San Mateo Woman Takes Readers on a 'Learning Journey'

In 1958, when her husband was diagnosed with brain cancer, June Lamb was a wife and mother asking questions no one was prepared to answer at the time.

Ms. Lamb said the medical community wasn’t ready to deal with the emotional needs of her husband or the effect his cancer had on their family.

As far as the doctors were concerned, they were interested in the patient’s medical condition and little else.

Since that time, Ms. Lamb said, the world has changed for the better and she is one of the people helping to provide support for Bay Area families dealing with life-threatening illnesses.

"I specialize in working with catastrophic illness or working with catastrophic events in the family system,” Ms. Lamb said.

The 85-year-old licensed psychotherapist helps individuals and their families deal with the fear, anger and emotions that arise when someone is facing potential death from an illness.

In her recently published book, “The Learning Journey,” Ms.  Lamb, a San Mateo-based family therapist offers wisdom based on her nearly 30 years of professional experience.   

Subtitled “Absorbing Life’s Lessons,” the book offers advice on how to deal with life’s challenges, which include, but are not limited to dealing with the loss of loved ones.

Ms. Lamb wrote her book from both personal and professional experience. Each of the book’s ten chapters begins with Ms. Lamb relating an experience from her own life and following that up with clinical cases drawn from her professional experience as a family therapist.  

The book’s first chapter is titled “The Hardest Lesson of All.” It deals with the acceptance of death, something Ms. Lamb has personally had to deal with multiple times.

“I have had a relatively unusual life, which has included the death of my fiancé in the Battle of the Bulge and the death of my children’s father from brain cancer.”

In working with cancer patients in her practice, Ms. Lamb says one of her initial goals is to get the entire family together to talk about their fears, anger, and the feelings that accompany the news that they have cancer.

Ms. Lamb said one of the hardest things for people to deal with is the fact that we are not always in control of what happens to us. But not being in control of everything does not mean we have to
adopt what she calls a “declaration of powerless.”  

When people are done reading “The Learning Journey,” Mrs. Lamb hopes their take away is that they might not be able to control everything that happens to them, but they always have a choice in how they respond to those events. 

“My hope is that this would help people find their own inner power and accept life the way it is rather than the way they want it to be,” Ms. Lamb said.