Keeping in touch with our Life Force Family

Greetings to all our Life Force friends, patients, survivors, carers and all those working with and supporting people living with cancer in the community. We are moving into 2021 with hope, courage and enthusiasm, and a strong resolve to continue advancing our valuable supportive care programs here in Sydney and across regional NSW. We’ll keep you posted through the year on all events and programs.

Finding Meaning
Join a Life Force group now

A support group can be a lifeline for people, an opportunity to reflect as they share with others in a safe and understanding space.

It’s about finding meaning, transforming loss and pain into vitality and hope. Not struggling alone, but healing together with others who understand, as only those on a similar path can do. The Life Force programs provide regular support with a holistic approach that embraces the whole human being, with many different elements supporting and reinforcing that healing process.

Inclusive support groups and workshops open to all cancers at all stages and all genders, led by a professional counselling team. Currently being conducted online via Zoom and hoping to resume face to face sessions in conjunction with Zoom in the future.
To find out more call Caro on: 0425 296 698 or Jane on: 0412 643 751

Lee’s Story
“It was only after he had left hospital that Lee Anderson Brown realised his cancer treatment was not really over.
The medical side was. He had survived surgery, radiation and months of chemotherapy, and doctors agreed he was in remission. For this he was grateful.
But emotionally, he still felt like a man afflicted. The cancer experience had so saturated his life that he found it impossible to pick up where he had left off.
Yet that was the expectation. Others urged him back to work and back to having a good time. He tried, but internally he felt crippled.
Brown, now 37, managed to resume work as a machinist and struggled along for more than a decade until something quite unexpected happened. He saw a pamphlet for a cancer support group and, although it was not the sort of thing he would normally respond to, he decided to enquire.

With considerable reservations, he went to the support group...”

Excerpt from …

Share the pain, shed the tears and let the good times roll again
Jill Margo
Man Trouble
Sydney Morning Herald, Thursday, March 9th, 1995

Lee came to one of our Life Force support groups in the Inner West. He discovered that ‘in the group he finally found people who could understand the feelings he had kept hidden for so long.’
Cancer Council NSW research has shown that people who take part in support groups have lower levels of anxiety and depression than those who don’t.
In the 25 years since Life Force first began running its support groups, much has changed in what is now known about the cancers that 150 000 Australians will be diagnosed with in 2020, and many advances have been made in treatments.
But the human experience of fear remains, and the desperate feelings that keep us awake at night and overwhelmed with worry and anxiety continue. This emotional roller coaster doesn’t need to be endured alone.
As wounded healers, we are all such gifts to each other. By attending a support group, much of the power of these distressing emotions can be reduced, and skills can be learned to manage distressing emotions. Each Life Force group meeting includes a guided imagery session. “They are ‘the healing balm’ to end each session”, as one of the group members puts it so beautifully.
Reading the stories on our Life Force website gives an insight into how this happens.
Lee’s story expresses it so well: “I found that to share another’s tears was finally to express the tears I repressed so long ago; to share another's fear was to feel the strength of a common bond, and to be touched by another's pain was to feel my own pain lessen because it no longer seemed so absolutely mine.” You can read more of Lee’s story on the Life Force website.

Copyright (C) 2021 Life Force Cancer Foundation. All rights reserved.

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