AFTER CANCER: FEELING AND REACTING LIKE A CHILD
What If I Feel Like a Young Child Sometimes?
After completion of cancer treatment you are physically and emotionally vulnerable. Your physical and emotional needs are greater than they were before your cancer. Under the best of circumstances, you still need help, attention, support, and comfort.
You may experience this vulnerability and neediness as something embarrassing to yourself and to others. Neediness may be confused with immaturity or weakness. Your vulnerability is an expected consequence of the treatment. Your neediness is the normal, healthy consequence of recognized vulnerability.
Just as thirst protects you from dehydration, neediness protects you from isolation that would be detrimental to your physical and emotional well-being. Respect your neediness as your well-balanced self attending to itself. You feel needy because after cancer treatment you have legitimate needs. Satisfying these needs will encourage uneventful healing, physically and emotionally.
What If I Find Myself Reacting like a Child to Stresses?
Children are expected to have little tolerance for stress. When a two-year-old licks the scoop of ice cream off the cone and onto the floor, the expected, normal response is to cry. The two-year-old child cries from disappointment, frustration, and a sense of powerlessness.
Losing a scoop of ice cream will elicit some emotions at any age, but will be less and less likely to cause you to cry as you get older. As an adult, you have acquired a repertoire of feelings, thoughts, and actions that allows you to absorb and respond to stresses in a socially acceptable way. You developed these tools as you matured and practiced them until they became your normal way of responding. Mature responses give you identity and self-respect.
During recovery from cancer treatment you may find yourself literally crying after little stresses like that of losing your ice cream. When you are under great stress, especially chronically, you may temporarily lose access to some of your acquired mature responses. This state is called regression, where you feel and act like a child in stressful situations that, under more normal circumstances, you would handle in a mature way.
Cancer survivors can experience regression during recovery because of
• fatigue
• anxiety
• sleep deprivation
• pain
• medications
• effect of the cancer or cancer treatment on the brain
Extra emphasis needs to be given to the effect of sleep deprivation and fatigue. These two factors have a major impact on how we see and react to the world around us, and they are the easiest two to control.
Regression is a normal response to chronic physical and emotional stress. Although you may find it embarrassing or frustrating, regression is a mechanism of self-protection that helps you attend to your needs and conserve your energy.
What Can I Do about My Responding like a Child?
When you feel and see yourself responding like a child, it will help to
• accept this as a common, normal, temporary part of recovery •accept yourself with your human
needs
• get extra rest
• avoid unnecessary stresses
• let your support people know what things are difficult for you and what things help
Understandably, serious illness can cause you to become preoccupied with yourself, another characteristic often associated with children. A degree of self-centeredness after cancer treatment is necessary for healing, because it allows you to recognize your physical and emotional needs and conserve your energy for recuperation.
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