Episode Overview

When life hands you a cancer diagnosis, it’s natural to want to protect the people you love — to keep things “normal.” But what if that instinct to protect actually creates a wall between you and the very people who could help you heal?
In this week’s episode, I talk about what I call the protective barrier — that invisible wall we build when we try to hold everything together — and how breaking it down through radical transparency can open the door to trust, connection, and emotional freedom.

You’ll hear how honest communication not only deepens relationships but also supports physical and emotional healing. We’ll explore why holding everything in doesn’t serve anyone — and how letting others truly see you can transform the way you move through this season of life.

If you’ve been saying “I’m fine” when you’re not, this episode is your gentle reminder that openness is not weakness. It’s one of the bravest, most healing choices you can make.

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Read the full transcript:

0:00
You're listening to better than before breast cancer with the breast cancer recovery coach. I'm your host, Laura Lummer. I'm a certified life coach, and I'm a breast cancer thriver. In this podcast, I will give you the skills and the insights and the tools to move past the emotional and physical trauma of a breast cancer diagnosis if you're looking for a way to create a life that's even better than before breast cancer, you've come to the right place. Let's get started.

0:33
Hey, friends, you're listening to Episode 434

0:36
of better than before breast cancer. I'm your host, Laura Lummer, and today I want to give you start off with giving you a little bit of background on why we're talking about this today. In my original coaching program, my signature program, the four pillars of breast cancer recovery, I taught a couple of concepts that I felt were really important for us to address as we go through the process of being diagnosed with breast cancer, getting treated for breast cancer, but more importantly, getting through that process and getting back to life in a different place, in a better place than where we were before and after years of coaching and teaching these concepts. I don't think that these things happen because of breast cancer, but I think that once we get a cancer diagnosis, the habits that we've already established for ourselves throughout our life, what's missing, what's good, what's not good, what we like, what we don't like, what we're not comfortable with, and especially our communication skills and Our relationships, all of the factors in there become unmasked after a breast cancer diagnosis, and we start to see things for the discomfort that they cause, but we don't necessarily have the skills or the tools to manage them, and one of those things that I talk about often is called the protective barrier. I call it the protective barrier, because I realized that when something as serious as a cancer diagnosis occurs, and I think this occurs in many other things throughout our life, but definitely after a cancer diagnosis, we have so many stories in our mind, and those stories are about who we're supposed to be, how we're supposed to show up in our roles as friend, wife, sister, mother, all of the different daughter, you know, all of the different roles, and how we think that our words and our behaviors will impact other people. And you know, when I think about the impact that I want to have as a coach and in my business and on the world, I think really what I would like to do is help people stop making their life so miserable. You know, if we could just cut back on the amount of suffering we create for ourselves, that would be amazing, because we do it a lot, and the stories we have about who we're supposed to be, are the foundation of that suffering. Instead of just allowing us to be, allowing other people to be, you know, we have this constant not an attempt to control the world. Everybody be happy. Everything be just as I think it's supposed to be or want it to be. You know, the fairy tale life, and it's just not true. So when we try to move towards that way of living, we really create a lot of suffering for ourselves, because a lot of judgment comes in, and we fall short over and over, because life is not perfect. It's never going to be. This is where the protective barrier comes in. So we get a cancer diagnosis, and what we try to do, more often than not, is protect people around us from the fact that we have a frigging cancer diagnosis, that we are dealing with a life threatening situation, and yet, for some reason, we want to keep life, quote, unquote normal for everyone around us. And then this begs the question, what is normal? Well, if I look around me in this world today, it's not not normal that someone you know gets a cancer diagnosis. So is this part of normalcy? Is this part of life? What are we doing and how are we supporting what we need, loving ourselves, getting the care and the understanding we need, but more importantly, connecting to others at such a devastating time in our lives. And I think again, it's not just cancer. We do this throughout. So it could be any kind of situation that you find emotionally troubling, disturbing, that we keep it in and we try to protect other people, but that in itself, is a fallacy. We're not protecting other people. So I bring this up because in this last couple of weeks, I've had many clients who have a cancer diagnosis, who are living with cancer, and. And who put so much emotion and so much fear and so much anxiety into not allowing their kids to know this, or their moms to know this, or their sisters to know this right people close to them, because they're holding in all this pressure that if they know they'll worry another if they know I have cancer, they know they have cancer, but know what we're feeling, what we're going through and what we need. So it's almost like we try to keep cancer diagnosis and treatment separate. We'd like try to pluck it out of life and put it over here and say, Let's take care of this. Let me remove myself. And I hear this a lot, and you may have said it before cancer took this time away from my life? Well, it only does that if we separate it from our life, if we say, I have to check out of life and go deal with this, and we believe that's what we're doing so that we can protect other people. Let me go off on my own here and deal with this cancer diagnosis, but if we realize, hey, this is and it is a part of life, and I can't protect people from what is true, right? So, meaning, of course, if you have children, it's age appropriate information, but there is a beautiful concept called radical transparency. We're just really honest about what is happening. And I think that that kind of transparency, coming from a place of compassion, is a beautiful way to connect to other people. So when we have the protective barrier, what we're doing is almost shaming ourselves, right? This is a shameful thing that I'm going through this cancer, and I don't want people to see it, and I don't want people to think certain things of me, which you cannot stop people from thinking, but you're also putting up this barrier saying this is not something to be talked about. This is something to pretend isn't going on. And trust me, out of my own experience, and all of the women that I have coached over the years, not looking at what you're going through emotionally will not help you heal, but bringing people in that you love, allowing those people to ask you questions and asking them questions like, How are you feeling? What are you afraid of? How can we be here for each other? How can we walk this together? Is an amazing opportunity to be very clear and very transparent about your thoughts and emotions. Now, you know, when I work with my clients, of course, there's a kind of a protocol, you know, there's a process here, meaning you've got to get straight on what your emotions are, right? So we've got to work through things for ourselves so that we can clearly communicate what is happening, and a lot of times that's where a therapist or a coach or someone comes in to help you make sense of your thoughts and your emotions, but when you make sense of them, then we can open our hearts to other people, and we can share that experience with other people, and we can hold a safe space for them. So me, having been on both sides of cancer diagnosis, meaning I have a cancer diagnosis, and I have a sister and I had a brother who had a cancer diagnosis. So I know what it's like to be on both sides of this, the helpless person who doesn't have the diagnosis and wants to fix things and can't, and the person who is going through it, doing the best that they can to go through it and trying to just be connected to everybody while keeping a positive mindset and a healing mindset. It's a lot of work. So there, there is a process to it, which we'll talk about, but I think that we have to start looking at the stories that we tell ourselves, and we have to realize something that just because you don't tell the people around you, what you're going through doesn't mean that they're not worried. It doesn't mean that they're not making up their own stories, because I promise you, they are, and the stories they're making up are probably a lot worse than the ones you're afraid of putting on them by being honest and being transparent and sharing your emotions. You know we have this ridiculous idea that of what being strong means. I have to be strong. I don't want to scare anybody. I don't want to be a burden. Like, why would we even tell ourselves that is there anyone in your life that you love who would come to you and say, Wow, I got a cancer diagnosis, and you would be like, What a pain in the butt. You are like, what a burden, right? You don't want to scare anybody. Trust me, when we don't tell people what we're going through, and they see us struggling, they're scared, and it's okay to be scared. We cannot stop ourselves or anyone else in this life, in this world, from experiencing negative emotions. So when we hold space for those negative emotions, and we say it's normal to feel that way, it's okay to feel that way. I'm here for you. Will you be here for me? This creates a bond, a connection, and then it shows other people it's safe to feel it's okay to feel right. We don't want to have this mask of No. Normalcy, because it's it's just, it's bullshit, right? It's not true. It doesn't help anybody. When we are holding everything in, when we're not clearly and compassionately saying what we need, when we're smiling, when we want to just fall to pieces and saying, Oh, I'm fine, when we're absolutely not fine, and we're carrying that fear and the uncertainty for ourselves and what we believe for everybody else on our shoulders. This is not helping. It does not help us to heal. It does not help us to create a life that is better than before. The diagnosis, right? It doesn't help to have emotional freedom. What this protective barrier that you're intending to shield the people you love from pain is actually doing is isolating you, and it's isolating them. And I think about when I would go through that experience with my brother and with my sister after their cancer diagnosis,

10:56
I wanted to feel trusted. I wanted to feel like because the only thing I could do was offer support, right? I can't heal their cancer, but I could sure offer support. And when people aren't open, then the people who are on the perimeter and the outside, they're unsure, right? And so oftentimes they can feel untrusted, and they can feel like it's not it's not safe, it's not safe for us to talk about whatever it is that you're going through. And this is where we get this ridiculous idea that vulnerability isn't strong, right? We're taught that strength means not showing emotion, not needing help, not falling apart. That's not true. It takes a lot of courage to ask for help, and it takes a lot of courage to express emotion in a healthy way, and there's so much research out there that shows us that emotional suppression, that pushing our feelings away, increases stress and anxiety, which weakens our immune function, and it makes it harder for our bodies to recover. There was even a study in the Journal of Psychosomatic Research that found cancer patients who express their emotions openly had lower stress hormone levels and better quality of life than those who bottled things up. So emotional disclosure that simply and honestly talking about what you're going through is so important for our immune responses, especially in women, who are very emotional creatures. And there's nothing wrong with that. The shame and the judgment that we have cast on emotions, on people being emotional creatures, is just wild. I love one of the things I love about yoga and the philosophy of yoga is that really at the root of yoga, it is, this is what is be here. Now look at the truth. Now look at life. Now look and see what is. And if we could do that our life, and we could just sit and say, This is what is. This is who I am, and this is how I'm feeling, and then stop ourselves before we go into judgment, this is who this person is, and this is I love them for who they are, with all the faults, with all the clumsiness, with all the messiness, I can drop my stories and my judgment and allow there to be connection and emotion that is so healing. But when we keep our pain or our fear hidden, don't think that the people who love you don't sense it. You sense it, right? You see people around you when they're going through something, and you know what it feels like to be closed out. You can feel it when someone's not being open with you, right? We feel each other's energy, and pretending that everything is fine creates confusion and distance at a time where connection is so vital, because happiness and love is very, very healing, not just for our physical body, for our emotional, spiritual bodies as well. So when we hear ourselves saying things like, my partner doesn't get it, my family doesn't understand what I'm going through, we need to take a moment and peel back the layers and ask ourselves, re letting them in? Am I being honest about this? Am I being really truthful about what I need and what I'm going through, and am I holding space for what I can handle? Right? I think I've shared on this podcast before that I have said to my family after my stage four diagnosis, when I was trying to wrap my head around everything and what I wanted to do like, don't bring your fear to me, right? You guys need to be there for each other, and it's okay to be afraid. But right now, with everything I'm processing, I can't be here to process your fear. So this is why I say we have to understand where we're at and what we can manage and be really clear with ourselves before we start to express our needs to other people. We need to understand what we can take on. So holding a safe space and creating a safe space to drop that protective barrier doesn't mean you're there for people to just dump emotions all over you and no one else can make you feel better. Right? So this isn't a let me bring my pain to you and you make it better for me, or vice versa. This is let's openly talk about what we're going through, because it's in the talking about it itself that's very healing. This is the concept of radical transparency. It's not about over sharing. It's not about making every moment like being in a confessional, but it's just about being honest enough to be seen, to be able to make simple statements, even if you can't put words to it, to say I'm just scared, or this is just really hard for me right now, or today I'm struggling, or I don't have the answers, and I don't know what's coming, but I'm struggling with it. I feel emotion coming of that now, just as I talk about it, because I have a lot of those days, and it's very important that we trust ourselves, that we accept ourselves. We're like this is just where I'm at right now, and that we trust those people around us. One of the other concepts that I teach, especially in the four pillars of breast cancer recovery in that program is identifying your champions, like, who are your champions? Because we're not going to be emotionally open and vulnerable with everybody, but we've got to see in our lives who our champions are, and that means those are the people that we can be honest with, and those are the people that we know will have our back, and they might not always know what to say, and that's okay. When I'm talking to or communicating with someone who's got a diagnosis or newly diagnosed or going through treatment and they're on my mind, I will often just send a text message and say I'm thinking about you. This is, you know, my thoughts sending you love. And don't feel the need to respond. Just want to let you know you're on my mind, right? We don't always have to know what to say. We don't always have to ask for something in response. We just show up very honestly saying, just want you to know that I love you, right? When we see someone around us struggling, we can say, Let's just sit and watch a movie together, right? We don't have to talk about this today. Maybe we just are honest with each other and say we just need to be together right now, right when these things happen, and we can be really truthful. Instead of just operating on all of this pretense, there's very powerful shifts that happen. And these, these protective barriers, we drop them, and they become Windows opportunities, moments that are opportunities for understanding and for sharing this human experience that is really messy, right? It's really messy human experience. And I hear clients say to me, Well, I just want people to be happy, or I want everything good for me, for the people I love. Of course, we do, but let's be real. We cannot all be happy all the time. It's not going to happen. That's not how life works. But being honest and being truthful about how life works, what a safe feeling that is

17:54
right, especially for your closest relationship. That brings a lot of light and lightness into the relationship. There was a study in the American Psychological Association Journal, and it highlighted that perceived so what we perceive as emotional closeness, not just physical help, but just feeling understood directly improved immune function and even survival outcomes. So radical transparency is not just a nice idea. It is a healing practice. It strengthens your emotional and your biological resilience. And it's not easy, right, especially if you spent your whole life taking care of everybody else first, which is most of the time, what I see in my women who have a breast cancer diagnosis. So you can take small steps to begin working towards this. We start, as I said, with ourselves, self honesty. Before we can be open with anybody else, we've got to be honest with ourselves about what we're really feeling. And so that might include journaling. It might include meditating, holding space for yourself, or saying out loud to yourself. This is what I'm afraid of right now, just today. Sometimes all we can handle in the moment in the day is just right now, just this next hour that I'm going to have to deal with. And this is where I'm at. Let me get through this. Another step is to identify one champion, right? One person in your life. That's all we need to start off with. Is one person that you really can trust one person, a friend, a partner, a coach, that you really feel I can share everything I've been holding back and it's safe to share with this person that's your champion. Start with one and you might be really surprised at how much relief comes from that simple act. Loud allow you know we have to allow people to show up for us. Think about the difference in allowing versus putting up a barrier. Think about the difference of letting people be there versus all these stories of what you should be and how they should be. It gets so crowded and messy inside your head, there's no space for closeness. Right? So letting people show up for you is an important part of the healing process, not just after breast cancer diagnosis, but in life, there are times when I am in a coaching session with someone and they're in tears and they're heartbroken, and they're sharing with me how someone is not showing up for them in their lives. And when we dig down deep, what we really discover is that they've never told this person what they needed. They've never asked. They've said they should know. Why don't they understand? Why do I have to tell them? Well, we have to tell people because no one is a mind reader, at least. I mean, I guess maybe there's some mind readers out there, but most people are not. So then where does the story even come from? To think I shouldn't have to tell people what I need or how I feel, where in the world did that come from? Why should everybody know what everybody else needs and what everyone else is feeling like? Let's question some of the thoughts that come up in our head that create more suffering in our lives. Transparency gives people direction. It helps them to see your boundaries, what you need, what you don't need, what you're ready to take on, what you're not ready to take on, and it gives them a role in your healing. Sometimes it's just be here. Can you just be here? Let's not even talk. Sit in the same room with me and let's read a book, right? And that doesn't happen just in treatment. I'm not I'm talking throughout life, right, knowing what we need and compassionately sharing that with others. So if you realize that you have a protective barrier that you've been living behind, I want to invite you today to take one small step towards lowering that barrier. It's going to be uncomfortable at first, because it's unfamiliar. And ever we take a new action or behavior, it's unfamiliar, and we don't have to just go and what was that? Ronald Reagan, tear down that wall. We don't have to tear down the wall, but we could start taking bricks off the top right. We can start opening windows and looking at our stories, of what that means when we let someone in, when we let ourselves be seen. What does that mean to you? Do? You have a lot of thoughts that you have to work through before you even do it. So if I let someone in, I expect them to say this or do that or act that way. We got to drop that story. We've got to manage those expectations and realize what is I'm going to be transparent that person's there for me, and I'm going to see what happens. Where do the chips fall, and realize that if I get a response that I don't like, it's never about me, it's about that own person stories and their ability to handle their emotions, right? So then we can be even more compassionate and say, I can see maybe you're not ready to handle this or to hear this. That's okay. Let's talk about it, radical transparency, kindness, right? Not where we hear people say brutal honesty, as in saying things that are mean and insulting. That is not what we're talking about here. We're talking about allowing yourself to be fully seen by yourself and by others, and discovering a new level of connection that is so healing for you. All right. So I would love to hear your thoughts on this. Come and find me on Facebook and Instagram. Send me a DM, come and join me in the better than before. Breast cancer, life coaching membership where we do all this work of building trust, trust with ourselves, knowing ourselves. You know this, most women are diagnosed after the age of 50, although I have a lot of young clients, which is a bummer to see more and more young people getting diagnosed. But it's really, I think, an opportunity to get to know ourselves and to get to love ourselves, and in doing that, to understand that connection is what we make of it as is everything in this life that we can drop a lot of stories, we can drop a lot of hiding, and in doing that feel lighter and connected and happier every single day. All right, so think about your barrier. Think about one thing you could do to move one little brick out of the way that barrier. And think about connection and just inviting people in and come find me, let me know how it goes for you, and always being good to yourself and dropping the judgment. All right, friend, I'll talk to you again next week. Till then, be good to yourself.

24:15
You've put your courage to the test, laid all your doubts to rest. To rest. Your mind is clearer than before. Your heart is full and wanting more. Your Future's at the door.

24:33
Give it all you got no