How To Return To Feel like Yourself After a Health Crisis

3 hours ago

3 min read

Life After Cancer: Feeling Like Yourself Again.

In my work supporting women beyond cancer treatment, this is the question that underlies almost every conversation. It comes up while we're exploring what the body needs, what it feels, how values and needs may have shifted.

"Back to Normal" Isn't Always the Answer

What I notice is that "getting back to normal" isn't always the productive direction to aim for to find answers.

One could assume that going back to normal is the natural flow of things because it’s familiar, safe, it’s the life that existed before everything changed.

But the reality is that a cancer diagnosis and cancer treatment don’t leave a body, or a life, exactly where they found it. Chasing a return to exactly who you were before can become exhausting, because it's asking the present to match a version of you that may no longer fully fit.

From Survival Mode to Intentional Living

Instead, the answer may involve allowing for a pause, space for the body and mind to shift from survival-mode bracing towards an intentional, calm, healing state. Supporting this shift is very important because when the body has spent months (or longer) in a state of alert, it’s likely to struggle to relax the moment the immediate threat is over.

A woman taking time in nature to reflect on her life

Acknowledging that life has changed can be the start of this process, and recognising the inherent healing potential in that change: the possibility for something deeper and more authentic to unfold, once there's room for it.

Seeing The Process of Reconnecting As An ‘Opening’

As a health and wellbeing coach, it’s my priority and my privilege to listen.

From women who find themselves on the other side of a cancer diagnosis - or even a different type of profound health crisis - I learned that reconnection involves a more or less conscious decision to leave the surface and go deeper. To use curiosity and self-compassion to discover, perhaps rediscover things that were unintentionally forgotten along the way, even before the crisis, set aside while everything else had to come first.

Things that meant a lot. Things that were essential to their being.

This process of reconnecting to self after a health crisis could therefore be seen as an opening, an invitation to meet who you are, with curiosity, compassion, and honesty about what really matters.

Misty forest path leading toward light, symbolising the gradual process of reconnecting with yourself after a health crisis

Where To Start?

I don't think this looks the same for any two people. For some, it starts in the body, with nutrition, energy, the physical rebuilding. For others, it starts with the nervous system, learning, often for the first time, what it feels like for the body to register safety rather than threat. And for others, it focuses on the question of identity, who I am now and what I actually want, separate from who I was expected to be before any of this happened.

In my practice, I tend to work across all three, because in my experience they rarely function independently of one another. Rebuilding energy and rebuilding a sense of self tend to happen together rather than in sequence.

If any of this resonates, if you are wondering whether it's normal that normal hasn't quite returned, I'd love to hear how these ideas sound to you.

*If you'd like to explore what this could look like for you, I offer a free 20-minute exploratory call — you can request one through my website.