A Helping Hand - Simple Tools To Enhance Recovery and Life During & After Cancer

In this booklet, Grace Gawler tells her own cancer story and describes how she came to the philosophical basis of her approach to healing and living with cancer. She offers several non-judgmental tips on how to start living well with cancer, instead of having the attitude of a victim who is dying of cancer. Included are her Three Stages of Healing, which are aimed at helping you “identify and plan your healing and recovery process.” She makes us think about what motivates our will to live after receiving a cancer diagnosis. This booklet was meant for personal use, and as a companion to Women of Silence.

Grace Gawler wrote A Helping Hand as a companion to her book for breast cancer survivors, Women of Silence. Most of us would like a helping hand when we're going through treatment and recovery, and that is the intention of both books. This booklet is aimed at applying a healing philosophy to the whole person - tending to the person, as opposed to treating a collection of cells. It's not quite a workbook, but could be used as a self-help guide for those who have already read Women of Silence and want to do some therapeutic work on their inner selves.

Suggestions for creating a healing attitude for yourself include starting a self-care bank account - commit to spend some time daily taking care of some aspect of yourself, to build up your inner reserves. Set some simple goals for yourself. Sift through your healing priorities and rank them. Recover the magic or passion within your self. Change things that have been covering up your true self, and step out of pretense. Return to self-nuturing activities. Use laughter as part of your healing therapy. Accept times of sadness as normal; don't force yourself to remain chipper all through diagnosis and treatment.

Take your focus off of your cancer, and focus instead on getting the most out of life as it now is, or as it can be. Do not blame yourself or something you did for causing your cancer. Use your energy on healing and recovery, not on feelings of failure. Identify your emotional wounds - those places where the joy of living has leaked out of your life. A Helping Hand ends with a list of questions to help guide you in the path of healing and recovery.

This booklet is aimed at attitude change - do you see yourself as dying of cancer, or as living well with cancer? That is a major shift for some patients, and a book like this may be most practical when used with a therapist or during a healing workshop or retreat. Gawler believes that the right attitude is essential to navigating the cancer experience as well as life beyond cancer. Working your way from the shock of breast cancer diagnosis to an attitude of healing may indeed require A Helping Hand.

Katharina Rapp provided original artwork for this booklet, which expressed both compassion and humor. Gawler and Rapp plan to collaborate on a series of booklets about health and healing therapy, and A Helping Hand is the first of this series.