-care in cancer patients, and few things help focus one’s energy and inner resources better than meditation. There are many forms of meditation. Some people concentrate on one part of their body, while others focus on a word or phrase as they meditate. Some meditative disciplines focus on controlling pain, while others are designed to help practitioners accept and cope with the physical changes their bodies are going through.

Image projection

The mind’s ability to project images with sensory qualities is another effective means of making the mind-body connection. Mental images can affect your senses, a useful exercise for people suffering the physical discomforts of cancer. Some patients combine their spirituality with meditation by concentrating on religious images. Patients with a strong sense of spirituality often gain a strong sense of well-being, which makes it easier to cope with the disease.

It should be noted that spirituality and religion are not interchangeable terms. Some people use religion to channel and focus their spirituality, while other patients consider themselves spiritual, though not religious, at least not in the formal sense of the word. A cancer diagnosis may cause some people to become religious, or to return to a religious practice they may have previously abandoned. Research has shown that spirituality is capable of enhancing the patient’s quality of life through renewed optimism and hope for a future free of the disease.

Cancer patients sometimes experience difficulty with prescriptive medications, as these are often used as necessary pain management. Incorporating self-care practices like deep breathing and meditation can help prevent cancer patients from becoming addicted to opioids during their course of treatment. The use of alternative therapies to create the mind-body connection has been proven effective at alleviating pain without an excessive use of prescriptive methods.

Cancer ravages the body in many ways. Its effects can also oppress the mind, impeding its ability to help patients deal with the symptoms of the disease. But alternative self-care therapies and spirituality can help marshal the power of the mind to mitigate the pain and physical misery of cancer. 


About Brad Krause:
After four years in the corporate world working 15-hour days, 6 days a week, Brad Krause demonstrated the ultimate act of self-care by leaving his draining, unfulfilling job behind. He now spends full-time helping others as a self-care guru, writer and life coach (SelfCare.info). He sums up his vision by saying, “We all have the potential to be the best versions of ourselves we can possibly be, but it comes down to prioritizing our own wellness through self-care. And that’s what I’m here to help people discover!”

You can contact Brad at Brad@selfcaring.info.

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I understand that part of forgiving is to reduce anger.  Yet, I am concerned about this.  If I deliberately reduce my anger toward the person who hurt me, am I at the same time reducing my motivation to seek justice?

It is important to realize that the moral virtues should not be practiced in isolation from the other moral virtues.  Forgiveness and justice should occur side-by-side for you.  As you forgive, try to deliberately cultivate a sense of justice or the seeking of what is fair.  In this way, your forgiving and becoming less angry should not diminish your quest for justice.  In fact, without deep anger, what you seek in justice may be qualitatively different (and actually more fair) than what you seek when fuming with anger.

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Why Forgiveness Is Not Only a Psychological Construct

The entrance of the idea of forgiveness into the social sciences is quite recent. The first publication within psychology that centered specifically on people forgiving other people was published in the late 20th century (Enright, Santos, and Al-Mabuk, 1989).  That article examined children’s, adolescents’, and adults’ thoughts about what forgiving is.  In other words, the study took one slice of forgiveness, in this case people’s thoughts, and examined those thoughts from a scientific perspective.  Such an investigation, of course, does not then imply that forgiving is all about thoughts and thoughts alone just because that was the focus of the scientific investigation.

People forgiving other people is an ancient idea, first explicated thousands of years ago in the story within the Jewish tradition of Joseph forgiving his 10 half-brothers who sold him into slavery.  The portrait of forgiveness in that ancient report includes Joseph’s entire being, not just his thinking, as he shows anger, a sense at first of revenge, which slowly transforms into tenderness toward his half-brothers in the form of weeping, hugs, generosity, and an outpouring of love.  His entire being was involved in the forgiving.

Philosophers, such as Aristotle and Aquinas, have developed what is known as the virtue-ethics tradition to explain morality.  To be virtuous is, like Joseph, to produce a moral response with one’s entire being: thoughts, feelings, behaviors, motivations toward goodness, and relationships that reflect that goodness.

Psychologists, in contrast, and especially if they do not rely on this wisdom-of-the-ages, tend to compartmentalize forgiveness.  For example, they may borrow from personality psychology and conclude that there is a trait of forgiving and a state of forgiving and these are somehow different.  A trait forgiver, it is assumed, already has a personality geared to forgiving.  In other words, expertise in forgiving is not forged by practice, practice, and more practice as we all have this opportunity toward developing expertise in forgiving.

Other psychologists, when they do not take the virtue-ethics position, tend to think of forgiving as mostly emotional as the forgiver substitutes more pleasant feelings for the existing resentment toward an offending person.  Substitution of feelings, as seen in the Joseph story, is only one part, and not even the most important part of forgiveness.  Offering love in a broad sense is the most important part.

The bottom line is this: Taking only a psychological perspective on the concept of forgiving tends toward reductionism, breaking up of forgiveness into smaller and more exclusive parts than should be the case.  This tends to distort the concept of forgiveness.  If a distorted view of forgiveness is presented to clients in therapy, are we helping those clients reach their highest potential as forgivers?

Robert

Reference:

Enright, R. D., Santos, M., & Al-Mabuk, R. (1989).  The adolescent as forgiver. Journal of Adolescence, 12, 95-110.

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This may be an unusual question for you.  About 20 years ago, I was deeply hurt by someone.  Slowly over the years, I did not think about it, but just this week I suddenly remembered this painful incident from decades ago.  As I thought about it, I realize that I have no anger toward the person.  Would you label this as forgiveness on my part?

 It is difficult to say whether you have forgiven or simply moved on from the incident and the person.  As the late Lewis Smedes used to ask, “Do you now wish this person well?” If you do, then you likely are in the process of forgiving or perhaps have forgiven.  On the other hand, if you simply have no negative emotions, but are indifferent toward the person, with no concern or compassion at all toward this person, then this may be an indication of putting the past behind you without necessarily forgiving.  Do you wish the person well?

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Forgiving Those Who Gaslight Your Character and Ghost You

“It is difficult to truly defend yourself when your character is assailed.”

The theme of gaslighting has become popular in the psychological literature.  It now is well known that the word “gaslighting” comes from a 1938 play, Gas Light, in which the female character is continually falsely accused of wrongdoing, which causes her considerable emotional distress.  Gaslighting is present when there are false denials by the other or false accusations toward you by the other.  At least 4 kinds of gaslighting are described in the current literature: 

1) The other person does a nefarious act and denies it.  “I did not steal your money.  You must be mistaken.”

2) The other person has a character flaw, an ongoing pattern that is denied.  “You keep saying that I neglect the children.  Look.  I am playing with them now.  You do have a way of exaggerating.”
3) The other person accuses you of an act or a series of acts you did not commit. “You skimmed funds from our checking account.”4) The other person accuses you of a serious character flaw.  “You are so continuously angry that I can’t stand it any more.  I am out of here.”

Ghosting occurs when the other ignores you, abandons you, and shuts off all communication with you.

I have had people approach me for advice when they are the victims of the 2 G’s, both gaslighting and ghosting, a particularly difficult combination because the victims cannot defend themselves as the  other accuses and then leaves.  The victims are left alone to wonder and to doubt their own perceptions of themselves.

 

The 4th kind of gaslighting above, the assault on one’s character, is particularly difficult because there is no one concrete piece of evidence as occurs in points 1 and 3.  Either the accused person did or did not steal, for example, in point 3.  It is easier to verify a one-time behavior as having occurred or not than to defend an accusation of an ongoing character flaw.  After all, if one is accused of being overly angry, the victim probably can remember once or twice being too upset or having a bad day.  These occasional imperfections, of course, do not constitute a character flaw, but nonetheless might lead to some level of agreement with the accusation, even though it is false.
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Martha sought help because her husband, Samuel, was constantly accusing her of being insensitive to his needs.  “You are always wrapped up in your own issues.  I try and try to make time for you and yet, when I do, you push me away,” he would say.  Martha was astonished by this because she truly tried to focus on him and his needs when he came home at night.  He used this accusation as an excuse to leave the home and stayed away for 8 months with no text, email, or phone contact.  Martha was left to wonder with no way of working this out with him.  “Was I insensitive?” she wondered.  “Might I have tried harder?”  Her self-doubt led to low self-esteem.  She started to lose weight and have depressive symptoms.

Josh approached me because his partner Abby was constantly accusing him of being overly angry.  She said that she cannot take all of the anger any more and so she is leaving, which she did. As in the above case, Abby shut off all communication with Josh.  Before she left, he asked her for instances in which he had been too angry to the point of fault.  She said this before leaving, “Do you remember two years ago when we were having an argument and you put your fist down on the car’s hood? That scared me and I just can’t take that sort of thing any more.” When Josh was about to rebut the accusation, Abby was gone.  He was left to think this through by himself.
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As Josh realized that his resentment was getting too high, he asked me for advice on forgiving Abby.

The preliminaries when forgiving involve:
1) seeing that as you forgive, you are not excusing;
2) understanding that you may never reconcile with someone who accuses and distorts deeply and consistently;
3) further understanding that you can and should seek fairness.  This is especially important if the abuse is ongoing or even deepens. 

A beginning part of forgiveness is to concretely explore the other person’s injustice.  What, exactly, is the injustice?  When did it occur, how frequently did it occur, and how serious is it?  As we explored Abby’s accusations, Josh realized the following:

  • Abby’s final accusation was of an incident that occurred 2 years ago, not at all recently.
  • His “putting his fist down on the car’s hood” was not a pounding of the fist at all, but a gesture of emphasis over yet another accusation she was making at the time.
  • Abby could not come up with even one anger-incident in the past two years other than the false accusation about the fist and the hood.

When Josh more clearly saw all of this, he realized how seriously unjust were Abby’s accusations.

Josh then began to explore more deeply Abby’s own life and the challenges she faced.  For example, when growing up, her mother faced serious healthissues and so the mother had little time for Abby, who felt worthless.  Next, Josh examined Abby’s earlier relationship which ended in divorce.  Abby back then was accusing her first husband in a way that Josh now was experiencing.

This exploration set Josh free from his own self-doubts, from his own subtle self-accusations of “if only I had done more.”  He could see Abby’s pained life which opened him to forgiving her, not because of what she did, but in spite of this.  The process of forgiving uncovered Abby’s gaslighting.  The process of forgiving uncovered Abby’s ghosting which was not Josh’s fault.  He was able to see her confusions, her pain.  Thus, he forgave her from his heart and, of course, he could not discuss this forgiveness with her because she had abandoned him.  Yet, the gaslighting and ghosting did not destroy his integrity and his psychological health.  Forgiving helped him to identify the problems and to find a healthy solution to the effects of those problems, the primary effect of which was unhealthy anger and a developing low self-esteem.

Martha had a similar outcome.  As she freely decided to forgive and as she looked more closely into Samuel’s life, she discovered, through talking with some of his colleagues and friends, that his accusations and abandonment were hiding a serious drug habit which started a year before leaving.  Her examination of his unjust behavior not only uncovered that he was gaslighting and ghosting but also that he was living a lie and was using the gaslighting and ghosting as a coverup.  As his drug habit continued, he asked Martha to be his partner again, which she refused given his lack of insight into his own behaviors.  Seeing his pain helped her to forgive.  Forgiving, which took many months, set Martha free from anxiety and self-recrimination.  Not everyone would be ready to forgive in this situation, but it was Martha’s choice to do this.

In both cases, reconciliation did not occur.  A person can forgive without seeking to reconcile if such reuniting could be very harmful to the victimized person.

If you are the victim of the double injustices of gaslighting and ghosting, consider the process of forgiveness if you choose to do so. It may help you see more clearly that, in fact, you have been treated unjustly.  It may help you to label the other’s behavior as unjust, to see the pain in the other that has led to the 2 G’s of gaslighting and ghosting, and allow you to escape the harmful effects of these dangerous behaviors.

Posted in Psychology Today May 08, 2018


 

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