Brighton Cancer Counselling

I am pleased to introduce my new website here – Brighton Cancer Counselling.

Working with cancer patients has long been a cherished part of my life as a psychotherapeutic counsellor, both in my private practice and for Macmillan Cancer Support. This new site simply formalises that and, I hope, makes it clear to anyone looking for support after a cancer diagnosis that this is a specialist area of mine. I work in person in Brighton and Hove, and also online.

Illness of any kind is confronting. The body, so often subservient to the wishes and drives of the mind, moves centre stage. It demands attention. This can feel at best inconvenient and at worst humiliating, humbling and frightening.

A serious diagnosis abruptly interrupts ‘normal’ life. It overturns our coping strategies, challenges our self-image and batters our defences. Alongside the day to day reality of coping with ill health, medical appointments and change, we are served an enormous psychological challenge. Under the stress of illness, unpalatable truths about our vulnerability become hard to ignore, old wounds are reopened and small cracks in relationships are transformed into gigantic faultlines.

My new website spells out how therapy when you are affected by cancer and chronic illness can help. Through confidential, thoughtfully paced work we can explore your experience of serious illness, or of living alongside someone who is unwell

Making sense of a serious diagnosis

Coping with treatment

Physical changes and chronic pain

Anxiety about recurrence

Existential questions around longevity, aloneness and meaning

It is not only the patient who deserves support

A diagnosis impacts not only the patient but those around them, too: partners, family members and friends. Anyone caring for or close to someone unwell with cancer or another serious condition must navigate turbulent, conflicting and confusing feelings of impotence, fear, resentment, distaste, dismay and guilt.

The narratives around war – ‘battling cancer’ ‘fighting the disease’ – and positivity, so often layered onto illness by western culture, with its squeamishness of frailty and death do not serve us well, either. Connection, conversation and honesty do. They are never more essential than when disease enters our life.

If you or someone you care about is facing the challenge of cancer or chronic illness, I warmly invite you to get in touch: Brighton Cancer Counselling