How Therapy Can Support Preparation for and Recovery from Major Surgery

How can your therapist support you in preparing for, undergoing, and processing major surgery? Let's talk about it!

Utilizing Therapy to Prepare for Surgery

When I work with clients who are preparing for surgery, some of our work initially looks very solution-focused. We explore all of the things you might need to physically prepare and set up your supports. However, what I like to primarily focus on is preparing your narrative and your imagery around this procedure. Together, we shape the lens you’re viewing your procedure through, and begin to work with imagery that you can utilize all the way up until that moment you’re sitting in pre-op and preparing to head into the operating room. What I like to remind clients in this work is that "energy follows intention."

Preparing for Endometriosis surgery can feel like an overwhelming unknown. Preparing for a hysterectomy can feel like a profound loss. Preparing for a mastectomy can feel like a devastating shock. Together, we honor and process fear and grief, and begin to connect to restorative imagery that allows you to tap into a new story of how this is re-organizing your inner terrain. What energy and emotion do you want to release with the excavation in this procedure, and what seeds do you want to plant in the spaces in your body that you are reclaiming as yours?

Utilizing Therapy to Process Post Surgery

To support clients post surgery, I often utilize a combination of EMDR, Brainspotting, resourcing imagery and IFS parts work to process the medical event, including what your body remembers. Anesthesia, surgery and hospital stays can be a disembodying, ungrounding and disorienting experience. Together, we work to ground you back into your body, reconnect to agency and safety, and process what physiologically and psychologically just happened to your mind, body and spirit.

In this co-created, integrative and affirming container, you get to say all the hard things you might not get to say to your support system. Here, you get to fall apart and lose the pieces you no longer want to hold, and put together the pieces that resonate in a new way. You get to be both devastated and hopeful. Empowered and afraid. Exhausted and ready. Mad and grateful. It’s all welcome here. As your unconditional co-pilot, we’ll navigate it together. This is the space that you get to arrive and exhale, for a soft landing amidst hard experiences. Then, we walk through this process together.

Candice Craft, LMFT

LMFT # 154305

soulcraftcounseling@gmail.com