No More Bingo Dresses: Using NLP to cope with breast cancer and other people by Rosie O'Hara

No More Bingo Dresses: Using NLP to cope with breast cancer and other people by Rosie O'Hara
Buy No More Bingo Dresses: Using NLP to cope with breast cancer and other people by Rosie O'Hara at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com
Category: Lifestyle
Reviewer: Trish Simpson-Davis
Summary: Feisty Rosie O'Hara recounts the year in her life when a routine mammogram turned up “a little breast cancer”. Also a self-help guide to NLP's potential in helping cancer patients, but I found this part difficult to understand.
Buy? Yes	Borrow? Yes
Pages: 202	Date: May 2011
Publisher: MX Publishing
External links: Author's website
ISBN: 978-1908218346
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I'd love to meet Rosie O'Hara. She sounds like a full-on, earthy lady who has more than a few tales to tell about her life to date. Rosie is a professional neuro-linguistic programming trainer in the Highlands of Scotland, and has already published an NLP-based self-help book. At the beginning of 2009, a routine mammogram turned up a little breast cancer. Rosie set out in her very direct and determined way to put the cancer in its rightful place as a challenge in her life rather than a defining disaster and this feisty diary is the result.

To achieve positivism she used NLP, which involves re-framing negative thoughts into more useful channels, usually by removing the spin. Rosie used visualisation to contain her cancer in the run up to her mastectomy, which was a particularly anxious waiting time. (Maybe I'm not using the right terms, which sounded a bit awkwardly technical to me, but hopefully you get my drift). Fortunately surgery and radiotherapy have restored Rosie to good though lop-sided health, and she decided to publish her thoughts, feelings and progress in an effort to help and encourage other unfortunate recipients of the Big C.

At times darkly humorous and at others quite angry with the world, here is an original diary for anyone wanting to explore what it feels like to live through this particular experience. It is, of course, one woman's narrative, so Rosie has her original take on just about everything, which you may or may not feel as a fellow cancer patient. She brushes aside the issue of de-feminisation after mastectomy because she didn't happen to feel like that. She didn't worry overly about dying (quite correctly: there's a 92% 5 year survival rate for breast cancer these days). Neither did she lose her sense of self in suddenly becoming a patient. Instead Rosie rants at the vocabulary of cancer, objecting to the fighting terminology traditionally used and always insisting, … listen to that individual, please.

I found the NLP part of the story somewhat incomprehensible, and in the end decided that for me, it intruded in Rosie's much more interesting life story. I suppose if you were more interested in the potential of NLP in the cancer context, you might feel the life story intervened! It may have been that the content still needed some straightening in the author's mind – after all this event only happened a couple of years ago, which isn't long to make sense of a major life crisis. Or it may be that the editing needed to be considerably more stringent. Either way, the juxtaposition of NLP primer and narrative story wasn't quite smooth enough for my taste.

However, the NLP techniques Rosie describes will certainly do no harm, and may potentially do a great deal of good. If you are interested (or worried) enough to read the book, hopefully it will spur you on to consulting an accredited NLP practitioner.

I'd like to thank the publishers for sending this book.

Suggestions for further reading:

There are several NLP texts on the mx publishing website, including the story of another cancer patient helped by NLP, Bangers and Mash by Keith Hern. We also loved Taryn McKeiver's cancer story in A November to Remember.

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You can read more book reviews or buy No More Bingo Dresses: Using NLP to cope with breast cancer and other people by Rosie O'Hara at Amazon.com.

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Rosie O'Hara, the author said:

Yes comment from the author please - absolutely no radiotherapy was had by me, I have to date refused all conventional treatment! And when we can fix up a meet then?

Remember also my decision was based on experiences had when my late husband was diagnosed with cancer in 1993 too.

Thanks for the review, I like all of it apart from your inaccuracy which I hope you’ll correct please;) and take good care of yourself

Rosie

Rosie O'Hara

Director at NLP Highland, Certified NLP Trainer, Licensed Consultant and Trainer of the Language and Behaviour Profile, MInstLM.

Approved Endorsed & Development Provider by ILM

Dr Katharine Timberlake said:

Rosie gave me a manuscript that had some stuff straight from her heart and some straight from her head. My job was to let both her heart and head shine through. The book contains diary entries, musings on common themes and an NLP primer, so I gave the chapters clear titles to show which is which and therein is the stringency in the editing that the reviewer seemingly did not appreciate. Sometimes, categories of life happenings are just that and shouldn't be blended together. All in all, I think that women who wish to reflect will find Rosie both comprehensible and totally sorted and will be able to quickly move on to their own particular situation.

Kind regards Dr Katharine Timberlake, the copy editor Member of the Society for Editors and Proofreaders (advanced) and the European Association of Science Editors