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Katherine Puckett, Ph.D.
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VIDEO: Katherine Puckett, Ph.D. - Therapy And Counseling, How Can They Help A Woman With Cancer?

Katherine Puckett, Ph.D. describes how therapy and counseling may help a woman with cancer and what she tells women who do not embrace these practices.

Katherine Puckett, Ph.D.:
A woman going through the cancer journey may or may not have ever experienced counseling or therapy and might or might not embrace it.

For the person who hasn’t, first of all, in our setting at Cancer Treatment Centers of America, I would offer myself or my staff to meet with this person and explain what it is that we do, and how we can help.

I would never say to a person, "You have to have counseling to heal," although I believe every person could benefit from it. There are many tools we can use for healing, but I think once a person starts to see what it feels like to sit with someone whose only role, whose only agenda is to be available to that person to think together about how to help that woman, what she needs and how to respond to those needs, it’s a powerful experience, and it looks so simple. Well we’re just sitting and talking together. How could that help?

But, sometimes I picture it in my mind as if, “If I am the woman with cancer, and I am walking down the road carrying a really heavy bag, and it’s weighty, it’s heavy, it’s hard to carry. Somebody comes along and takes one handle, and I am taking one handle, and we’re carrying it together. It feels lighter, it feels more manageable,” and it’s kind of like that in counseling.

I can be available to a woman to help her carry her load, to think about how she can manage her load better, to think about how she can use her mind as a healing-tool in the healing process. People, I believe every person, has inner strengths and resources, but a woman might not be aware of that or, even if she used to be when she got scared because of the cancer diagnosis, maybe she doesn’t realize right away that she has a lot inside of her already that she can use.

A counselor can help her see those strengths in herself and can reflect back to her what she has already that she can use to help her in that process.

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