As healthcare professionals, we owe it to you not only to provide medical information and technical management skills but also to help you manage feelings and emotions.
While knowledge about how to manage diabetes is extremely important, just “knowing” won’ t be enough to help you make it through to feeling better.
It’s not just about knowing, it’s about feeling and feeling comfortable about letting feelings come up and be expressed.
How you deal with difficult feelings and emotions and how your family deals with each other will help you use the knowledge and management information that you’ll need to learn in order to get on with your lives. How you, as parents, talk with each other, how you support each other, how well you deal with that and deal with how other people in your family deal with that will have tremendous impact on your child’s medical control, management and psychological adjustment.
It’s my job, together with all the other people in this book, to help you learn how to deal with the feelings so that you can suit up and show up for managing this disease on a daily basis. We’re all here to let you know you’re not alone!
Over the years I’ve seen so clearly that the families who deal with the psychological stuff with “eyes wide open” do better with the technical management stuff. They are the ones that do the best.
My clinical experience in the United States and abroad for the past 35 years has shown me that this area – the tools and guidelines for the integration of emotional and psychological well-being in diabetes – needs to be more available to patients, their families and health care professionals. If you feel “right” then you can get into action. If you’re not feeling right and balanced then it’s hard to get into action and do what you need to do to move on with your life in an engaged and productive way.