Copyright 2001, Colin C. Tipping

Jane’s Story
Jane came to one of our five-day retreats in the North
Georgia mountains. She had had a mastectomy and
was awaiting a bone-marrow transplant. After the re-
treat, she came to me once a week for hypnotherapy
and individual coaching. On the second visit she ar-
rived in a distressed state, because a routine Magnetic
Resonance Imaging (MRI) scan had that day discov-
ered minute spots of cancer
 
in her brain.
While this new cancer was upsetting enough by itself,
its appearance also was liable to spoil her chances of
a transplant. The doctors planned to give her chemo-
therapy to try and arrest the cancer’s progress. How-
ever, they were surprised at her condition, because nor-
mally metastasis proceeds from the breast to the liver
and then to the brain. Very rarely does cancer proceed
directly from the breast to the brain. To me, this seemed
worthy of some exploration.
Jane, an attractive woman in her early forties, had not
been involved in a romantic relationship for about seven
years. She had a boyfriend of sorts, but she described
the relationship as not much more than a close friend-
ship. In fact, she said she looked upon him as her
buddy,
even though she had sex with him from time to
time. As I probed further into her relationship situation,
she got in touch with some incredible grief she still felt
around a relationship she had ended a number of years
ago. This eight-year relationship was extremely pas-
sionate and intense, and Jane clearly worshipped the
man. Four years into this relationship, which she be-
lieved was soon to be consummated in marriage, she
discovered that he was married already and had chil-
dren. He had no intention of leaving his wife. Jane
was devastated but could not stop seeing him. It took
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her another four extremely painful years to extricate her-
self from this relationship.
It was clear to me, that as a result of this failed relation-
ship, Jane had shut down her emotions completely and
would no longer allow herself to get involved so deeply
with a man. Neither was I surprised that she had suf-
fered a broken heart; most women with breast cancer
have a broken heart somewhere in their history. (The
breast is the organ of nurturance and is in the proximity
of, and related to the heart.)
As she was going out the door at the end of our ses-
sion, Jane said in a whisper, “I put him in the attic.”
I stopped in my tracks. “What do you mean?” I asked.
“Well, everything I had accumulated over the years that
had any connection to this man, or that would remind
me of him, I stuffed in a box. I then put the box up in the
attic. It's still there. I haven't touched it since.”
I told her to sit down and tell me that again. I had her
repeat the same thing three times. Suddenly, she saw
the connection between the box in the attic that repre-
sented her broken love affair and her brain cancer. “Oh,
my God,” she said. “That's him in my head, isn't it? He’s
in my attic.”
I told her to go home, go up into the attic and take down
the box. I told her to bring it with her to her next ses-
sion, and we would go through it piece by piece. We
planned for her to tell me the story around each item
until we had exorcised his energy and released the pain
that she had repressed. Jane understood that this might
be the key to her healing and was very excited. Tragi-
cally, she had a seizure the next day and was taken
back to the hospital. She died a month later without
ever touching the box in the attic. Looking at the box’s
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contents and feeling the pain of her lost love may have
been just too much for her to bear, and I feel, at some
level, she may have decided to let go of life rather than
face the pain.