Many of us are daily diagnosed with serious illness.
Following the bad news are often feelings of shock, denial and disbelief. For
many of us, depression ensues. “The emotional and psychological tsunami that
strikes just moments after can often make you feel worse than the disease
itself,” writes Sarah Mahoney, American health writer.
How we greet bad news, at any level, not just medical, can impact the course of
healing. "Getting a handle on your emotional state at diagnosis will ultimately
help you evaluate and choose the most appropriate course of treatment ," says
psychologist Nancy E. Adler.
Developing a psychological protection program and
being able to take control of our emotions may bring additional benefits
throughout the entire process of treatment and healing.
One great, often unseen, danger in being diagnosed with a serious disease is the
potential loss of vision of who we are.
There can be a tendency to over-identify with the disease, obscuring the nature of identity. All of a sudden, we can become “a diabetic, a heart patient, or a breast cancer victim” and all experiences become interpreted vis-à-vis this new identity.
Part of the process of healing can be to gain a more full perspective of who I am as a human being and to ask ourselves questions in this regard.
Is there a profound and lasting identity beyond my ephemeral physical states? What is it that defines me? Coming to grips with the fact that I am not my health problem, nor am I my profession or my car can be a big step along the way for those of us who have learned to define themselves in terms of things that they possess.
And the mental frame in
which we view ourselves, that’s to say our state of consciousness, as science
shows, can alter health and well being.
