Author: Kelly Pelton

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.

When you do the work of emotional healing, you become more honest with yourself and are less likely to blame others for your feelings. You take responsibility for your emotions, and even if your loved one is triggering a feeling in you, you don’t ultimately hold another person responsible. By taking ownership of your feelings, you begin to look for solutions that include a change in your perspective. You alone get to decide how you feel, and this takes a lot of inside work.

Some of us, though, are in a close relationship with a toxic person, and even though we take responsibility for our own feelings, we benefit ourselves and our families by standing up to emotional abuse, refusing to put up with it. We simultaneously own our emotions and rebuff the emotionally abusive person. And as we get healthier, we become more assertive in all our relationships, distancing from untrustworthy people and gravitating toward trustworthy friends.

Clarifying questions help us along our healing journey. These questions are not designed to fix, give advice, judge, or criticize; they aid us in thinking more clearly about our thinking. Deep and insightful friends can do this for each other, asking thoughtful questions which may not elicit immediate answers. Such questions can also be found in books or on the internet, or in quality psychotherapy sessions.

Probing questions can lead us to the answers that free us, encourage us, expose the lies we’ve believed and allow us to embrace the truth instead. The value of clarifying questions cannot be overestimated. Pursue the questions and discern the answers. Ask, seek, knock.

The major factor that burned me out in my twenties was my feeling responsible for that over which I had no control. I had no control over patient compliance or patient happiness, and yet I felt responsible for both. When a patient was unwilling to comply or to get emotionally healthier, I felt like I had failed. Stepping out of practice for a season allowed me to re-evaluate and re-define the purpose of being a physician, to determine how I want to perceive and experience the practice of medicine (which includes wise boundaries), to find fulfillment in being a compassionate witness who uses scientific knowledge to alleviate suffering.

Another factor leading to burnout was my internal perfectionistic expectation that I had to know everything. Doctors are always reading and learning, and there are tiny slivers of time in clinic to look up information, but self-pressure to know it all will only lead to performance anxiety. It’s far better to enjoy the lifelong medical learning without the inner perfectionism that kills both curiosity and enthusiasm.

As we seek emotional healing, we gain compassion on ourselves as needy human beings, and then we feel a camaraderie with all other human beings. We lose the burdensome thought that somehow we’re better than other people (and worse than more highly accomplished people); in fact, we stop thinking in terms of “better than” or “worse than” and see everyone as hurting people in need of love and compassion.

We stop expecting ourselves to meet a patient’s every need because we realize what it takes to meet our own needs. We even begin to expect our patients to take increasing responsibility to care for themselves, or at least we hope they will, because the outcome of their health is not solely in our hands. But we’re also more patient with our patients because of the slow nature of the healing journey, for all of us.

Many of us are not naturally aware of our emotions, hence we cannot embark upon a healing journey. One way to become more aware of our feelings is to write them down, in cursive if possible. Sit down with a spiral notebook some evening and ask yourself, What do I not want to write about today? What was so irritating or unpleasant that I have an aversion to wasting my time by writing it down? And start with that. Start with something you’d rather not relive from that day, and write about why.

Writing is a practice of awareness and a powerful tool for healing, and it’s practically free. If you’re open to the idea, try it, more than once. If you are getting good psychotherapy, your journaling could provide material for a gifted counselor to sort through with you.

Physicians encounter patients from time to time with whom we cannot establish a rapport. We may remind them of someone unpleasant in their past, we may trigger them in some way, or we may be unwilling to grant a request they have. Pay attention to your tension when you become aware you are disappointing a patient. If you sense inordinate dread or unbearable anxiety, you may have a history of someone close to you who wanted you to be a different sort of person than you actually are. Delve into that old story, for many of us have people-pleasing tendencies from which we need to be freed in order to authentically and unapologetically be ourselves and to practice medicine without undue social anxiety.

To begin the healing journey, we must first detect and acknowledge the distress within us. Most of us have postponed our emotional healing by blaming another person or a circumstance for our distress, but when we take ownership of our feelings, we are engaging in a healing practice. We can then ask probing questions like, “What thought is giving me pain?” “What problematic perspective do I have?” “How can I see this differently, in a less painful way?”

If our only thought about our distress is to blame it on a series of people or circumstances, we can procrastinate our own healing for years or even decades. Taking ownership of our emotions – which is accepting responsibility for them instead of holding others responsible – is step #2 of emotional healing, with step #1 being to notice our feelings in the first place.