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No More Bingo Dresses: Using NLP to cope with breast cancer and other people by Rosie O'Hara (view source)
Revision as of 11:02, 29 November 2014
, 11:02, 29 November 2014no edit summary
To achieve positivism she used NLP, which involves re-framing negative thoughts into more useful channels, usually by removing the spin. Rosie used visualisation to contain her cancer in the run up to her mastectomy, which was a particularly anxious waiting time. (Maybe I'm not using the right terms, which sounded a bit awkwardly technical to me, but hopefully you get my drift). Fortunately surgery and radiotherapy have restored Rosie to good though lop-sided health, and she decided to publish her thoughts, feelings and progress in an effort to help and encourage other unfortunate recipients of the Big C.
At times darkly humorous and at others quite angry with the world, here is an original diary for anyone wanting to explore what it feels like to live through this particular experience. It is, of course, one woman's narrative, so Rosie has her original take on just about everything, which you may or may not feel as a fellow cancer patient. She brushes aside the issue of de-feminisation after mastectomy because she didn't happen to feel like that. She didn't worry overly about dying (quite correctly: there's a 92% 5 year survival rate for breast cancer these days). Neither did she lose her sense of self in suddenly becoming a patient. Instead Rosie rants at the vocabulary of cancer, objecting to the fighting terminology traditionally used and always insisting, ''… listen to that individual, please.''
I found the NLP part of the story somewhat incomprehensible, and in the end decided that for me, it intruded in Rosie's much more interesting life story. I suppose if you were more interested in the potential of NLP in the cancer context, you might feel the life story intervened! It may have been that the content still needed some straightening in the author's mind – after all this event only happened a couple of years ago, which isn't long to make sense of a major life crisis. Or it may be that the editing needed to be considerably more stringent. Either way, the juxtaposition of NLP primer and narrative story wasn't quite smooth enough for my taste.