Author: Kelly Pelton

Take pains to build equal, reciprocal friendships in which you are seen as a whole person and not simply a resource or a demographic. You do not need to be designated as a leader in every group in which you participate. Try to avoid groups of friends who, as we all age, talk mostly about their medical problems. You need at least one group of people who are a safe haven for you with no expectation of you serving a medical purpose regularly.

We all compartmentalize our medical brains when we’re off duty, and you need people who don’t expect you to turn it on. Cultivate friendships in which neither of you is seen as a role but rather as a personality whose being is more delightful than one’s “doing” (role or function). Seek friends who’ll never put you on a pedestal because of your being a doctor. You are a whole person with quirks, mannerisms, strengths, weaknesses, blind spots, character flaws, and endearing qualities, and you need loving relationships in which you can be enjoyed as your whole self and can enjoy others similarly.

We have no actual control over relationships. Good relationships require that both parties are emotionally healthy. Relationships cannot be the most important thing in our lives. Love and truth are most important, and if we adhere to love and truth, some of our relationships will flourish and others will wither. Relational rift occurs when at least one person is not adhering to either love or truth, and rifts are not the end of the world. This rifting happens occasionally in the doctor-patient relationship, and we need not be inconsolable but can rather wish a patient well in their relationship with another doctor. Relationships must always be subordinate to love and truth.

Healthy relationships are possible only if each person takes responsibility for his or her own distress. Even if another person triggers our unpleasant emotions, we have the responsibility and the privilege of discerning what emotions are surfacing and why. As adults, we get to take the time to analyze our own distress and discern any false perceptions that are contributing to our distress.

As we discover the roots of our unpleasant emotions and get healed, we can then assert a healthy power in our relationships to insist on healthier dynamics, including the relationships with those who were triggering us.

On the healing journey, it’s helpful to name the behaviors we’ve endured or witnessed that are the opposites of love. Withdrawing, withholding, punishing with the silent treatment, and pressuring are not love. Minimizing, discounting, ridiculing, accusing, blaming, scapegoating, and manipulating are not love. Making a joke at another’s expense is not love. Yelling, threatening, humiliating, and name-calling are not love. Belittling, condescending, and patronizing are not love.
If you’re not sure of the meaning of one or more terms, look them up. Lots of free, excellent resources exist online.
A future post will cover what love looks like and feels like, but for now, see if you can characterize the unloving behaviors of your childhood home and other environments like extended family gatherings, schools, or religious settings.

Sometimes, when we get triggered by what someone does or doesn’t do, we are making an assumption that causes us pain. If you find yourself being triggered by the same sort of situation over and over again, you’d benefit from teaching your thoughts for painful assumptions, assumptions you have carried for decades regarding that situation. You will want to challenge your assumption, starting with the first such situation you encountered, and discern if you can interpret the situation in a more helpful and hopeful way. Your new and more balanced interpretation can then be remembered when other similar situations occur.

As you face your emotional wounds, you gain compassion for yourself even as you learn to put your hurts in perspective. The journey of emotional healing reveals hidden, subconscious lies, and as we slowly awaken and disentangle truths from lies, we realize how complex is our pain, our history, our decisions and conclusions that emerged from the pain. Once we gain compassion for ourselves, we naturally have compassion for other people. Finding compassion for self is a difficult and prolonged process, but the benefit of having compassion for others materializes almost immediately after that with no effort required. And then people, including our patients, know that our compassion for them is genuine.

Sometimes, a loved on or our inner voice keeps scolding us to “get over it,” to get healed and forgive, to rush the process. Do not listen. The psyche of individuals and of dysfunctional family systems are so complex, confusing, and multi-layered that our emotional healing can easily take decades. “Love is patient,” begins the famous chapter in the Bible. “Patience is the essence of love,” wrote Joshua Choonmin Kang. We show love to ourselves by giving ourselves all the time we need to heal. And our loved ones, once they begin the healing journey, will finally understand why “Get over it” is an insensitive and harsh admonition to a hurting and seeking soul.

Part of the inner work of healing is examining our family of origin. An idealized view of one’s childhood is never helpful. If you are open to acknowledging the difficulties of your family during childhood, you will be able to heal and even one day appreciate the good points of your family as well. One common fear that keeps us from facing our family-of-origin disappointments is the fear of losing sight of the good, and indeed, we can temporarily lose appreciation for our families, but when the healing progresses, we again see the good in even sharper focus than before, and we truly understand the limited soil in which the good took root. We emerge from our healing with a balanced view of our family life rather than a one-sided view of either good or bad. But we also emerge with compassion on ourselves for all we went through or missed out on, honoring ourselves as survivors of confusing dysfunction.

Leaving the past in the past is a myth and also a mantra of people in denial. Your past will continue to influence you in negative ways until you face your own thoughts about it and find a true and compassionate perception of it. Children are excellent recorders and terrible interpreters, as the saying goes. As adults, we have the privilege and the opportunity to re-examine the painful perceptions that plague our subconscious; innumerable resources exist to help us re-frame our experiences, to rid ourselves of false guilt and shame, if only we have the courage to face the things we’d rather avoid.

Your past can be transformed if you are willing to re-visit it, with open-hearted willingness to examine your feelings, your conclusions, and the decisions you made that served you well but that may be limiting you now. Invest the time to review your past, to listen to yourself then, to serve as a parent to the child version of yourself. The rewards are immeasurable.