With increasing frequency, psychotherapy practitioners encounter patients who struggle with enduring physical illness, such as cancer, AIDS, diabetes, and kidney disease. Chronic physical illnesses have a common psychological thread: the individual's experience of life will never again return to the pre-illness sense of self, of options, of invulnerability, of obliviousness to the body's functioning. The individual's strongest wish is to return to normal. The psychotherapist's strongest wish is to heal. The uncertainty, progression and unpredictability of illness create anxiety in the therapist as well as in the patient.