Can Breast Cancer Be Positive?

Life's challenges are not supposed to paralyze you, they're supposed to help you discover who you are. -Bernice Johnson Regon

I have known people who have been able to make creative use of a cancer diagnosis. One psychologist put it simply. A cancer diagnosis, he said, is often an excellent treatment for neurosis. That is, a life-threatening disease often helps us to radically shift away from self-defeating psychic patterns in the fight for life. My colleague Julia Rowland, a respected psycho-oncologist, says that if you ask women with breast cancer what the diagnosis has meant in their lives, you often hear a recital of rang of positive life changes that-if you did not know the cause was the diagnosis of a life-threatening disease-you would ascribe to a powerful positive event.

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