If counselling or therapy is not something you have had any experience of, you may wonder what it could offer you when you have cancer. Emotional relief and healing can come from sharing your deeper self with someone you can trust. Sometimes shutting down emotionally is important as a survival tool, but if you stay shut down, over time you become cut off from yourself and others.

There are often specialist counsellors working with cancer agencies who are able to provide free or subsidised sessions where you can talk about the things that you don’t feel friends and family can help you with. Also your GP will be able to refer you to someone. Talking to an empathic professional can really ease the burden of isolation that comes with keeping your deepest feelings locked inside.

The latest research shows that anxiety and depression are significantly higher in those with cancer, as is post-traumatic stress disorder, and they often go undiagnosed as clinicians are focused on treating the cancer and do not screen for mental wellbeing.

This research shows that if these problems are attended to, cancer patients are more able to comply with and complete treatment and so live longer, with a better quality of life. Read more about this research here.

Groups

I’ve said a great deal in The Feeling of Cancer about my own experiences around finding the right group for you. Support groups and therapy groups can be both powerful and confronting and it takes good leadership to manage a group of people who are sharing their most vulnerable selves with each other. Not everyone wants this and it may well be that a peer group of people in a similar position to you feels right for you, people who keep in touch online or meet for coffee and check in on each other, people who know what you might be going through.  Or you may, like me, feel the need to do something in a group, to learn new ways of managing and to hear from others how they are coping. Much depends on your situation and your personality. Again these are often run by cancer agencies.