Reflections After Cancer: Betrayal, Resilience, and New Beginnings at Sanity
There are periods of life that do not ask politely before they change everything. Maybe you heard the saying 'be careful of announcing your plans, the universe has a habit of changing that'?
For the past nine months, my world has been shaped by cancer. Treatment, life threatening chemo reactions, waiting rooms, scans, fear, hope, exhaustion, small wins, and the strange quiet that arrives after you have been brave for too long. I have not blogged for a while because I did not have the words. Some days, all I had was enough energy to get through the next appointment, the next hour, the next breath.
Now I feel drawn back.
Not because everything is neat and resolved. Life after cancer is not tidy. Healing is not a straight line. I am writing because something in me is ready to speak again, and because Sanity has always been more than a place of work. It is a place where people come as they are. Tender, tired, hopeful, angry, grieving, uncertain, rebuilding.
This is a personal reflection, not medical advice. It is my truth from a difficult chapter, and it is also a doorway into what comes next.
Nine months can change the way you see everything
Cancer strips life back to the bone.
Before all this, I thought I understood resilience. I have worked with people through pain, stress, trauma, illness, recovery, grief, and change. I have sat with clients as they tried to make sense of things no one should have to carry. I believed deeply in the strength of the human spirit and a natural authenticity that's difficult to portray in today's world.
Then I had to meet my own.
There were days when strength did not look like courage. It looked like answering the phone. Getting dressed. Letting someone help. Crying in the car. Telling the truth when someone asked how I was, instead of saying, “I’m fine.”, or feeling that my life was so insignficant to others to bother asking.
Cancer changes time. Life becomes measured in appointments, blood tests, medication, side effects, anxious silences, and the long wait for results. Plans shrink. Priorities sharpen. The small things become enormous. A kind message can carry you through a whole morning, words cost nothing, but received as priceless. A client (you know who you are) visiting me with a bag full of pens and a colouring pad to provide me some escapism, meant the world to me. A quiet moment in the sun walking the dog can feel like coming home to yourself and what a summer we had for that!
I learnt that healing is not only physical. The body may be the place where treatment happens, but the mind, heart, and spirit are in the room too. They absorb the shock. They hold the fear. They remember what was said, what was not said, who came close, and who disappeared.
That is where the deeper work begins.
Betrayal has its own kind of grief
I did not expect betrayal to be part of cancer.
Those of you that have been with Sanity since the beginning will know the last three years my body was slowly giving up, full body massage became a painful treatment to deliver and had to be addressed. I retrained in mental health counselling, it always felt like a calling to me, I have always been curious about people, their energies and their trauma's, and delivering holistic treatments for the past 10 years listening to my clients, was a natural fit .I have always believed in working at relational depth—connecting with people exactly where they are, a skill that my tutors, supervisors and other placements all commended me on..So, I balanced Sanity clinic and in parallel I setup the mental health department at the MS Centre in Bedford, working at both locations for 3 years.
This is a difficult write, it's hard to know where to start as receiving a cancer diagnosis I believed that the world would somehow treat me kindly and supportively but betrayal was never on my mind. During my treatment I unfortunately had a serious reaction to the chemotherapy, I was rushed to A&E three times with a cardiac event, and even a suspicion of a brain bleed. My recovery was set back, my initial hope of 3 months of treatment and recovery became 6 months. During that time the centre had already made arrangements to replace me! I was receiving information that was contradictory to what was being communicated by the centre and this culminated in them playing their hand by issuing a confidentiality agreement which, had I signed, would have prevented me from even discussing losing my contract with my family, let alone being able to blog and reflect and recover from this.
What have I learned? Well, goodwill, protect it, there are many people, organisations, jobs, that will take take take, and because I didn't set a boundary they took and left me with little. Interesting huh that a counsellor didn't set her own boundaries, but herein lies the lesson, we are human, to err is to be expected but to grow from those mistakes is where we flourish. Yes I could go into detail all the failings of the centre, their mistakes legally, the cold nature of making this decision while I was fighting cancer, but this is their chaos, it's the universe's way of saying, 'they never appreciated your skills, nor could they understand them'.
I share this to you all so that you can have insight that us counsellors are not immune to the central nervous systems annoying way of keeping you stressed, anxious and depressed, not immune to the words of others used to deflect their own poor judgement. It's what we do after is where we shine and become our best self.
Resilience is not pretending to be untouched
After cancer, you do not simply bounce back into the person you were before. You may return to familiar rooms, familiar work, familiar routines, but something has changed. I have seen how quickly life can tilt. I have felt vulnerability in a way that cannot be unseen.
Resilience, for me, has meant allowing that change to be real, when I'm in the gym, I no longer look around and feel I need to keep up, I've had cancer, I'm working at my pace. I've had cancer and look at me, I'm strong and focussing on what my body needs, and this cannot be taken away from me. It has meant saying, I am not the same, and I do not need to be.
It has meant learning to listen to my body rather than overriding it. Resting before I collapse. Asking for support before I resent the lack of it. Letting joy return in small pieces instead of demanding that I feel grateful every minute, and just appreciating having choice, as sat in A&E wondering if I'd make the night I had no choices, I was in the hands of emergency personnel with my life in their hands.
That is another truth people do not always say out loud. Gratitude and anger can sit in the same body. Relief and grief can exist together. You can be thankful to be here and still mourn what the illness took from you. AND that's ok. It's ok to be angry, resentful, after losing both my parents to cancer before the age of 60 I naively believed the universe wouldn't do this to me. It did. Some days I screamed into the air 'F you, why, haven't I been through enough', didn't change my diagnosis, left me anxious, exhausted and confused.
Healing has asked me to soften and strengthen at the same time. Cancer for me has been a reset. I changed my diet, I'm embracing bone strengthening training, I lost my precious hair (those that know me understand how obsessed I was with my hair), and gained a thick curly regrowth, and through a wonderful charity called 'something to look forward to' received a years free membership at a gym and enjoying every session.
I have become clearer about what I will carry and what I will not. I have less patience for performance, drama, and one-sided relationships. I feel more protective of my peace. I feel more committed to work that is honest, grounded, and human.
That clarity is coming with me into Sanity.
Sanity has always been about the whole person
Sanity was created by me, for me originally. After losing my mum I turned my back on the corporate world and felt the calling for helping others. Delivering hands on treatment I realised i had a heightened ability to feel peoples energy, and offer clients the chance to have the treatment in silence or open up without judgement. Working at relational depth is such a prize in counselling, when you get that connection the work is rewarding, clients can reflect, address areas of their life they didn't dare to even think about knowing that there is no judgement, exploring thoughts and feelings, in a world when the NHS coldly offers CBT for 6 sessions, I knew that would never work with my skill set. I'm not a tick box counsellor.
During my recovery, when words failed me, I found myself turning to symbolic imagery and archetypes—specifically Tarot—as a way to understand my internal chaos. It wasn't about predicting the future; it was about holding up a mirror to my subconscious mind when my conscious brain was too exhausted to process the trauma.
This experience changed me as a therapist. It showed me that true healing requires us to look at the whole picture—mind, body, and soul. That is why I am introducing Intuitive Archetype Exploration at Sanity. It is a space where powerful visual symbols to bypass our intellectual defences, tap into inner wisdom, and find a clear path forward when life leaves us feeling stuck." I will blog more on this in my next ramblings.
What I want clients to feel when they walk in
If you are returning to Sanity, I hope you feel the same warmth, with a deeper steadiness behind it.
If you are new, I hope you feel that you do not have to arrive polished. You do not need to have the right words. You do not need to know exactly what you need before you book. Many people come to therapy, bodywork, or wellbeing support with only a sense that something needs attention.
That is enough.
My hope is that Sanity offers a place where people can pause and be met with care. A place where the body can unclench. A place where difficult stories do not scare us. A place where healing is allowed to be slow, layered, and real.
I want clients to feel:
Safe enough to be honest
Supported without being rushed
Respected in their choices
Seen as a whole person
Able to take the next step, even if it is small
That last point matters. Healing often happens through small steps repeated with care. One appointment. One conversation. One new boundary. One release of tension. One honest breath.
Writing again is part of my recovery
This blog is not only a business update. It is part of my own return. Writing helps me gather the pieces. It gives shape to what has felt shapeless. It allows me to say, “This happened, and I am still here.”, some of you may have heard me say 'your not getting rid of me yet'!
I will be writing more about resilience, betrayal, recovery, boundaries, therapy, the body, and the work I do at Sanity. I will share reflections from my own experience where it feels helpful, and I will also shine a light on the therapists and offerings that make Sanity what it is.
I do not want to write polished pieces that pretend healing is simple. I want this space to be honest. Warm. Useful. Human. There is so much noise around wellness. So many promises. So much pressure to heal quickly, think positively, move on, glow, transform, and become a better version of yourself by next week.
Sometimes healing means surviving the thing you did not think you could survive. Sometimes it means telling the truth about who hurt you. Sometimes it means letting love in again. Sometimes it means resting without guilt. Sometimes it means coming back to the work you love, changed but still full of purpose.
That is where I am now.
Changed. Grateful. Clearer. Still healing. Ready to begin again.
Comments