Katherine Froggatt (00:02.071)

Nobody told me the emotions were coming for me like that. Nothing like this. I knew the medical team was going to walk me through what surgery would feel like, what chemotherapy would look like, and what am I supposed to feel through the whole process of the side effects and the symptoms that potentially would happen. What radiation would mean for me and my body.

That prepared me for every physical side effect they could anticipate. However, nobody sat me down and said, here is what is about to happen to your inner world. Here is the tidal wave that you're going to feel. Here's what to do when the tidal wave arrives. And when it came, it kind of hit me, and I thought to myself, there's something wrong with me. It wasn't.

And if you are sitting with something right now that nobody prepared you for, nothing is wrong with you either. Today we are talking about the emotional experience of a breast cancer diagnosis. This storm, this absolute wave that you were not anticipating, and what it actually does inside your body, and why suppressing it is more dangerous than feeling it.

And what helped me navigate the hardest part of my own journey?

Katherine Froggatt (01:41.591)

So let's get into it. By the time you finish this episode, I want three things to land for you. One, permission. Permission to feel exactly what you are feeling without adding any shame, any guilt, or any judgment. Two, understanding a real explanation of what is actually happening in your body when these emotions show up.

Because this is not a failure in your body, even though a cancer diagnosis might feel like an absolute betrayal. But this is physiology. And when you understand that, it changes how you relate to your own experience. It really changed the trajectory for me. So I want to share that understanding with you. And three, I would like you to have something practical, something you can do today.

Nothing complicated, nothing to add on to something else that you have to do, but just a place to start.

So, this is what happened for me, and that nobody told me. The emotions after a breast cancer diagnosis is not separate from the physical experience. Hear me out. They are part of it. This is not separate. They are a physiological response to a genuine threat. And the threat, obviously, is the cancer diagnosis and what is to come. Your body and your mind.

Are not two different things, having two different experiences. They are actually one system, responding together. And that system was about to go through something enormous. For me, the emotions came in waves. And some of them I expect, some of them I completely didn't see it, nor can see it coming for me. Some of them are deep.

Katherine Froggatt (03:44.568)

visceral roar shocking fear, and the uncertainty of what's happening, and the terror of not knowing what to expect or what's going to happen. Because let's face it, when you get loads of printouts, brochures from the surgeon, from the hospital, and the nurses that are giving you all these things to read through, how many of us actually read and process it? Probably a very small percentage of us. I know I didn't read all of it.

And maybe the more I read it, the more terrified I am and I became. So some of these emotions are grief. For me, grief was one of the things that I couldn't really name in the beginning. But it is something that had to happen. And it was grieving the version of myself, I suddenly wasn't sure I existed anymore.

Because what I knew to be true for me completely was off kilter because hey, I got cancer, so I didn't take care of myself and my whole identity of achieving, accomplishing, delivering and the doing was challenged because hey, guess what? This is something completely out of the blue. I must have done something wrong. So

I didn't know how I existed or how I should be existing moving forward. And the future that I thought I had in my mind felt like it was completely erased. So for now, whilst I sat in that diagnosis and processing all those emotions, I feel like my whole life has been on hold, that I don't know what is to come, and that all of this uncertainty is making me feel the incredible anxiety and the unknown.

And there are also moments where I probably laughed because I watched my kids do something funny and I tried to inject some level of normality. I did laugh and I probably laughed a few times with friends that was coming to see me and we talked about something different, something completely not cancer related. And there are times when these moments just brought that you know, sort of a slight pause in all of the

Katherine Froggatt (06:07.665)

deep negative narratives that I was challenging on a daily basis. And sometimes the laughter I came to understand later on that laughter was just part of what my nervous system was needing to do to navigate the overwhelm.

And of course I cried, obviously, many nights, many days, when I just didn't have the capacity for words. But all I had were tears and tears of fear, tears of insecurity, and tears of the the the trauma of the diagnosis that hit me out of the blue. And I was never known to be a crier, my friends.

Because I was always just someone that had everything under control and was the person that everyone turned to. But then suddenly I'm the one who needs help. And the guilt was enormous. The deep, quiet guilt that I had where I realized that I I was constantly judging myself that I didn't do better at my self-care, that I should have known there was something wrong.

And what if I had discovered things earlier that I didn't delay the doctor's appointment, that perhaps this wouldn't be stage two breast cancer, it would have been just one tumor. That somehow this should have been caught earlier. That there was something I had missed, ignored, or not done enough of. This guilt was really stifling and suffocating for me. And that was one of the heaviest things that I carried because it was directed at me.

I was holding this invisible whip that was constantly carried by me since I was a child. And I was unknowingly doing this whipping action on myself, so much so that this was so normalized a behavior for me. And also in one way or another, this particular mindset was what got me really successful in my career. So

Katherine Froggatt (08:20.264)

It was difficult because I did not know what to do with any of this and nobody handed me a guide of what's happening in my inner world, of guilt, of shame, of judgment, of all the crying, of all of the overwhelm and anxiety that I was feeling. It was really difficult for me. So here's what I eventually learned and what the research backs as well.

The instinct most of us have when overwhelming emotions arrive is to push them away because we're so conditioned to actually believe that these emotions are too scary for us to deal with. I cannot feel them because I will show other people that I am not in control, that I am weak, that I am not coping. And when these emotions arrive,

I should stop thinking about it. I should stay busy. Or I should do everything I can to mask, to suppress it, to hold it all together. Especially us women, and I know many of you are listening in and potentially are relating to my experience, this visceral emotion of fear and overwhelm that we cannot be feeling. Especially us mothers as well.

Right? We need to always show up for our children and our family in a way that does not show fear or lack of control or that we are the authority and we almost almost always tell ourselves that we need to be perfect. Especially when everyone around us is also scared. I don't want my children to see me fall apart because what am I showing them that?

This authority figure, this role model, this person here is not what they think I should be. And what makes it worse is that the more I try to mask it, the more I suppress it. And the more I want to be a certain way, the worse I feel. I'm always saying I'm fine, but when I'm actually not, when everybody else could see that I am.

Katherine Froggatt (10:46.665)

caving in, I'm falling into the deep dark hole that I still need to soldier on and white knuckles through all these emotions. So here's what's actually happening when we do that. Suppressing emotions is not making it disappear. It is requiring that your body to actively hold it down. Don't show it. Don't let people know you're crumbling. And that holding

Takes energy and it keeps your nervous system in a state of low-grade alert, the hypervigilance that is like an alarm that never quite gets turned off. According to the researcher James Pennybaker at the University of Texas, he has spent decades studying what happens when people express emotions versus suppressing it. His finding

Is consistent. That suppression creates a measurable physiological burden on our body. It is not just emotionally exhausting, it has real immune system consequences as well. And for us, this really matters. Because immune function is not a nice to have. It's not luck of the draw either. It is part of our recovery.

And if you if if you imagine that all of the chemotherapy treatments that we're receiving and and lowering our immune response with neutrophils being low, and if we are not able to boost our immune system in order for us to continue chemotherapy treatments as well, then this these moments of emotional suppression is actually a perfect storm.

Now on the flip side of that, neuroscientist Matthew Lieberman showed that when we put words to an emotion, when we actually name what we are feeling within our body, it reduces the activity in the amygdala, which is a gland in our brain. And that is the brain's threat detection center. And I always tell my clients it's like our little smoke alarm.

Katherine Froggatt (13:10.608)

And it increases activity in the prefrontal cortex of our brain, where regulation and reasoning live. So, learning to name the feeling is not just emotionally useful, it literally helps your brain shift and navigate out of threat response. Now, let's acknowledge one fact. The fact is a cancer diagnosis is now being received as a huge life-threatening incident. And however long it takes for our body to regulate into a sort of out of a threat response, which is fight, flight, or freeze, into more dominance towards rest and digest. This is actually happening to our nervous system at at that point. So the amygdala is the communication control center where that happens. So this is actual science.

This is important for us to understand. And because if I add this fact for you to process that actually from a physiological standpoint, this is really what's happening, then I'm inviting you to really sit with this. Sit with me for a moment. Because this is actually where it changed my trajectory of my recovery.

We, as women, are taught mostly by the medical system to treat the body and the mind as separate beings or separate problems with separate solutions. We've never ever really seen that as one. Even our oncologists, as expert as specialized as they are, they treat the tumor. As psychologists, they treat the anxiety.

They are in different rooms. But that is not how it works inside you. The emotions you are feeling after a diagnosis are creating a physiological response in your body. The fear is rising our cortisol. The fear is raising our cortisol. The suppression that we're trying to you know, we're trying to really

Katherine Froggatt (15:33.447)

push away the emotions. The suppression is keeping your nervous system activated. Right? Activated in fight, fly, or freeze. And the guilt is sitting in your tissues, in your cells. Right? So the relationship between you and your own physical self is often one of the quieter casualties of a diagnosis that nobody really talks about.

And the reverse is also true. When you name what you are feeling, when you allow it to start moving through rather than building up like a pressure cooker and suppressing it because you just want to have a lid on because you can't let it go, what's happening is you're creating a real physiological change. You are giving your body a message that the immediate threat had been registered and processed.

Through naming the feeling.

So, this is why emotional work is not optional in our breast cancer recovery. It is not a luxury either for when you have the extra time or energy. It is part of what we are actually doing when you are healing. So it is essential. This has to happen as soon as we are

Starting treatments or as soon as we are finishing treatments wherever you are in your journey, it is never too late for us to start naming those emotions.

Katherine Froggatt (17:14.521)

So I want to share what actually helped me in those early days and weeks. And this is not a prescription of what you must do, but I'm inviting you to just consider it to be a possibility for you. The first thing I would like to share is that I found trusted people around me, people I who

People who I knew would hold what I told them without judgment, without trying to fix it, without flinching, and I let myself be honest with them. This is really important because who you choose to tell and who you are implementing as part of your cancer recovery team is very important.

And I said the hardest things and the hardest emotions out loud to them. The guilt, the grief. and and I had a lot of grieving because I had a full mastectomy and I lost my nipple as well. And so there there is this whole grieving of the change in my body and my femininity. And these sh you know, shame that I'm feeling, these moments of I should have taken.

Better care of myself. I had to have an outlet to articulate and to share it with somebody else. And slowly, as those words left my body and landed somewhere safe for somebody else to receive and to sit with me to let me know that I'll be okay. I started, I started to stop hating myself for what I was feeling.

And that was a very important shift for me. I started to see that maybe this was happening for me, even though most of the time that felt impossible to hold on to. But just brief moments of that. But they were there.

Katherine Froggatt (19:26.968)

And the second thing was learning how to press pause. That was hard for me, my friends. I've always been a person that kept moving, who stayed busy, who equated stillness with falling behind. And cancer stopped all of that very suddenly before my mind could actually align with what is true to me. So

Learning to allocate time to sit and do nothing was an intention I had to set for myself. A new habit I had to learn because let's face it, it I was not working and I had the chance to learn and be friend stillness in a whole new way. And I found out that it was challenging.

way more challenging than I thought it was possible. But in the stillness, I started to find breath work. I love breath work, my friends. It was foundational for me to learn how to breathe properly again. I've always been chronically stressed and burnt out as well. And I've always been a shallow breather. And so learning how to be breathing properly was one of the key

shift in the early days of learning how to foster a brand new habit. So at the very beginning, the fear would spike very often. And I know few of us who are listening in would probably attest to it as well. And my thoughts would start spiraling. And the thing that would help me most was simplest thing and just breathing. Deliberately with intention. So here's how I did it.

I adopted the box breathing approach. So I a breath in for four counts, hold for four counts, out for six counts, and hold for six counts. Now this pattern of breathing allowed me to activate the parasympathetic nervous system, the longer exhalation and the slow holes.

Katherine Froggatt (21:51.383)

really help to signal and teach my body that actually I am safe on a physiological level. That I am okay. That everything is okay. Because there are a lot of moments when the threat and the overwhelm will kick in and if we are able to allow ourselves the moment to just breathe, you are here, you are breathing, and I'm okay. And that was where I started.

And it changed more than I expected.

Katherine Froggatt (22:26.241)

If you are in the thick of this right now, here is what I want would like to invite you to do. Start by naming these emotions. Let go of needing to fix it. There is no need to manage it, just naming it out loud if you can. Or if you can't find the words, you could write it on paper, if it's easier. And say, I'm feeling terrified.

I'm feeling the grief. I'm feeling guilt that I do not know what to do with it. And let the tears flow because there will be a release of all the tension and that is absolutely a normal human response.

My friends, I have never been a crier, but I guess cancer taught me how to start releasing those pent up, pressurized, suppressed emotions that have been holding for more than I can remember. And this act of naming, of putting words to what is happening inside you is the beginning of a physiological shift. Then breathing.

Four counts in, four counts hold, six counts out, and six counts hold. And do it three times in one seating. Once a day to start, and then working your way through to three times a day. And that is a good starting point. And if you can find one trusted person to say the hard things, do that. Not someone who needs you to be strong, but someone who holds the weight.

of what you are actually carrying. And you do not need to have it all figured out. You do not need to be handling it perfectly either. You just need to start letting it move.

Katherine Froggatt (24:34.956)

So here's what I want you to take from today. The emotional experience of a breast cancer diagnosis is not separate from your physical recovery. It is part of it. Your body, your body and your mind are one system. And what you feel and how you process what you feel has real consequences for your immune function. And your healing is important too.

Naming is not a weakness or is not really a chore. We can learn to build this muscle of identifying those feelings and not to be afraid of those emotions. And grieving is not falling apart. Letting trusted people in is not burdening them as well. These are the things that actually help your body do what it is trying to do. To keep you safe.

To hold that space for you. And you're not doing anything wrong. You are navigating something massive. And the fact that you are still here, still searching for ways through, still listening to a podcast at whatever time of day or night this is for you, this matters. The resilient remission assessment is linked in my bio and show notes. It takes about five minutes or less.

Only twelve questions and it will help you understand where your nervous system is right now and what it actually needs. And this is a really good place to start.

Katherine Froggatt (27:08.789)

When it comes to finding someone and trusting someone with supporting me and asking for help.

Katherine Froggatt (27:18.546)

I have a funny story to share with you. I always had difficulty delegating because I had okay, let's scratch that.