Physician, Get Healed

It takes courage and discipline to feel your feelings. Some of us who are more avoidant on the attachment spectrum don’t even know that we have any feelings beyond our daily surface moods. But to begin the journey of emotional healing, one must get in touch with the tender feelings of sadness, loneliness, anxiety, and many others. Anger is a secondary emotion protecting the more tender emotions, and some of us readily feel our anger while others cannot access even this less vulnerable emotion.

Sometimes we must begin with a problematic behavior we keep doing and work backwards from there to detect the feeling beneath it. There are various ways to get in touch with our feelings and from there, to learn what false belief or perception is fueling the feeling. The cognitive behavioral therapists have much to offer in this arena of emotional healing.

Although the journey of emotional healing is lifelong, we can get healed enough to enjoy our vocation, to enjoy our family lives, to enjoy ourselves and others in general. “Physician, Get Healed” is a challenge to seek the healing that frees us to enjoy the present moment and that empowers us to insist upon healthier dynamics in our current circumstances. As people who are healing and more empowered, we can have longer, more satisfying careers in medicine.

The heaviest false perception we can harbor, the one that will kill the joy of practicing medicine and of life in general, is that “everything depends on me.” We acquire this perception in childhood or adolescence and carry it into our work and family lives. With regard to a patient’s outcome, we fail to factor in the influence of the patient, their circumstances, and God in determining what happens. If everything depends on us, we have to know everything and do everything right, with no mistakes. This perception is paralyzing or at least keeps us living in fear. We are not the savior of anyone nor are the the sole determinant of a patient’s physical outcome. We do what we can to help patients but also voice the expectation that they must also help themselves in certain ways to get better. The doctor-patient relationship is a partnership, not a parent-child or boss-subordinate relationship. As I pray on my way to work each morning, I want to be an instrument of healing and to enjoy every patient encounter without the burden of falsely thinking I am fully responsible for the outcome. We are responsible to practice medicine to the best of our ability, but a multitude of variables are not under our control.

This blog, though it seeks to prevent physician burnout, has the more positive goal of helping physicians to prioritize their own healing. As the healers get healed, as we gain compassion and patience for ourselves, we become more compassionate and patient with others. As we cease to be hard on ourselves, we cease to be hard on others. Our harsh, pressure-driven, performance-oriented inner narrative can be replaced by kind concern, understanding, the shedding of false perceptions, and a healthier perspective on ourselves and our profession. This leads to less of us retiring early or transitioning out of patient care.

Being a physician is only one facet of our identity, and it’s not even the dominant aspect of who we are. Identity goes much deeper than one’s vocation and also deeper than our roles as an adult son or daughter, a parent or aunt or uncle, a spouse, etc. I see my primary identity as a child of God but also as a person with a story of perseverance. The better we know our own backstories, to use a fiction term, the more we know who we are. If we see our identities as mostly being physicians, our sense of who we are can be threatened by our own retirement or health problems or a medical mistake or a lawsuit. If we see our identities as rich, complex, and multi-faceted, our career does not greatly or excessively factor in to our sense of worth.

We illuminate the healing path by being on it ourselves. Those who see us grow and change can be inspired to do the same.

I’ve been known to glance at an intake form on which every symptom is circled, toss it aside, and say to a patient, “Tell me what’s going on in your life.” But unless we are getting healed in our own life challenges, we cannot with conviction point anyone else to emotional health amidst their life challenges. Being on a healing path is invigoratingly honest, refreshingly hopeful, and deeply meaningful.

Our ideal of putting others first is often used to justify neglecting ourselves. We are human beings, with needs and limitations, and to get our needs met is both child-like and mature. Children express their needs, often quite loudly, and each of us has a needy child at our core. Mature adults can listen to their inner child and parent themselves, in a sense, living a self-relationship of kindness, grace, and love. When we neglect ourselves, we are empty-shell physicians who have no inner experience of healing that can naturally overflow to our patients. We become frustrated and primed for burnout. Self-neglect is costly.

We can benefit from pondering the patients who elicit disproportionate emotions from us. Whether a patient is hostile, controlling, pressuring, or apathetic, our strong inner response teaches us something about our own pain and need for healing. The more healing we get, the less often we are triggered into an unpleasant emotional state. I’ve had a few unpleasant encounters in the last several years, and I process my emotions once I’m home: How do I feel? When have I felt this before? Did this patient remind me of someone? And so on. Never waste an opportunity to learn about the origins of your anger, your stewing over an interaction, your fight or flight or freeze response to a patient.

This blog will not be exalting the “high calling of medicine,” which is actually a thinly veiled term of self-pressure that embraces a mentality of performance-drivenness. Rather, I hope to encourage other physicians to get real with themselves and other trustworthy people about their own inner struggles in order to heal. We are not doing our patients any favors by neglecting ourselves. Realizing and tending to our emotional needs will make us more human, more humble, and more genuinely helpful. Join with me in the journey of healing.