Working With Our Emotions – Guilt
Disclaimer: The tips and thoughts in this blog are shared from my personal experience. If your emotions are affecting your ability to function in daily life, please ask for professional help – hospitals and the NHS (UK) offer therapy, counselling and other mental health services. Check with your health provider.
“There is no sense in punishing your future for the mistakes of your past.
Forgive yourself, grow from it and then let it go”
Melanie Koulouris
It may be that you feel guilty about having cancer, about being ill. I certainly did in the beginning, and I still suffer from guilt from time to time. But guilt is not an emotion I choose to hold onto, it becomes unhelpful if we use guilt to punish ourselves with. Holding onto guilt doesn’t serve me or other people. I think it’s good to have some guilt, if we’ve done something deliberately hurtful, because guilt reminds us, we have a conscience. Guilt is the way we distinguish between our kind actions and our hostile actions. Holding onto guilt and I include shame does not do us any good. Instead, guilt needs be let go of and replaced by a genuine desire to heal and rebalance – to replace anger we might feel against ourselves with self-forgiveness. If we just feel guilty for guilt’s sake, it keeps us stuck in a state of beating ourselves up.
Often during my cancer treatment, I would feel guilty about the past, and regret ‘What could have been,‘ ‘If only I’d done that or hadn’t done this.’ But the past is done now, and we will never truly live, unless we’ve made mistakes. Cancer will put everything under the spotlight, facing the possibility of dying brings everything in life into sharp focus.
It helped me to connect with my feelings of guilt and regret, acknowledge them and let them go and bring myself back to this present moment.
I had feelings of guilt about the illness itself, the stress and upset it would cause my loved ones. Our carers go through a lot of emotional turmoil too, and this is where boundaries come in. We can be honest with those looking after us, about how much they can take and how much we can take. If it all becomes too much, remember we can delegate to others – for example people sharing lifts to and from the hospital when I wasn’t able to drive. You can contact your GP and your hospital to ask for help. I was booked in with a nurse who was dedicated to holistic health – she asked me how I was managing on all levels: physically, financially, emotionally, and mentally.
Survivor’s guilt is also another emotion that can come up for people whose cancer is in remission. To be honest, I didn’t really experience survivor’s guilt. When my cousin or close friends passed away, I was more overcome with deep feelings of sorrow. I also felt more motivated to go out there and help as many people as I could with cancer, whether that be by talking to people who’d been diagnosed with cancer later than me, or by sending them supportive emails, or saying “I’m here for you if you need me.” To pass on the flame and carry their message was what mattered. I needed to be mindful of the fact that some people might have just received some bad news about cancer, and that their cancer was more advanced than mine, so on the occasions when perhaps I hadn’t been so sensitive, by oversharing my joy about my remission or tumour reduction, then I would feel guilty afterwards and wonder if I’d been tactless in anyway or hurt their feelings. I’d then check in with the person, and say “I hope I wasn’t being insensitive when I said…”
Connecting with my feelings of guilt and shame has revealed it’s often to do with thinking patterns: “I’m not enough. Whatever I do is not enough.” I used to be haunted by these thoughts for many years. To heal these thinking patterns, I needed to be with myself in the moment and firmly tell myself that I AM ENOUGH, I am doing enough NOW– even if that means sitting in stillness or having a nap or not ‘doing’ anything. In this day of modern fast paced living, I think there is an unspoken pressure to be constantly DOING rather than BEING. Remember we don’t have to justify or explain our choices to others.
Sometimes my feelings of guilt and shame have been connected to people pleasing – wanting to appear ‘busy’, ‘positive’ or ‘strong.’
Aesop’s saying, ‘Those who seek to please everybody please nobody’ is very true.
There were times during my cancer treatment when I felt embarrassed and even ashamed of what cancer was making my body do. When I’d first got my stoma, especially when it was going crazy during the adjuvant chemo, I felt revulsion and I would say more to myself than anyone else, “Cancer’s done some disgusting things to my body.” I always had a secret fear of colostomies and thought if I ever had to have one, I’d be incapable of coping. So, when I did have a colostomy, a stoma, I found it very challenging at the beginning. My cousin Andrew, said to me on the phone with his wonderful American-British accent, “You’re going to have to get used to it Abi.” Tough love. And another time when I was complaining about it, he talked about war veterans at his local veterans’ home – some who were young men – who lost their arms or legs and he told me when he got depressed about his own stoma, he would think of those young men who were in a worse situation.
The longer I lived with my stoma, my initial feelings of disgust changed to feelings of love and gratitude. I reminded myself my stoma had saved my life, and of the incredible skill my surgeon had used to create my stoma. Changing my bags, reminded me again and again, of the incredible resilience, intelligence and magnificence of our human bodies.
Now that I’ve had my stoma reversed, I will always be grateful for not only my bowels but for my entire body.
We can take a healing first step by recognising that guilt and shame usually come from thought patterns, and that we don’t need to hold onto them. Acknowledge them, talk to them, and transform them into self-love and self-acceptance right in this very moment.
