Episode Overview

As we close out the year, many women find themselves asking a quiet but important question: Am I really living my life, or am I just getting by?

In this episode of Better Than Before Breast Cancer, Laura explores how trauma, illness, uncertainty, overstimulation, and digital noise can slowly pull us out of participation and into observation. Drawing from psychology and neuroscience, she explains how low-level dissociation becomes a coping mechanism after major life disruptions like a breast cancer diagnosis and why stillness is often the missing piece in healing.

You will learn why distraction does not calm the nervous system, how intentional presence restores agency, and how living with intention helps you step back into your life rather than watching it from the sidelines.

This episode is an invitation to move out of autopilot and back into ownership, presence, and participation as you head into a new year.

In This Episode, We Discuss:

• Why many women feel disconnected or numb after breast cancer

• How dissociation and passive coping develop after major life stress

• Why stillness feels uncomfortable but is essential for healing

• How external noise overrides internal signals

• The difference between surviving and participating in your life

• What intentional living really means after cancer

• Questions to reflect on as you move into the new year

Resources Mentioned:

• Living With Intention Workshop

• Better Than Before Breast Cancer Metabolic Health and Mindset Membership

• Living Well After Breast Cancer Community

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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 there, friends, welcome to episode 422

0:37
of better than before breast cancer. I think this when this comes out. I don't know, this is the second to the last or the third to the last. I really can't remember. I think it's going to be the second to the last podcast of the year, 2025 it's amazing how fast this year has gone by. But at the end of the year, as I think I've talked about on the show before, a big part of how I ended the year is reviewing the year that's gone by with lots of curiosity, no judgment. What went well? What didn't What would I like to bring forward and really thinking about how I want the year 2026 to look and as a part of that review, I host an annual living with intention workshop, and it is a fantastic experience, and it's so great to help people look at their lives through a different lens. It's not about time planning, it's not about goal setting, but it's about really understanding what you want to create in your life, and what are the thoughts you have that maybe stop you from doing this. So as I was planning the workshop, I got this social media post from my daughter, and there were some of the things that were said in this post that I thought were very profound. I want to share a little bit of it with you. So this is by a thread on Instagram called seggy, S, E, G, G, y, seggy said, and basically, to set the the scene for you, he's having conversation with chat GBT, and he asks Chachi PT to speak to him as if Chad GPT is a post human intelligence professor from the year 3025

2:16
And he's analyzing 2025

2:19
as the age of misdirection. And he asks, chatgpt, what do you think we were really hungry for in 2025 and it responds, certainty. And he asks, why is that? And it responds, because uncertainty required thinking, and thinking required stillness, and stillness terrified you. So he asked, What did humans in 2025 do with their freedom? And he said, You traded it for convenience. So he asked what happened because of that? And he said, instant gratification rewired your species faster than evolution could protect it. And then he asked, What do you think success meant in that era? And it said, social proof. So he said, What did that look like? And it said humans became audience members in their own lives. So he asked, did any of us resist change or do anything about it? And he said, Yes. And he asked Who were they? And he said they were the ones who remembered how to be present in a world that begged them not to be and I thought about this a lot. Some of those statements, I think, are really profound, whatever you think of AI, I don't know it doesn't really matter, because it's the statements that I really wanted to give some thought to. And as we wrap up this year, I want to spend a little time unpacking this with you, this idea that we as humans have become audience members in our own lives. Are we living fully, or are we just observing? Are we just watching? Are we just consuming? Are we just reacting, or are we really participating in our lives? And I don't say that with any kind of judgment, because it's definitely something that I ask myself. There are phases that I've gone through, and definitely women that I coach have said to me, you know, I feel like I'm just getting by, and that to me, when we're just getting by, we're not actively participating. We're in survival mode, right? Sometimes that happens, and I think there are a lot of forces that pull us out of participating in our lives, big ones that we don't know how to respond big ones that we don't know how to respond to, like trauma, illness and small ones, like overstimulation, comparison, digital noise, emotional fatigue. And this one I always think, is interesting, uncertainty. You know, we do have a. Lot of fear about uncertainty, and I tend to hear a lot and see a lot of fear around uncertainty, especially after someone's had a breast cancer diagnosis. And I love to walk my clients through this, because everyone has always had uncertainty in their lives. We live every day, every human being with uncertainty. We have no idea what's coming one minute from now, one day from now, one week from now, and yet, it doesn't seem to be such a glaring reality until something we didn't expect, like a trauma or an illness or a loss suddenly yanks that rug out from under us, right? But all of this, these realizations, they chip away at our capacity to be present and active in our own lives if we don't know how to reframe them and think about them, and if we don't decide how we're going to respond to them. So we will scroll through highlight reels on other people's lives. We react to headlines. We read about other people's growth, other people's healing, maybe other people's joy. Well, we feel very stuck in our own lives, and that can cause us to think we're connected, but we're really just distracted, right? We think we're informed, but we're really fragmented. And we think that we're living, but we're not really there. And the term that often comes up in psychology when we talk about something like this is dissociation. And I think while most people associate with trauma, many, many, many of us experience low level dissociation just from the pace of nature and modern day life. And what that means, and what that looks like is this numb, detached going through the motions, feeling which can easily become a habit and a coping mechanism, right? A coping mechanism of taking a back seat, becoming an audience member, and looking at your life and saying, what's going to happen?

7:13
Now, there was a study that was published in 2017 in the Journal of Clinical Psychology, and it found that individuals who experience a high level of stress, especially after major life disruptions, were more likely to default to passive coping mechanisms like avoidance, disconnection, distraction and withdrawal. And I think that especially if we've had a breast cancer diagnosis, we can kind of identify with that because we can feel very powerless, which can lead to disconnection, withdrawal. But I also think that in moments when things are really challenging, like when you're going through cancer treatment, chemotherapy, surgeries, like it's so much that I do think sometimes it serves us to disconnect in these moments of really acute, intense overwhelm, but over time, if we don't realize we've disconnected, that same dissociation can keep us from healing, because it blocks our understanding and awareness that we have agency, it blocks our ability to integrate what happened to us in our lives into what we want in our lives. So I think on the one hand, it's very normal to feel this way sometimes, but when your life is turned upside down, and when you go through something that feels very deeply destabilizing to your identity and your body and your future. It makes complete sense that you would step back emotionally and that you would retreat and default to observing instead of participating, default to being, let me see what happens, right? Or I can't make any plans or I don't have the power to make decisions. It totally makes sense. The problem is that the longer we stay there, the harder it becomes to return. So what I want to talk about today is how we can begin to shift back into presence, out of observation and autopilot, into participation. So let me ask you this question. I'd love for you to think about this. What pulls you away from being present in your own life? I think a big one is constant external input, right? Noise from the outside world, the news, social media, expectations of other people, or what we think are expectations of other people, and the and the pressure to always be productive, to have it all together at all times, to be grateful all the time for everything that's happening. And one of the things that I see over and over again is how this noise can override. Guide our own internal signals, how we learn, we come, become disconnected to ourselves, to the point where we don't trust our own needs, our own instincts, because we're just used to responding to everything out there, right? So that's where that stillness comes in. Again, we're reacting, reacting, reacting, instead of having stillness, taking space and making a choice. And that stillness is absolutely crucial, because it gives us our space to hear ourselves right. The problem with that, it's kind of like what Chad GPT said, is that stillness terrifies of us, because stillness can be uncomfortable when we stop moving, when we stop distracting ourselves. All the stuff we've been avoiding has an opportunity to bubble to the surface, right? So the thoughts that we've pushed down, grief that we haven't processed, but we said, I'm just past it, fear that we never named because we told ourselves we shouldn't feel it, anger that we were definitely told we shouldn't feel and it's in there, because it doesn't matter if people said you should feel it or you shouldn't. You did feel it, but we don't process it. If we didn't even give ourselves permission to feel it and be okay with it. All that starts to come to the surface, and that can feel like a lot, and so we avoid it. We buffer right? We distract ourselves more with busyness. We pick up our phone, we reorganize the closet or a drawer or the pantry. We help everyone else but ourselves. We say we don't have time for that, and very slowly, our lives become this constant string of distractions rather than a very clear sense of direction that our nervous system does not reset through distractions. It resets through safety. It resets through awareness, through calm and through intentional presence. This is why my workshop is called Living with intention. We have to be very purposeful in what we decide we're going to choose. So there's a lot of growing evidence around this in neuroscience, and it shows that the brain's Default Mode Network, which is the part that processes identity, memory and the sense of self is only accessible when we are not actively doing something else, when we are quiet and at rest, that's when this integration happens. So it's interesting the way we think about stillness, because a lot of people think about as unproductive or lazy, and it's absolutely not. It's not indulgent. It's not lazy. It is a space where healing can start and where we can start stepping back into the agency that was always ours, but maybe no one ever taught us that it was that we had the right to have our own agency, to enact our own agency. So think about when the last time was that you were still long enough to really, truly feel your own life right. And what I mean by that is asking yourselves, am I living in a way that feels like me, right, that connects me, that feels true for me. Are my relationships supportive, inspiring? Are they just familiar because they've been around for so long? What are you tolerating that keeps you small, right? That keeps you from being everything you want to be, from being expansive? What are there things that you keep saying you want, but you don't make space for them, or you haven't made space for them. And they're not easy questions to contemplate, to answer, to play with, but they are very clarifying question, because the thing is, being an audience member is passive. When you watch what happens, you comment, you cheer, you cringe, but you don't change your story, right? Living with intention is active. It means you're in the arena. You are kicking up the dust. You are making choices. You are saying yes to things that matter to you. You are saying no to things that don't matter to you, and you're reconnecting with your own sense of self, instead of just following the momentum of everything around you. And that doesn't mean that every day will be perfectly planned or peaceful, or that stuff you don't expect won't come up absolutely not that's not the point. The point of being an active and intentional participant in your life is that you own your time, your boundaries, your responses, your stories, you get back your power when you shift from being a responsive spectator who is impacted by everyone else's. Words, actions and behaviors to being a participant when you decide what you're going to make these things mean to you. So I would offer you this when we think about the new year, when I do my living intention workshops, I also have programs creating a life you love in 168 hours a week manifest. These are all about teaching you techniques and skills and giving you ideas to be able to create the life you want to be able to look forward and how you want to feel in your life. Because I'm not interested in resolutions. I'm not even interested in goals. I'm interested in engagement. You know, and goals are great, because if you set a really high goal, then you say, what do I have to do today to get there, to become the person who does that thing? And that's when you start to engage back in your life, right? What do I have to do to be the person who decides that they're going to cook for themselves three times a week, right? Or every single day? Who do I have to become to engage in my life to that extent? Right? So I want to ask you, where do you want to be more present in your life? Where do you want to step back in your life, and how can you create just a little more stillness so you could hear what is real for you, so you can acknowledge and hold space for what matters to you, because you deserve more than just surviving, right? You get to be an active participant in your life, an active participant in your healing. You deserve to feel your life again, and you deserve to be able to create a life that feels good to you. So I hope that some of these ideas, and if you explore these questions for yourself, go back, listen to them again, write them down, explore them for yourself, and maybe that can be the beginning of the awareness of where you stand, right in the stadium seating of life. Are you on the stage? Are you in the nosebleed? Are you in the orchestra section. Where are you at? Are you in the audience? Because I want you to step up on your own stage. I want you to be the producer, the director and the actor in your own life, right? Because that's when you really revive yourself, not going back to normal, not going back to the way things were, but deciding who you want to be. That's where the power is. If you need help with that, go to my website, the breast cancer recovery coach. You can choose one of my programs that helps support you in doing that work for yourself, or join my better than before, breast cancer, metabolic health and mindset membership, where we not only coach on all of these types of things and come together as a community, but I have five years worth of lessons and coaching and tools and skills that support you in becoming that person and creating that life that you want for yourself. And that's right, of a new, exciting thing going on. I have a new community. I'll put a link to it here that you can join. It's totally free. It's called Living well after breast cancer. So I've had this Facebook group for a long time. There's a free Facebook group. There's over 1000 women in it, and I started that group so that women, you know, if they're they didn't understand coaching, they weren't ready for coaching. But you know, they wanted a community. They wanted to connect people who are like minded. And even though they'd had a breast cancer diagnosis, they wanted to be future focused, right? They want to be focused on what can I do to support myself, to help myself and to inspire myself to live a more joyful life? But Facebook and its algorithms make it very difficult to engage with your people unless you're on it all the time and putting money behind different posts being seen, and so I decided to create a community within my website, and so it's a community that's not going to be controlled by any algorithm. So you join the community, you can post in the feed, you can ask questions. I'll post announcements or activities or workshops that I'm doing, and so we can have more of an opportunity to see each other and to connect and support, and I hope that it's going to be a really cool space, but join it, because everybody who joins will have that role, right? We don't want to a community of all audience members. We want a community of active, engaged participants. Come on in, ask your questions. Introduce yourself. Ask for what you need, talk about things that help you create a life you love. And I think it's going to be a great way to kick off 2026 so click on the link that you'll find in the show notes, or you're listening to or watching this podcast, or just go to my website, and you'll find the link to the community right on my homepage. All right, friends, I will talk to you very soon. Until then, be good to yourself.

19:42
You've put voices in your head. You've put your courage to the test, laid all your doubts to rest. Your mind is clearer than before, your heart is full and wanting more. Your Future's at the door.

20:00
Give it all. You got no hesitating.

20:03
You've been waiting all your life. This is your

20:12
moment. This is your moment. Time.