What's Missing From Most Cancer Care: The Body Knows Things the Mind Can't Reach

Dr. Lena Suhaila, ND, FABNO

Most of my patients come to me focused on what to take, what to eat, and what to do next. That makes sense. When you're dealing with serious illness, the body needs real support. But somewhere in our first conversations, something else usually surfaces, not a symptom exactly, more like a question underneath the question: Why do I feel so disconnected from myself? Why does being in my own body feel so hard?

They often don't have words for it. They just know that the way they've been living, pushing through, taking care of everyone else, swallowing what they actually feel, hasn't been working, and they know it.

This is where what I call the Deeper Medicine comes in.

If you've been living with a serious illness, you've probably gotten very good at coping. You show up to appointments, you ask the right questions, and you manage other people's worry about you on top of your own. You research. You plan. You hold it together because falling apart feels like a luxury you can't afford, or because the people around you need you to be okay.

And somewhere in all of that, you stopped being asked how you actually are. Not your numbers, not your treatment response, not your side effects. You. What you're carrying. What you've never said out loud. What you've been pushing past for so long, you've almost forgotten it's there. It has a cost, and most people feel it as a kind of flatness, a distance from their own life, a sense that they're getting through rather than living.

What we're actually working with: Compassionate Inquiry, IFS, and Polyvagal Theory

Alongside the clinical work, I draw on three approaches that work at the level of the nervous system, the body, and the inner world: Compassionate Inquiry, Internal Family Systems (IFS), and Polyvagal Theory. These aren't talk therapy in the conventional sense. You're not just describing what happened to you. You're actually in contact with it, in real time, in your body, with support.

Compassionate Inquiry, developed by Dr. Gabor Maté, starts with a simple but genuinely radical premise: that physical symptoms, chronic illness, and the patterns that wear us down over a lifetime, the self-suppression, the hypervigilance, the inability to say no, aren't character flaws. They're adaptations. They made sense given what you went through. The work is about getting curious about those patterns rather than fighting them, and starting to feel what was too much to feel at the time.

IFS, Internal Family Systems, offers a map for understanding why we can want something and sabotage it at the same time, why we can know something intellectually and still not be able to act on it. It works with the idea that we're made up of different parts, a part that's scared, one that overachieves to feel safe, one that's been carrying grief for years, one that goes numb when things get too hard. None of those parts are the problem. They've all been trying to protect you. The work is about meeting them with enough compassion that they don't have to work so hard anymore, and finding that underneath all of them, there's a Self that's actually quite steady.

Polyvagal Theory gives us the biological grounding for all of this. It explains why the nervous system gets stuck in survival states, why some people go into freeze rather than fight or flight, and why connection itself can feel threatening when you've had to be your own source of safety for a long time. Understanding your own nervous system patterns isn't just intellectually interesting. It changes how you relate to your reactions, your symptoms, and your body in a pretty fundamental way.

Does this work online?

Yes, somatic and nervous system work translates well to video sessions, and for some people it works better than in-person.

People ask me this often, usually with some hesitation, as if expecting me to confirm that something gets lost over a screen. It doesn't, or at least not what they think.

What happens between two people in this kind of work isn't carried by physical proximity. It's carried by the face, the voice, the eyes, the quality of attention. That's what Polyvagal Theory calls the social engagement system, and it's the channel co-regulation actually uses. When my nervous system is settled and tracking yours, you feel that, whether I'm sitting across from you or two countries away. What you feel is being met, and met isn't a function of distance.

There are things I actually prefer about doing this work online. You're in your own space. Your nervous system is already at home. You can lie down, you can hold your dog, you can cry into your own pillow if that's what wants to happen. After we end, you don't have to drive anywhere or pull yourself together for the world. You stay where the work happened. For a lot of people, that's not a compromise. It's an upgrade.

From the head into the body

Most of us, especially people living with serious illness, spend enormous amounts of time in our heads. Researching, planning, managing, bracing. The mind works overtime trying to feel in control of something that can't fully be controlled, and it's exhausting. The body becomes either a problem to manage or something to push through, rather than a place to actually live.

What these approaches offer, practically, is a way down, not a metaphor but a literal shift in attention, from thought to sensation, from analysis to direct experience. What does this feel like in my chest right now? Where do I notice tightness, or heaviness, or the absence of feeling altogether? You're not trying to figure anything out; you're just making contact. For many people this is unfamiliar enough to feel strange at first. We're so trained to reach for understanding that simply being with sensation can feel like doing nothing. But something happens when you stop trying to think your way through an experience and just let yourself have it. The nervous system settles. The body, often for the first time in a long time, gets to rest. From that place, things that felt stuck start to have room to move.

What it actually feels like to do this work

You don't have to explain yourself or arrive with it all figured out. You bring whatever is alive for you, something that's been weighing on you, a feeling you can't name, something your body keeps doing that your mind hasn't caught up with yet. There's no predetermined territory, no agenda beyond what's actually present.

What happens in a session emerges from what's present. We're mapping it as it moves, following what surfaces, staying with what needs attention. There's a quality of attention in that kind of work that creates something most people haven't experienced before, a space where it's actually safe to not be okay, where you don't have to hold yourself together because someone else is holding the container. What tends to move through that space is a softness, a kind of opening, where people find understanding for parts of themselves they'd been fighting for years and feel, sometimes for the first time, that they're not alone inside their own experience.

It's quieter than people expect. We're not excavating trauma for its own sake or pushing toward catharsis. More often, we're just slowing down enough to notice what's actually here. What does that contraction in your chest feel like if you let yourself stay with it? What does that part of you that's been holding everything together actually need? What happens in your body when you're finally permitted to not be okay?

What tends to happen, gradually, is that things that felt fixed start to shift, not because you forced them but because you gave them enough space to move. People describe feeling more like themselves, sometimes for the first time in years, more present in their own lives, less driven by a low hum of fear or obligation they didn't even know was running in the background. They start to actually know what they feel, what they need, and what it's like to act from that place rather than around it.

What most people don't know is available to them

Most people have no idea how much fuller their experience of being alive could feel, not because something is wrong with them but because nobody taught them to have this kind of relationship with themselves. The culture we live in actively discourages it. You learn to perform strength, contain feeling, keep moving. What these approaches offer is a way back, not to some idealized past self, but to a depth of inner connection that was always there, just never given room.

Serious illness has a way of making that room. It strips away the distractions and asks a harder question: what do I actually need, and have I ever let myself have it? I don't think that question needs to stay frightening. In my experience, it can become one of the more honest and alive parts of the whole process.

What is your body trying to tell you that you haven't let yourself hear yet?

Selected References

1. Maté, G. (2022). The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture. Avery.

2. Porges, S.W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation. W.W. Norton.

3. Porges, S.W. (2022). Polyvagal Theory: A Science of Safety. Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience.

4. Schwartz, R.C. & Sweezy, M. (2020). Internal Family Systems Therapy (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.

5. Hodgdon, H.B., et al. (2021). Internal Family Systems (IFS) Therapy for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Among Survivors of Multiple Childhood Trauma: A Pilot Effectiveness Study. Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma.