Difficult Conversations

When Bailey’s mother, Angela was diagnosed with uterine cancer she was told she would need both a hysterectomy and chemotherapy. Angela had watched her father die a slow and painful death from throat cancer and remembered what chemotherapy had done to the quality of his life. She decided she would have neither the surgery nor the chemo. Bailey tried to reason with her mother. Survival chances after a hysterectomy and chemo are very high, she told her mother, and there is a very good chance that she would survive both. Chemotherapy had come a long way since her father’s death and she would probably do just fine on it. Her mother was adamant that she would not do chemotherapy. She decided to try herbs to treat her uterine cancer instead.

When Bailey came to me, she was struggling with her mother’s decision to refuse all treatments. Her sister too was adamant that their mother DO what the doctors were suggesting. Bailey and I explored how painful her mother’s decision was for her and how stubborn her mother was being. I asked Bailey if her mother was typically headstrong and stubborn and she said, “Absolutely. About everything. She knows best and she listens to no one.” Bailey and I looked at the ways she felt her mother was being selfish by not choosing the treatment that offered her a better chance at survival. We looked at how Bailey’s certainty that she knew what was best for her mother and her mother not agreeing was separating her from her mother at a time when she might want to be as close, loving, and accepting with her as possible. Bailey realized that her mother was being who she’d always been and that she had the right to choose how she wanted to live and how she wanted to die. She made peace with her mother’s choice and did the best she could to support her journey towards her eventual death a year later. When her mother died, Bailey was free of the anger and resentment that lingered for her sister who had never been able to forgive their mother for the choices she’d made. Bailey could grieve her mother’s passing without the shadow of resentment and even smiled when she talked about her mother doing things her way up until her very last breath.

CONSIDER THIS

When we find ourselves believing that we know what’s best for someone else it may serve us to be curious about what it is we need for ourselves. In Bailey’s case she thought her mother was being selfish by not choosing to live for her kids. Bailey loved her mother, and it devastated her to lose her. It was the fear of this loss that was preventing Bailey from hearing what it was her mother wanted. Once she was free of the thinking that she knew what was best for her mother she didn’t have to waste another minute arguing with her. She could get on with the business of loving her for who she was.

Are you interested in how Life Coaching  can improve your relationship to self and other? Contact me, Nina Vincent, for a free 30 minute phone consult and find out whether I am the right life coach for you.       Text at 415-595-2739

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I see clients virtually or in my Whole Self Healing/Heart of the Matter Coaching Mill Valley office.