The following is an excerpt from my book Surviving the Storm: Finding Your Way Through the Wreckage of Cancer

“People with histories of cancer are considered to be ask risk for PTSD. The physical and mental shock of having a life threatening disease, of receiving treatment for cancer, and living with repeated threats to one’s body and life are traumatic experiences for many cancer patients.”  National Cancer Institute (NCI)  12/1213

“Each evaluation, breast exam, MRI etc brings me back to the terror of reliving the initial horror.”  Barbara, survivor

Facing life threatening illness brings a complex mix of fear, sorrow, anger and confusion.  The capacity to deal with the illness and all that it involves takes a massive amount of energy and courage. Yet even when you move beyond the illness, sensations, thoughts and feelings still linger and emerge at times when you are vulnerable or tired or when something triggers the invisible pieces of sharp glass or twisted metal  still hiding beneath the surface of your skin, embedded in the soft tissue of your soul.. This is what can happen when you have endured trauma, sometimes months and  even years after the original incident. Trauma denied only festers and grows within you like a different cancer. It becomes a cancer of your inner world, a world where you struggle to breathe, where you feel that you can’t move, you’re frozen in time. In the hidden depths of  your secret world is a place that affects everything you do,  everything you feel, and all that you are. Trauma can shatter your illusions of safety and control.  When we can identify and then acknowledge that our trauma is congruent with our experience, we can move forward into a place of compassionate awareness. In naming the wound, we find healing.

The struggle to include the experience of trauma into your everyday life can be fraught with difficulties. What has happened to you is a part of you.  It is your history, it tells about you.  You are a person whose life story has a chapter titled cancer. And yet you don’t want this chapter to be all that your memoir is about, you want to turn the page. You want to write the next chapter…