Study Finds Most Breast Cancer Patients Develop PTSD Symptoms [PsychCentral.com]

I love this post!! Thanks so much for sharing. I am a breast cancer survivor and a person with an ACE score of 4 and 2 possibles. I love the example that you gave in your comment comparing a cancer diagnosis to a gun being held to your head and the added stress of having to remove a major body part that is so closely connected to identity. I am a 12 year survivor and last Saturday was the anniversary date of the mastectomy, I still sometimes feel anxious and other emotions connected to such a life changing event. 

That's a comprehensive look at the trauma of breast cancer, Kathy. It's clear we have to do a much better job at every step of the way to help people. Thanks for posting this.

I'd say it's 99%.

First, it's an immediate life threat; at diagnosis, the brain stem sets off our fight-flight stress chemicals, then for a minimum of a year or more (the suspense often lasts much longer), it's like having a gun held to your head 24 x7.

If someone did hold a gun to your head, even for "just" an hour, and even if you were a trauma expert versed in the best trauma recovery practice so you immediately in the next hour began Tapping, Trauma Release Exercise (TRE), Peter Levine discharge, and running around the block until you discharged the fight-flight chemicals?  "Just" one hour with that gun will take you 3-6 hours to discharge until you reach pre-trauma homeostasis. Actually you might have to do all that for a few days to reach homeostasis from just that one hour of life threat.  The brain's "negativity bias" makes us "velcro" for bad experiences, and "teflon" for good ones.

Then, how long does it take to discharge a year + of the gun?  Supposing, of course, that you're even aware of the need for trauma release protocols? Your doctors certainly aren't aware of it, and neither is anyone else, so if you're aware, you'll have to do it despite feeling like a nut or a social outcast.

Second, cancer is caused by childhood trauma, as the many videos by Dr. Vincent Felitti, MD on the ACE Study document: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQwJCWPG478 .  A population without childhood trauma is "medically uninteresting," he says; they don't develop adult-onset non-communicable lethal diseases like cancer and heart disease. Thus, breast cancer diagnosis is happening to a woman who's likely had both suppressed childhood trauma, plus the toxic adult relationships that follow from it, all causing stress chemicals to have been eating at her tissues for 20+ years. Then, the diagnosis triggers all that lifetime of repressed trauma and stress chemicals.  

Third, it threatens not only physical life, but the core self-identity of a female; cut off that body part, even if you survive, and who wants you?

Fourth, no one understands any of this, not the patient, and not even excellent doctors, great spouses, etc., let alone those less-than-excellent. Thus the most urgent need one can have in trauma, "people support" aka real compassion aka mammalian attachment, is almost impossible to find outside a cancer support group -- if one can find a group that gets this. If they don't get it, a group could be further traumatizing rather than helpful.  And is there time to travel to more meetings, when after diagnosis, treatment and wrangling with health care rules and insurance takes 10 hours a day?

Breast cancer, along with other cancers, is on the rise because the more distant we get from a "village" type society, to today's "internet" dissociated non-society, the more childhood trauma there is. See again the ACE Study, and "Scared Sick" by Robin Karr-Morse; they make it clear.

For most of human history,  women, especially pregnant women, were supported daily by a group of other mammals, and there were an average of six adults to care for each child born, and to care for the mother.  Today we have the same biological needs, but a ratio of even one adult to six children is considered high.  

Even a stay-at-home mom in a safe home with a loving husband out working, only has a one-to-one ratio. That's not enough, it's still too much stress on a mother alone to do the job a baby is built to need. Now think of the percent of even just American "first world" infants raised under far less support than that; maybe 80% plus?

Kathy Brous
AttachmentDisorderHealing.com/allan-schore/
Co-Founder, Orange County CA ACEs (Child Trauma) Task Force
https://www.pacesconnection.com/...ience-film-screening