Grief of self

I didn’t have many breakthrough moments in therapy, but learning this concept was a massive step in understanding my emotions after cancer.

My psychologist explained that a lot of my feelings were linked to grief.

I was confused. Nobody I knew had died?? Was I grieving the people who didn’t survive Ewing’s sarcoma? Was this part of survivor’s guilt?

Then she told me who I was grieving; my pre-cancer self. And that made a lot of sense.

I was grieving ‘pre-cancer me’. I missed her. I missed her innocence and freedom.

I hadn’t realised this before. I’d never seen anything about grieving ‘the old you’, but it made so much sense.

All the feelings that come with grief; hopelessness, feeling lost, feeling broken, the feeling that you’d give anything to have them back… I was feeling all of these things for pre-cancer me.

This allowed me to treat myself like someone who is grieving, I started treating myself with compassion and understanding rather than judgement and hatred – this really changed a lot for me.

I truly believe that this is a key concept to understand in the movement of improving our treatment of people in cancer remission as a worldwide community. When we understand the perspective, we understand the actions that ‘don’t make sense’ – everyone grieves in their own way.