Kirstie Blanchette

Are You Reacting or Responding? One of the themes I notice with my lovely clients, is the wish they have to understand the ‘why’s’ of some of their thoughts and actions after breast cancer. They can find themselves in situations where they want and wish to have reacted differently to a challenge but just don’t seem able to.  Snapping or going quiet when people say the wrong thing. How we react when scans loom on the calendar. The many ways our bodies can surprise us after going through...

I want to talk about something that comes up often in my coaching sessions, yet many of my lovely clients struggle to name for themselves, and that is grief after breast cancer.   We tend to think of grief as something we only experience after the death of a loved one. But in reality, grief is the heart’s response to any loss. And wow, does breast cancer come with a boatload of loss.   Some of the most obvious losses are physical. Changes to or loss of our breasts. Weight going up or down....

...and the emotions that come up from this. I have been doing a lot of reading lately around the topic of acceptance and it has really struck a chord with me. Acceptance can feel like such a simple word, but it’s one of the hardest parts of life after breast cancer. For the first couple of years after finishing treatment, I remember feeling desperate to try to fit back into my old life, to ‘move on,’ but I wasn’t really able to. It’s not that I was in denial about what had happened to me, I...