The website is in existence today simply because the man who started it, my father, was driven by a desire to provide help and support to the community of people who continue to be touched by cancer.

As part of my desire to keep this website alive, I wish to carry on that legacy by offering some thoughts, every now and again, that I hope provide the reader/visitor with help and support, that my father would be proud to be associated with.

I have been reading about the psychology of Alfred Adler and it is as a result of reading his work that I have come to surmise that the main objective my father had with writing this blog and also his book was, in the words of Adler: “Contribution to others”.

This sense of “contribution to others”, also referred to as “community feeling” is something that can also help when it comes to understanding why many people who experience a crisis in the life move toward a desire to help others. It may well be a very effective therapy.

What I would like to mention, however, is there is also a danger, due to circumstances that may have happened in their early childhood, that instead of have the sense of contributing others, they have what I would term an unhealthy need to “contribute to self”.

If you ever identify with that, either in yourself or in a loved one, this is likely to be due to circumstances that have until now, been beyond you or the person’s ‘control’ or conscious awareness, and as I have mentioned at the top, likely to stem from influences during childhood development

I wish to leave you with a thought on therapy that might help a situation such as this, which is: I’m of the mind that any form of therapy should be directed toward helping the person realise how a shift of focus away from themselves, and being guided towards a way of contributing to others, in a kind and gentle way, may be beneficial. According to the work of Alfred Adler, it may also be useful to invite the person to describe their earliest childhood memory, however, this is best done with the aid of a trained therapist who has developed an trained understanding of Adlerian Psychology.