Physician, Get Healed

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.