It is so easy to take on other people’s bad news and transfer others’ suffering to your own life. Someone else’s cancer spreads to their central nervous system. The wife of someone in a caregiver support group has a bad scan. You get a blog update that describes another MBC patient’s significant disease progression. Or a blogger you follow stops posting altogether because they have died. And you think, “we’re next.”
We’ve learned that taking on others’ experiences as our own leads us nowhere good! It is so easy to end up in a downward spiral and in a puddle of extreme hopelessness. But, as Kelly Grosklags, an oncology psychotherapist who spoke at the recent Midwest Metastatic Breast Cancer conference, reminded us: “Those are not our stories.” We can feel empathy and concern for others without taking on their experiences as our own. Their story is not our story. Our story will be different from everybody else’s. All of us dealing with metastatic disease will experience the illness in different ways. The ups and downs. The test results. The side effects. All are unique to our situation. Our story is our own.
We found that bit of advice — to own our story – to be extremely helpful. Not just in dealing with cancer, but in living life. How many times have we heard a piece of bad news and taken it on as our own? Too many to count and it only leads to more anxiety, fear and dread. So now we are committed to listening to the stories of others and empathizing with their experiences but owning only our own.
