Cancer

Living Your Life with Cancer through Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: Flying overThunderstorms Kindle Edition by Anne Johnson (Author), Claire Delduca (Author), Reg Morris (Author) 

This valuable self-help book for people affected by cancer, their loved ones and friends focuses on self-care when life hurts. It explores the impact of cancer and explains why the usual ways of coping may leave people stuck.

The first book of its kind to focus on the scientifically based Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) approach, it helps people to find ways to cope with painful thoughts and feelings, and to rebuild a meaningful life despite the cancer. With an emphasis on value-based living the book illustrates skills such as mindfulness and the development of acceptance to help people affected by cancer to participate in a fuller life and gain a greater sense of well-being. It combines evidence-based practice with the experiences of people who are living with cancer in the form of numerous quotations throughout, as well as paper and pencil ‘thought’ exercises.

Living Your Life with Cancer through Acceptance and Commitment Therapy helps people affected by cancer to feel more able to sit with the uncertainty of their future, show themselves kindness and compassion and to learn to be true to themselves, no matter what the cancer throws at them. 

The Cancer Workbook: Developing a Compassionate Mind for Treatment, Recovery and Survival (Compassion Focused Therapy) Paperback – 4 Sept. 2025 by Julia Wahl (Author), David Sheffield (Author)

The workbook will teach you the principles and techniques of compassion focused therapy, and you will learn how to treat yourself with compassion in the face of cancer, how to manage shame and concerns over your changing body image, how to manage pain and how to find a mental place of safety, as well as taking these tools into your life beyond cancer, in recovery.

THE COMPASSIONATE MIND APPROACH
The self-help books in this series are based on compassion focused therapy (CFT, developed by series editor Paul Gilbert). This brings together an understanding of how our mind can cause us difficulties but also provides us with a powerful solution in the shape of mindfulness and compassion. It teaches ways to stimulate the part of the brain connected with kindness, warmth, compassion and safeness, and to calm the part that makes us feel, anxious, angry, sad or depressed.

Coping with Cancer: DBT Skills to Manage Your Emotions--and Balance Uncertainty with Hope Paperback – 26 Feb. 2021 by Elizabeth Cohn Stuntz (Author), Marsha M. Linehan (Author)

This compassionate book presents dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), a proven psychological intervention that Marsha M. Linehan developed specifically for the impossible situations of life--and which she and Elizabeth Cohn Stuntz now apply to the unique challenges of cancer for the first time.

*How can you face the fear, sadness, and anger without being paralyzed by them?
*Is it possible to hold on to hope without being in denial?
*How can you nurture supportive relationships when you have barely enough energy to take care of yourself?

Learn powerful DBT skills that can help you make difficult treatment decisions, manage overwhelming emotions, speak up for your needs, and tolerate distress. The stories and collective wisdom of other cancer patients and survivors illustrate the coping skills and show how you can live meaningfully, even during the darkest days.

Facing the Storm: Using CBT, Mindfulness and Acceptance to Build Resilience when Your World's Falling Apart

We live in a world where bad things can, and do, happen irrespective of whether we are good or bad, whether we consider ourselves lucky or doomed, and with no regard to fairness. Any of us can find ourselves facing redundancy, the breakdown of a relationship, bankruptcy or any number of life changing crises, or supporting someone else who is. And sometimes, no matter how much we might try, there’s nothing we can do to prevent or reduce the problem.

But that doesn't mean you have to be helpless; no matter how bad the situation you're about to deal with, there are things that you can do to become more resilient and that will help you face the storm that's coming towards you or yours.

Using Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) techniques and the latest developments in mindfulness and acceptance-based approaches, this practical guide will take you through each stage of preparing for, enduring and recovering from a major life crisis helping you better understand what's going on, and providing new tools for dealing with the situation.

When there's a storm coming towards you, and you can't escape it, then you have to prepare to face it. Here's how.

The Complete Guide to Breast Cancer: How to Feel Empowered and Take Control Paperback – 3 Oct. 2024

by Professor Trisha Greenhalgh (Author), Dr Liz O’Riordan (Author)

The Complete Guide to Breast Cancer combines the authors’ experiences as patients and as doctors to provide a trusted and thorough source of information for you and your family. Designed to empower you during your breast cancer treatment, it covers:

-Simple explanations of breast cancer treatments
-Staying healthy during and after treatment
-Coping with the emotional burden
-Advice about sex and relationships
-Dealing with the fear of recurrence
-Living with secondary breast cancer
-A new chapter on disability and breast cancer

Filled with all the things the authors wished they’d known when they were diagnosed, and tips on how to cope with surgery, radiotherapy, chemotherapy and beyond, this is the essential book to guide you through your breast cancer diagnosis.

Coping With Breast Cancer: How to Navigate the Emotional Impact Throughout Your Journey (ACP-UK Book Series) Paperback – 17 July 2023 by Sarah Swan (Author)

Current statistics suggest that between one in seven and one in eight women will develop breast cancer at some point in their lives. Being diagnosed with breast cancer can leave you feeling anxious and depressed, fearful of the treatment to come and concerned about your mortality. The treatment itself can have a significant impact on your wellbeing as you are faced with marked changes in your physical appearance, sense of self and energy levels. There is lots of information available regarding cancer and its treatment, but little to help you cope with the emotional fall out. There are some excellent support services available but access to high quality evidence-based psychological interventions to help you cope is limited. This self-help book is the first of its kind: written by a highly experienced clinical psychologist, who has herself gone through the devastating impact of breast cancer, drawing from the evidence-based Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) approach to provide you with essential coping skills. This book takes you through what your journey may look like through diagnosis, treatment and recovery, and explains the ACT skills that can help you to cope with the emotional impact of this disease and its treatment. The ACT approach enables you to respond differently to the painful thoughts and feelings that will arise during your cancer journey. Rather than fighting with them, the skills in this book help you to acknowledge and step back from your difficult thoughts and feelings so that you can focus on living your life in a way that will positively impact your physical and emotional wellbeing.

Course:

Macmillan online HOPE programme

The online HOPE programme is a 6 week self-management course run by Macmillan and Hope for the Community. It has been co-designed alongside people living with cancer, and is based on positive psychology, mindfulness and cognitive behavioural therapy. Topics covered include mindfulness, goal setting, fatigue management, stress management, identify personal strengths, gratitude, dealing with setbacks, challenging unhelpful beliefs, healthy eating and physical activity.

Participants will be asked to commit a minimum of 2 hours per week, at a time to suit them. They will need to have access to the internet via smartphone, tablet or PC.

They will be able to work through the weekly materials in their own time at their own pace.

Help overcoming problems effectively (HOPE) online - Macmillan