Status quo health wise. A long thought about recovering as a "cancer personality"
When I was first diagnosed, I heard snippets about "the cancer personality." I thought to myself, "Great, I'm a 2 on the Enneagram which has taught me that much of what I've done for others has actually been for myself. And I'm an SJ on the Myers Briggs which has taught me that I can be a rigid know-it-all." I am over dramatizing, these are great tools and this doesn't even begin to describe what these tools really say.
Essentially, in my words, "the cancer personality" is generally understood as one in which a person, surpasses anger and doesn't take care of their own emotional needs. It's the person that seeks to please others as a compulsion, not a choice. It can be a person prone to depression. Hmmmmm.
When I first went to see Dr. Kirsten West, ND and President of FABNO, the Fellowship on the Oncology Association of Naturopathic Physicians, in Boulder CO, she gave me a list of to-do's. She is just one of the many many doctors of all different kinds I have seen. One that stuck out in my mind is to get a hug from someone every day, rather than give that hug. It was curious to me. I thought hugs were a mutual thing. But I think what she was saying was to get my own emotional needs out of the drawer and allow people to help meet them. But literal hugs are good too; I've always remembered studying the research of Virginia Satir which asserts, “We need 4 hugs a day for survival. We need 8 hugs a day for maintenance. We need 12 hugs a day for growth.”
When we moved to CO about 6 years ago, I had about a year and a half of going back and forth between CA and CO to work and see the kids and grandkids as much as we could. The later part of that phase was during Covid so it was a weird time for everyone; I worked from home during that Covid and hated it. Concurrently, I had an increasing anxiety about being with my adult married children and their wives. I know much of the fear comes from watching my mom have terrible relationships with her son's wife, especially, and how that had so negatively impacted our big family. It wasn't just our sons' wives, though. I was just scared to be with any of them. They were all young marrieds, figuring out how to start their own families. I was trying to wrap my mind around how to have a healthy family all together when they were building new families of their own. I once said to my spiritual director that I step in dog poop all the time. She totally cracked me up when she said, "And you didn't even know there was a dog!" If I asked others advice, they pretty much told me to keep my mouth shut. But how do you have real relationships then?
I retired the end of 2020 and finally truly became a Coloradan.
Our oldest son, his wife and then 3 kids lived there already. We bought a house 25 minutes north of there's. We have a typical California transplant situation with equity that allowed us to buy a dream home with a view on 5 rugged acres. Our middle son and his wife had moved into the house after having lived in Georgia, and had been living in the house with my hubby and I as I popped in and out. They bought a home about 50 minutes north of us soon after I fully retired. Our youngest and his wife lived in southern San Diego at the time but have since relocated to Colorado too. What an amazing blessing to be all within 90 minutes of each other.
After retirement, I was feeling really really lost. I absolutely loved my career and the people in my life in So Cal. I would love to go back to So Cal, if only to drive on "The 5 freeway" and feel the familiar air on my skin. I would feel like myself again.
(Fun pause - AI helped me beat the test (orthostatic) that decides if they confine me to an alarmed bed! I just squeezed my tuchus like crazy once they had me stand up, hoping Andy wasn't videotaping me from behind). I drank lots of water beforehand. It worked! Hehe. If I was dizzy or stumbling or alone it would be different; but, I'm not and I'm so excited! Being in a bed you can't leave without a nurse or medical assistant, both of whom can be very busy, it awful.
Back to how I've been working on my "cancer personality."
I felt completely lost. They high ceilings in my house actually effected me like a reverse claustrophobia. I felt unanchored and wasn't sure if I was depressed. Here I was, in the unique and privileged situation of being retired at 56, financially in a good place, in our dream home, with most of our kids and grandkids close by and the others able to meet up through travel, and I was struggling.
I picked up a book by a wonderful woman who would become my spiritual director called Living Faithfully by Alice Fryling. I found her through the Enneagram world; my daughter in law had introduced me to this ancient and interesting personality tool I mentioned above. Alice is a professional spiritual director. I don't explain it well but spiritual direction is a relationship much like a counselor, but its focus is to be with a person as they deepen their relationship with God, helping the person see where the Holy Spirit might be speaking to them. As I read the book, I resinated so with her and felt I needed a mentor who was older and wiser than I and who had gone through these issues. I needed some advice beyond, "Just keep your mouth shut when it comes to adult children."
I read the book jacket to find she lives in my town; she had relocated to be closer to family. Uncharacteristically, I emailed her. She answered and, although she was moving toward retirement, she decided she had the energy and time to meet with me, by phone because of risks of Covid to her special needs grandchild. Anyhow, she helped me tremendously. Specifically she taught me how to use Scripture powerfully to battle my own mind. She also taught me to rest more in the Liminal Spaces of life. I have always been driven by achievement and planning. I was in a new time of life in which both of those seemed impossible because of my illness and the transition of our family from 5 to 2, really. But I still wanted desperately be comfortable with our family of 11 by that time.
I also reached out for a therapist somewhere back during Covid. I think I went through Psychology Today and Yelp, looking for a Christian woman older than me who I thought might be able to relate to all of this. I found a wonderful therapist who met with me via Zoom, of course. She helped me greatly in the traditional course of therapy. She also gave me a great gift in suggesting I go to an Al-anon meeting she had attended herself for a long while. It met via Zoom at the time. Since then, she has moved and continues on with the online meeting but I was able to transition to the in-person meeting once Covid had resolved. I've worked the 12 steps before, for co-dependency and I attended Overeaters Anonymous when the boys were small, but boy has this been the kicker for me.
All I can say is that working this program has helped me get comfortable in my skin, learn to stay in my own lane and mind my own business (trusting that God is working in their lives as he sees fit, and learn better what people mean by "keep your mouth shut." It doesn't mean have no voice or opinion. It does mean that we can learn healthier and humbler thoughts about ourselves and our thoughts, being careful about giving advice or thoughts when they are better left unsaid. It has made such a difference. I guess I have stayed and worked the program long enough to "experience the miracle" of serenity. I've thanked God many times the last 12 days that I feel such peace with each of our 6 kids. I'm not exactly sure if I'm perfectly on track to think of them all as "mine." After all, the daughters-in-love all have parents; but, I think of them as my children as I do my sons.
So, I've also come to be much better at taking care of myself, emotionally, even when that means someone isn't happy with me. I've left issues alone that I would have had to directly deal with in the past or I would have obsessively fretted about it, especially when it comes to my children. And, lo and behold, I don't have to fix everything. I've had help seeing where fear was driving me and things that worked in my life before were no longer working for me. And I have the courage to change the things I can.
I've thanked God over and over for his help in all of this. Night night.
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