change therapy

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it’s friday, and frozen pea post time - my weekly post on cancer. today, i’ve put together a guest post about psychological research regarding breast cancer over at GNIF brain blogger. you won’t be surprised to hear that social support contributes to higher survival rates.

two observations are more counter-intuitive, though: it is unclear to what degree being married helps with survival rates. also, surprisingly, it looks like minimizing is a good coping strategy. the authors of the studies supporting this do not go into much of a description of what is meant by minimizing and indeed, it is a coping strategy that tends not to be discussed much in detail. i suspect that is because psychologists and therapists tend to be suspicious of it - after all, we’re big on validation, which, at least on the face of it, looks like the opposite of minimizing.

minimizing refers to downplaying the impact of an event or experience, e.g. downplaying one’s pain level, the degree to which one is incapacitated, etc.

perhaps minimizing comes with a “glass half full” attitude, and that helps with better survival rates?

what do you think - should i look some more into this?