Written by: Marika Humphreys, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
You Get Suckerpunched…
You’re working, maybe raising a family… and BOOM! Your partner gets diagnosed with cancer, and just like that, your world turns upside down.
At first, you’re reeling from the shock of it all. As time goes on, you begin to adjust to this new reality and the effect it has on everything in your life. But there are some days when you wish you could ditch the fear, anger, guilt, and overwhelm and just find a bit of calm. You want to be strong and positive for them, but inside you're scared and worried over what the future holds. You’d like to take some time to yourself… without feeling guilty! You begin to feel like your life is no longer yours anymore.
These feelings are, unfortunately, very common when you become an unexpected caregiver for your partner. I know because I felt them all too.
My Story
My husband battled cancer for 5 years. Our child was 5 when he was first diagnosed. I remember his first appointment and seeing “cancer center” on the wall of the hospital and thinking...how did we end up here? I never expected to be spending my 40th birthday by his bedside while he endured a 24-hour chemo infusion. I never expected to have to coordinate rides to school for our kiddo because my husband was too sick to drive.
This wasn’t how our life was supposed to go!
Later we found life coaching. We both signed up for a coaching program, and immediately things started to change. I started learning how to manage my mind when it was full of crazy negative thoughts. I began to understand and recognize the emotions I felt frequently and learned how to feel them instead of eating to numb their pain. I began to understand how much I did have control over when I had felt like my life was no longer in my control.
It was so transformative for me that I wanted to help others with what I knew. I became a certified life coach, and I have focused all my efforts for the last 3 ½ years on the key habits or skills of the most resilient people. I have drawn many lessons from my training as a coach, my own experience, what I have learned from coaching other people, and from people who have faced tremendous challenges.
What I have found is that the difference between someone resilient in the face of adversity and someone who struggles and ends up depleted is their understanding and ability to practice 4 foundational habits of resilience.
Can Habits Really Be So Powerful?
The answer is a resounding YES!
Just think about it for a minute. A lot of your day is composed of things you do habitually. Wash your face, brush your teeth, eat lunch at your desk while surfing the internet, grab a late-night snack. You do so many things out of habit, but not all those habits are serving you!
When you are facing all the challenges of having a partner with cancer, a lot of your habits are not helpful. You may have the habit of constantly worrying about the future, or automatically going to the worst-case scenario, or eating or drinking instead of feeling your feelings. All of these are just habits! If you are doing any of them, you may not realize it, but you are enforcing bad habits, and they are wearing you down.
So you need new habits to help you cope. New habits to help you bravely face the emotional rollercoaster.
I’m going to outline the 4 key habits that I believe make the difference between growing and becoming stronger in the face of your partner’s cancer or falling victim to stress, anxiety, and overwhelm that is so common for caregivers.
Habit No.1 - Take Notice
You probably don’t realize what your current habits are. You just know you’re tired and worried a lot of the time. That is why the first habit to develop is to start taking notice of yourself. What do I mean? Well, as a caregiver, so much of your attention is focused on your partner, kids, job, etc. To build your resiliency, you have to get to know yourself well. So this habit is all about getting to know yourself. You want to understand what your stress triggers are, what tends to make you anxious or upset, what emotions you struggle with the most and how do you cope with them, and how you think about your life, your partner, yourself. You need to develop the habit of becoming a compassionate observer of yourself.
Habit No.2 - Feel Your Feelings
The next habit has to do with your emotions. When your partner has cancer, it can feel like riding an emotional rollercoaster. So many emotional ups and downs! However, once you begin to recognize your patterns around these emotions, then you can learn how to handle them instead of hiding from them.
Most people don’t know what to do with their negative emotions. Emotions can feel uncomfortable, so we try to push them away, distract ourselves with food, alcohol, or something else, or react to them. However, none of those approaches allow the emotion to flow through you. Emotions are “energy in motion,” and they need to be processed before they move on. So, the key habit to develop is how to feel your feelings instead of pushing them away or trying to avoid them altogether. This is a skill most of us were never taught, and so it’s no wonder we turn to food instead of feeling our feelings! However, once you learn this incredible skill, negative emotions become nothing to fear!
Habit No.3 - Shift Your Focus
The third critical habit to develop is to learn how to shift your focus. So often, we zoom in on the problems and everything that is going wrong. Before we know it, all we can see is how awful hopeless our situation seems. It’s only because we are completely zoomed in. When you learn to shift your focus, you can see the other aspects of life. This skill allows you to focus instead on solutions and what is going right in your life. This habit is at the heart of resiliency for you as a caregiver, but also the key to success for you in your job, business, or any challenging thing you do in life. It’s a game-changer!
Habit No.4 - Create Balance
The last habit of becoming more resilient when your partner has cancer is learning how to create balance in your life. All the doctors' appointments, treatment decisions, changes you make, uncertainties about the future...life can feel like a struggle. This struggle can wear us down. We believe our circumstances need to change to get any relief from the struggle. The problem is, we can’t control the circumstances in our life. We can control how we see those circumstances, however! So, you don’t have to wait until your partner gets better or you get the good news to see the beauty, and joy in life. It’s always there. You just have to be willing to look for it. When you learn to create balance, your experience of life will be different.
When you start practicing these 4 habits, you can be the ROCK you want to be, without the worry and guilt during your partner’s cancer.
Learn The 4 Habits For Resilience
I teach you exactly how to do this in a brand new, self-paced course specifically for people who have a partner with cancer. If you have been thinking for a while that something needs to change, then this is the course for you. If you’ve been struggling with fear and worry and feeling like there has to be a better way, then this is the course for you. If you’d just like to feel like you have some control over this part of your life, then this is the course for you!
Marika Humphreys, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Marika Humphreys is a Resiliency Coach. At the age of 40, while working full time and raising a 5-year-old, her late husband was diagnosed with cancer. Over the next 5 years, as her husband battled multiple cancers, she took on many roles, including spouse, employee, mom, and caregiver. Marikaf believes caregiving is one of the toughest jobs out there, and it’s easy to become depleted and feel like you have no control. Through coaching, she learned that she could still be in charge of her life, even while caregiving to her husband. Coaching helped her discover her own power, strength, and resilience, and now she helps her clients do the same. She believes that even in the midst of a challenge like having a spouse with cancer, you can build resiliency skills and take control of your life.
