Caring for your mental self

Christer Sundqvist

The mental health is a resource that helps with everyday life, temporary anxiety, sudden changes and losses. Care for the mental health when you have cancer is very important. Even your mental state can be a great resistance to recovery. Therefore, it is important to seek professional help. Going into different forms of psycho or conversation therapies requires courage.

 

Few people know that the mental part of you influences your health almost as much as the biological and physical you. It is of outmost importance that you pay the mental part a lot of attention, and the ways are many. We will show just some of them. However, the backbone of everything is that you are honest to yourself and show yourself the respect you always have deserved.

 

Having cancer is tough, but don’t let this depress you, because depression  and negative thinking is counteractive to your efforts to heal. Don’t worry – be happy, as much as you ever can. Read jokes and laugh loudly, the louder the better, because it is VERY GOOD FOR YOU. Soon you will notice it means a better quality of life for you.

 

Mental therapies can be strenuous and often you enter a chaos where all learned behavioral patterns are scrutinized and questioned. It is good to know this from the beginning. That way the process is not as intimidating. It is easier to enter a tunnel if you know there is an opening at the other side. What scares me and what do I do about it? Have I adjusted and want to please everyone? Do I consider the needs of others before I look to myself to see what I need? Do I cower before arguments to avoid conflict? Do I feel like an outsider? Do I have to be “good” to be allowed to join in?

 

Then it’s perhaps time to sharpen your teeth! Hold your own. Perhaps a lot of pent up anger lives inside you?

 

In therapy you gain greater knowledge of and understanding for yourself, and a greater sphere of consciousness. It helps you to bear pain and fear in a new way. You gain courage to look your monster in the eye, the one who has haunted your dreams for years. (Carl-Gustav Jung called the monster the Shadow.)

 

Once you realise the monster guards a great treasure, it is even easier to begin the journey. The monster has after all the answer to why I feel badly.

 

Good luck!

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