Physician, Get Healed

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 searching 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.

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.