Episode 007: How To Use Your Inner Resources To Better Deal With Cancer
Mar 31, 2018•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast Episode description
In this episode, I'm talking to Suzanne Chambers who has a fantastic book that helps men deal with prostate cancer. Filled with tremendous insights and practical advice, this book should be prescribed like medicine. In this interview, Suzanne shares:
How to use your inner resources to better deal with cancer
The importance of recognising your own instinctive reactions
Becoming the expert on your own illness
Separating the dubious advice from the truth
3 types of coping
Making big decisions under stress
How to deal with intrusive thoughts around cancer
Links
Facing the Tiger: A Guide for Men with Prostate Cancer and the People Who Love Them
Suzanne Chambers Academic Profile
Full Transcript
Joe: Hello, my friends. This is Joe Bakhmoutski and welcome to Simplify Cancer Podcast. Today, I’m talking to Suzanne Chambers. Suzanne is a psychologist who has been helping folks with cancer for many years. She took all that knowledge and all of that experience and put it into a fantastic book called: Facing the Tiger. That is specifically aimed at men dealing with prostate cancer, but most of the insights shared in this book is universal. Suzanne is practical, down to earth, and profound. I promise you’re going to love it. Suzanne, I know you’ve done so much more than writing this book, but please tell about yourself, about who you are, what you do and what you’re passionate about?
Suzanne: Sure. My background is that I’m both a registered nurse and a registered psychologist. I’ve done many things in my professional history. I started out as a registered nurse in intensive care. That was a very dramatic profession. Then I ended up working for the Cancer Council in Queensland, working with people with cancer in the community and developing community-based support services. It was really a journey of learning for me that started there.
This was back in 1989 I started working with people with prostate cancer. My best teachers were the ones who had had cancer themselves, who were very generous with sharing their stories with me. How I got into it, was I would go away and learn what the professions and what the research had to say, come to some conclusions about what might help people, and then I would bring it back to my community of people who had experienced cancer, and share that with them. I’d say, “What makes sense to you out of this and how would you use this information?”
It was a really collaborative process that developed my way of thinking from all of those years ago. Obviously, that’s a couple of decades ago, that informed how I think about coping with cancer and what I say to people with cancer when I’m trying to give assistance to them.
Joe: That’s fantastic, Suzanne, that you talk about it as a learning experience. When you looked at the research and you tried to bring it into practice and get feedback from real-life people, did you find that in terms of the research out, did it align with how people tried to deal with it in real-life, so to speak?
Suzanne: I think it did. The way that I look at research is, having cancer is really confusing for most people because it’s a shocking experience for most of us. Trying to make sense of it is really hard because you’re stressed and your anxious. The point of psychological research in this area, I always say, is to help us with a map. To help us go, ah-ha, that’s why I feel this way, that’s what this means, that’s what driving that, therefore, some ideas for how I can help myself might be this.
From my point of view, if anyone is doing psychological-type research with people with cancer, they have to be very focused on being creative in finding solutions for people to help them in a difficult circumstance, manage the best they can. Most people are doing the best they can, most people do well but sometimes you can get overwhelmed.
