Prostate cancer whacks intimate relationships!
What has happened to your relationships after prostate cancer? If you or your partner has been treated for prostate cancer and your relationship is seriously affected, please read on. If intimacy is important to you, perhaps the offer below will help.
Why talk to me about your relationship after prostate cancer?
The body changes caused by prostate cancer treatment can seriously disrupt and even destroy intimacy – physically, emotionally and in primal ways beyond words. It is too precious to give this up without asking for help.
Often it’s really difficult for one or both of you to share and help each other grapple with this. For my wife and me it knocked us sideways. We have learned a lot about having awkward conversations and figuring out how to adapt what we do in the bedroom. What is it like for you?
- Do you care but still get stuck as a couple – so much of it seems undiscussable?
- Is one or are both of you withdrawing emotionally and/or physically?
- Are you getting all the medical help you want?
- Perhaps medical treatment is not enough to give you back what you had before. Emotions run high.
This might be the time to get an expert to hold a safe space for you to talk to each other about what is happening to your relationship.
When at least one, and probably both of you, is hurting – the difficult conversations need to be carried on with care and mutual respect. It can help to have a neutral outsider to keep you on track and hold balance for both of your different voices and feelings.
You can reclaim your intimacy in some form. You can work together to figure out how to respond to the “divorce disease” without losing each other. Maybe I can help you do that.
Pilot programme: helping couples respond to prostate cancer together
For the first five couples to commit to working with me, I promise to work with you completely free and with no other commitments for three months. Future offers will depend on the results of this pilot programme. All I want from you is full engagement, and frank feedback.
I’m a professionally certified relationship systems coach with 17 years experience in this field. Coaching your relationship means that I help you, the partners, find your way forward together. I don’t (and can’t) solve the problem for you. And focusing on the relationship as a system means it is not about individual blame or taking sides, but helping your partnership respond creatively to new circumstances.
I am not a psychologist and I know my limits – I can help you find who else you need on your team. I am good at connecting with people online, beyond the limits of the technology and the screen. And I had my own prostate removed four years ago.
My invitation to you is to get help from me as a coach:
- somebody who has empathy for you
- somebody who listens carefully
- with a focus on you, together, finding your best way forward
To try this out, I invite you to sign up for an initial conversation, where the two of you sit with me on Zoom for between 3o minutes and an hour and explore what you are struggling with, what you want to achieve, and whether we are well matched to work together. With a focus on your relationship after prostate cancer.
I have been facilitating a successful global open support group for men with prostate cancer and sexual health issues for nearly 3 years. Under the right conditions, we’ve found men going deep about the very topics they say “men don’t talk about.” And this is now an opportunity to include the partners of men with prostate cancer, whatever your gender, on an equal footing.