{"id":1290,"date":"2016-03-24T08:30:30","date_gmt":"2016-03-24T12:30:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.themspress.org\/blog\/?p=1290"},"modified":"2016-03-14T06:43:33","modified_gmt":"2016-03-14T10:43:33","slug":"a-caution-against-the-extinction-of-emotion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themspress.org\/blog\/a-caution-against-the-extinction-of-emotion\/","title":{"rendered":"A Caution Against the Extinction of Emotion"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cWell, you know, I<\/em> was recently diagnosed with cancer,\u201d my friend said lightly in the middle of a spirited conversation about the merits of eating organic vegetables. She smiled as though she had just mentioned a factoid about organic kale, and not told me something earth-shattering. She continued eating her lunch while I sat there slack-jawed, trying to arrange myself. So consumed was I with the news of the diagnosis, I cannot recall a single other thing that we discussed during that lunch.<\/p>\n

Throughout medical school, our professors have often told us to \u201cget comfortable with being uncomfortable.\u201d Diligent student that I am, I believed I had mastered discomfort. I believed that no matter how difficult the patient or awkward the situation, I could muster up some empathy and manage to make that prized human-to-human connection that separates the clinicians from the caretakers.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s an illusion to believe that we are comfortable with discomfort if we only ever experience discomfort as physicians. In this unique profession of ours, we are prepared to meet strife and pain on a regular basis. Whether we are delivering bad news or seeing a struggling patient, discomfort is no stranger to us. It is essential, however, that we recognize the power imbalance inherent in these situations. As physicians, we are the ones delivering the bad news or offering advice to our patients. As such, we must come from the position of strength. I have also detected the unspoken expectation that no matter what awaits us when go through the door to see a patient, we must remain unchanged when we come back out the other side. While we empathize with our patients and do our best to help them, ultimately, once we step out of the examining room, that bad test result or unfortunate lifestyle choice is the patient\u2019s emotional burden to carry forward, not ours. In other words, our professional responsibilities call upon us to maintain that misfortune as \u2018other.’<\/p>\n

Even as a student, I\u2019m already seeing how challenging it can be to disentangle my professional identity from my personal life. In my professional life, I have cultivated a sort of empathetic stoicism that allows me to connect with patients \u2018in the moment,\u2019 and then quickly wash my emotions off and redirect my focus toward whatever task comes next. It\u2019s a survival tactic that I suspect many of us have deployed. In our personal (non-professional) relationships, however, our identities as children, siblings, lovers, and friends must come before our identities as doctors. Unfortunately, the more time we spend practicing in our professional roles, the more difficult it seems to transition from professional to personal. In personal relationships, we cannot always anticipate when we\u2019re going to receive news, either good or bad, but when we do, we cannot expect to go through the door and come back out unchanged.<\/p>\n

In our professional lives, we\u2019re expected to be compassionate but composed. We\u2019re taught to deliver bad news, perform motivational interviewing, and deal with difficult patients, but I wonder where the line is between beneficial sensitivity training and detrimental emotional taming. Before we walk into an exam room, we read through the patient\u2019s chart so we know what to expect, and this allows us to create a sort of comfortable discomfort to protect ourselves. I would argue that this emotional fortitude is not beneficial to all aspects of our lives. Emotions are sloppy\u2014something \u00a0that doctors cannot afford to be\u2014but I worry that if we don\u2019t let our feelings bleed through the lines, emotional composure could pave the way for an extinction of feeling. After having lunch with my friend, I had felt frustrated with myself for being so stunned and scared by her news. I didn\u2019t have the emotional composure that I would have with a patient, but that\u2019s the key difference\u2014loved ones are not patients. It\u2019s a testament to our most intimate relationships to express our genuine feelings however uncomfortable they may be. Perhaps, as physicians, we need to work even harder to stay in touch with these feelings so that we never lose our ability to access them.<\/p>\n

Featured image:
\nFeeling. by\u00a0Javi S\u00e1nchez de la vi\u00f1a<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cWell, you know, I was recently diagnosed with cancer,\u201d my friend said lightly in the middle of a spirited conversation about the merits of eating organic vegetables. She smiled as though she had just mentioned a factoid about organic kale, and not told me something earth-shattering. She continued eating her lunch while I sat there […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":1291,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[201,1],"tags":[135,134,309,308],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.themspress.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1290"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.themspress.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.themspress.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.themspress.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/32"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.themspress.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1290"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.themspress.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1290\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1293,"href":"https:\/\/www.themspress.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1290\/revisions\/1293"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.themspress.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1291"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.themspress.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1290"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.themspress.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1290"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.themspress.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1290"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}