Episode 43: Shame, Belonging, and the Real Work of Healing in Medicine

What happens when we realize that fitting into traditional medicine might mean losing touch with who we really are?

In this heart-opening conversation, I’m joined by my good friend Dr. Tracey O’Connell. Tracey is a Board Certified radiologist, Professional Certified Coach, and facilitator of Brené Brown’s Shame Resilience Program. 

Together, we explore the emotional weight of medical training, the myth of resilience, and how expressive writing can reconnect us to our own truth.

If you’ve ever felt like you don’t quite belong in medicine, or like you’ve had to compartmentalize your humanity just to get through the day, this one’s for you.

Here are my takeaways from this episode:

• The emotional cost of not fitting in within a traditional medical career
• How shame, silence, and systems erode physician well-being (and what we can do about it)
• The healing power of expressive writing and vulnerability
• How we can redefine purpose and identity after years of compartmentalizing

Connect with Tracey here:

Website: www.traceyoconnellmd.com

IG: @fertilesoul

FB: @tracey holland o'connell

LinkedIn: Tracey O'Connell, MD, PCC

YouTube: @traceyoconnellmd

Transcript

0:08

Welcome to the Purposeful MD Podcast. As a physician, you've sacrificed so much of your life for other people, your patients, your family, your friends, and your colleagues. What would it feel like to spend time doing what you enjoy and to live without guilt? I'm your host, Dr. Laura Suttin, a family physician, certified coach, and business owner. If you're a medical professional on a journey towards your most purposeful life, a life with more time and energy, and ultimately more joy, then this is the podcast for you. Welcome to the Purposeful MD Podcast. I'm so happy to have my guest and my good friend on, Dr. Tracy O'Connell. Um, let me read a little bit about Dr. O'Connell. So Tracy O'Connell, MD is a radiologist professional certified coach, consultant, educator, and facilitator of expressive writing, and Brene Brown's Shame Resilience Program. She provides tools for good people having a hard time. I love that. Tired of feeling lonely, negative, or out of place, after many years of feeling not enough as a person, a physician, a parent or partner, her work fosters positive self-worth, psychological safety and shame resilience for others. She's currently adjusting to life is an empty nester, can definitely talk about that, and is curious about what's next for her. So Tracy, thank you so much for being on. Thanks, Laura. It's really neat to be here, and I've known you for a long time. It's been fun to watch your career evolve, and shift, and take shape, and it's just really good to see what you're doing, and how you're living your life on purpose. Well, thank you. Well, you were a big part of that, so, um, you and I worked together, you were my coach for a few months, that was almost two years ago, it seems like. Can't even believe that. Yeah. Yeah. Feels, feels very fresh. Um, and yet you've done a lot, you know, since that time. Yeah. Thanks. Yeah, it was a, uh, it was a very challenging time in my life for lots of different reasons. And, um, and yeah, so you, you were very instrumental in helping me manage through that, so thank you. Well, that thanks means a whole lot to me. Hmm. I'm glad. Glad. Yeah, I was trying to remember when, when you and I met, I feel like we probably met online before we met in real life, guessing it was at Emerge when we met in real life, so that was 2022 here in San Antonio. That we met in real life, but then we had met online, I think in various coaching forums, mm-hmm, and, um, alliances and just, um, had some common threads, that, yes, some invisible strings that kept filling us together. Yeah. Yeah. I just always appreciated your warmth, and your kindness, and, and, you were, you just made me feel like so welcome, especially in some of these spaces where I was new to coaching, new to business ownership, massive imposter syndrome, didn't really know what I was doing, stepping into this space and, and you just made me feel like, you belong here, and that meant the world to me, so thank you also for that. Well, again, it means just, those kind of words for me are just the, my work is done, right. I, I, I feel like, um, those are really my intentions, I think when I show up is to, I think the world can be cold. Um, and I think especially in the medical space, can be very, uh, sterile, and formal, and stiff, and hierarchical, I didn't like that. Mm-hmm. And I think I stood out, um, many times in a negative way for being otherwise. So it's nice to be able to hear that being received in that way, or greeted in that way, or approached as a peer, resonated with you or landed, or was felt. Yeah, it definitely was. And, and since then I've been able to participate in some of your expressive writing work as well, and it's, it's so powerful. It's so powerful. And so I definitely wanna hear more about that, and just hear more about you, and how you got to this point in your journey. Well, it's always fun to revisit the story. I sometimes think the story sounds repetitive on my end, and I think I'm also shifting the way I tell the story as I age, and evolve. Briefly, I went medical school to be a psychiatrist, and then had a really weird six week rotation, where I just felt really, inept, emotionally inept to be able to handle the severity of the level of mental illness that I was put into. I, in retrospect, I think it was a lot, um, one of the uh, many traumatic things that happens to us in medical training. I have children now that are my age, the age that I was when I went through medical school, and it's hard for me to fathom what it would be like for them to witness some of the things that we see in medical training with having no, you know, having nothing except a desire to be there. Uh, so when I did that six month rotation there, or I'm sorry, six week rotation, there were two weeks in an outpatient psychiatric ER, two weeks in an inpatient facility, an institution where people had lived for a long time. Adults, children in helmets, people who were heavily medicated with tardive dyskinesia, really the other end of the spectrum, not walking into the ER. And then the other being a week of, sort of visiting the women's prison, and women, witnessing some of the really, most difficult things that society faces. And I was what, 23, 24. It just really was too much for me. Mm-hmm. And when I realized that I didn't, that my whole goal for going to medical school was to be a psychiatrist, and then I thought, I can't even do this training for six weeks, it made me believe, believe that I needed to do something else altogether. Mm-hmm. That was pre-internet, pre-awareness of, if you can remember, you only knew what you were exposed to directly. Mm-hmm. So those three mentors I had during those six weeks, I didn't have any access to people who were just normal people having a hard time. Mm-hmm. And that was what I had wanted to focus on. I have since come to believe through my own journey, that much of times when I was labeled psychiatrically unwell, was wrong. Yeah. It was just normal struggle, things that anyone, who's paying attention, or has a conscience would be struggling with, and I didn't really have people to advocate for me. I mean, even in that, those times, the only people that were available were therapists or psychiatrists. And I do credit them with helping me stay alive, and stay on track and, and, but the, they kind of towed the party line, mm-hmm, of, this needs to be compartmentalized. You need to behave this certain way in, in these environments. Um, and so I think I just at that point, really stuffed who I was, my, my essence, my vitality, the things that made me feel whole or purposeful. Mm-hmm. And I went into radiology, because, well, I got very depressed, and I took a summer off, and then I decided to go into radiology, because there's a bunch of radiologists in my family. My stepfather is a cardiologist. Um, but I didn't want, I knew I didn't want that kind of lifestyle. I wanted to have a family, and a life outside of work. And so radiology did make sense at the time where I thought, oh, this'll be perfect, because I can, stay away from these heavily emotional experiences. As an emotional person, I'll just look at the world in black and white, and at that time too, radiologists were really consultants. We really interfaced with the whole hospital. That was back when we hung films, mm-hmm, half the day we spent hanging films, and taking them down, and writing by hand, preliminary impressions. Mm-hmm. And people would come in, and wanna talk about it, and teams would come down from 3 West, and you'd feel like you were part of that patient's medical experience, and wanting to know what, what became of, what became of that person. What did they end up having? How are they doing? Oh, they're discharged, that's great. And so very though, very quickly, right at the end of my residency, came PAX, which is, being able to look at images on computer, and also dictating into a machine power scribe, instead of, even to a transcriptionist, mm-hmm, which then became, the job just became very rote, and very isolating. Mm-hmm. And I recognize that, but you're in the tunnel, and what else are you gonna do? Right. But it just ended up being the, kinda the worst environment for me, for my own emotional wellbeing, to be so cut off from other people, and also, many people, when you hear the word radiologist, conjures up a certain image, or personality, and I think most would agree that I don't fit into that, picture, for a variety of reasons, and I didn't feel that I fit in, mm-hmm, in my career. Yeah. Yeah. I, I wanna pull on that thread about fitting in a little bit, but thanks for sharing all that. When you said about the psych rotation, I mean, you were, you, you were experiencing the extremes of pathology, right? And completely unprepared for it. Um, I, I think you and I are very connected, and so I'm wondering,'cause I'm thinking, gosh, how, how, how might I feel in this situation? Was there some like helplessness in there too? Like not in a, like a victim way, but just like, these, I, what am I gonna be able to do for these patients, and how is society gonna help them? Um, and then you mentioned also the com, compartmentalizing, which is, at least, when I was in training, very common. I think there's, I think there's more conversation around it, around how to manage through emotions these days, but at least when I was in training, there were no discussions about where to put those emotions or how to, how to, let's have some closure when a patient dies. There was a, um, the TV show, The Pitt, I don't know if you've watched it, um, it's a, yeah, it's um, I have no affiliation with it, but, um, Noah Wyle, who played on ER for a long time, he comes back, and he reprises a role as a physician, as an ER attending. It's a 15-episode arc, and each episode is an hour in this shift. And so it's in, it's in real time, and it's, it's the most realistic, the, they set out to be, I listened to him on a podcast, they, they set out to be the most realistic medical show, ever to this point, and I really feel like it is incredibly realistic. One of the things that they did, was they had a patient pass in the ER, which happens in an ER environment, not uncommonly unfortunately. Um, the whole team gathered, took a moment, and talked about this patient, and they shared what they were feeling, what they were going through this, attendings, nurses, residents, med students, and they just shared this moment together, they stopped, and almost like a timeout, but it was, this is after this patient had passed, and I was like, wow, that's, that's amazing, nobody, nobody did that when I was in, in training, it was, you see the pathology, it becomes normalized, and death, and dying, and trauma becomes normalized. And then we have to, okay, put, like you said, put that away. Let's put that over in this part of the brain, and let's move on to the next patient, who needs our help, and there's no, no space to process that, no, not even an awareness of it, or anybody that modeled that behavior for us. And so, um, yeah, it sounds like you were definitely experiencing that too, and that, that influenced your decision to seek a different, a different specialty, um, realizing that this isn't something that you wanted to be exposed to on a regular basis. And then, you mentioned about normal people having a hard time, and where's the space for that, becuase when you see the extremes, I mean, well, that's exactly right. And I think also to your point, the mentors that I had, uh, I'm not really sure in retrospect, I'm not here to judge them, but one in particular, the, the guy that was running the psych ER was very flippant. Someone would come in, I'd, I'd never even heard of a psych ER before, like this was, it was not part of the hospital, it was like, a freestanding clinic, where you could come in in psychiatric crisis, and I, I don't think that's smart, because obviously when you meet someone in five minutes, who's gone through something, or is in the midst of something, they're in crisis, no one's going to appear like they've got their head on straight. Right. Kind of, you're inviting people to come in when they're dysregulated, and really in the midst of things, and that would be the case, is people would come in, and share something, urgent, and awful, and the psychiatrist would make a diagnosis. He would tell me, oh, this patient is a narcissistic, bipolar, um, borderline personality. Mm-hmm. And, I remember feeling, my intuition was, wow, this person's going through something really, really awful. Mm-hmm. And not, and feeling like, What?, you just made a diagnosis of them. Mm-hmm. And what is that? Wha, how is that gonna help them, in this moment? Right. And what is even the purpose of this psych ER? And, and at the time though, I didn't have the clarity that I have now upon reflection. At the time, I just thought, I'm not good at this. I'm feeling too much for these people. There doesn't seem to be a model, or room for the person, who's in struggle, and, and appropriately so. And I think that also became a mission for me throughout. Even when I was in radiology, I was constantly reading self-help, and constantly just trying to keep my head on, because I felt so, out of place with the way that I was experiencing, things I saw, things I did, uh, you know, procedures and things, um, whether they were necessary or not. And my role, I, I enjoyed the role of coming in, doing the procedure and leaving, right. There wasn't the, no one's gonna call me at midnight about what happened; however, there wasn't that continuity. Mm-hmm. I liked the patient interaction that we had, but it was minimal. And then also just throughout my career, seeing, in my own personal struggle, that it was pathologized. I was given diagnoses like, generalized anxiety disorder, mm-hmm, uh, adjustment disorder, major depressive episode, by people, who had been in medical training, so by their assessment, I was really off, I was unhinged, I was off the norm. Right. And I, I don't appreciate that now. Yeah. At the time, I owned it, and sort of kept it to myself as almost, it's like a disability. Mm-hmm. I kept, I made a lot of decision, professional decisions with that in mind, with regard to, well, I have this disability, mm-hmm, so I need to be careful not to work full-time. I worked part-time, I, didn't become a partner, I, it, to others, I'm sure it appeared that I was not all in, and to be honest, I wasn't. And so ironically, I made decisions that were boundaries on behalf of my own best interest, which really did provide the relationship with my spouse, with my kids, with my community, outside of work that I really wanted, but unfortunately I couldn't see it for a very long time, because it was couched in shame, yeah, around, I have this disability, oh, which is just, I mean, I don't feel that way now. Yeah. So like, yay that I don't feel that way now, and I just feel for all the people out there, who might be wearing that identity wrongly, and it's kind of where I feel like, shame, and it's not enoughness, and the inability to be vulnerable in medicine is really the root of eveything that's wrong, mm-hmm, in medical culture now. We can, there are plenty of things we can point to, the EMR insurance, greed, I mean all these things, and at the root of them, for me, I feel like it's, it's, the hierarchy exists, because people need to feel that they're better than, mm-hmm, someone else, or they make more money than, or they have this car, so therefore, it justifies, the sacrifices they make every day. Mm-hmm. And those who have compassion fatigue have likely left already, mm-hmm, leaving those, who are, most likely to perpetuate unhealthy, and pathological, damaging behaviors, right, that harm others. And then others wonder, why can't I deal with this person? Yeah. Why can't I be trained by this person? Why can't I make, why can't I operate or think right when this person's in the room? Yeah. Because of all those dynamics that are, I remember having a therapist once say to me, psychology is happening whether you're thinking about it or not. It was like, it's just so true. So I think that's really the driving force behind most everything that I do now, is trying to find that normalizing, path of, mm-hmm, well of course you feel that way, what do you wanna do about it? Yeah. Yeah. And I think, I wanna go back, and and try to rephrase what you said,'cause you just blew my mind there about, tell me if I'm, if I'm recapping this correctly, that when you had these diagnoses, generalized anxiety, adjustment disorder, major depressive episode, that, that gave you, because you had those diagnoses, you gave yourself permission to work less, than maybe some of your colleagues, not work full time. And, and yet that same container also made, created some shame in you, because of those diagnoses. And so if I'm putting those together, X equals Y equals Z, X equals Z, that you setting those boundaries, possibly even an absence of any sort of clinical diagnoses, might lead to some shame. Is that, for sure, yeah, sure, and it's funny, because now, as a coach, I know that you do a lot of values work and I, I realized it's been, it was really perplexing, because when I looked back on my career as a radiologist, and I left a toxic private practice job almost exactly eight years ago, uh, I really had, I had so much shame, but also when I went through values exercises, and thought, and then things I, I thought, and like a life audit, I thought, but I never did go against my values. Like I really, I, I was always standing up for, and, and oftentimes very unpopularly, for things that, didn't make sense, or that were seen as difficult. Mm-hmm. Why am I being difficult? Why am I working these? Why am I asking? Oh, suddenly the rotation has moved instead of 8-5, now it's 7-4, which means I've gotta get my three kids out the door, and oh my, I guess my spouse has to do that in my absence, which maybe that would be fine a few times, but every time I work, and people would say, well, just hire a nanny, or, or, but it would be sort of arbitrary, like, well, why did we change the rotation anyway? Mm-hmm. Oh, come to find out, so and so wants to get in early, so they can go biking after work. Mm-hmm. Things like that, and so I was, I was seen as difficult or high maintenance. And so again, just had this shame around standing up for the things that I felt really mattered, and my, my values unconsciously, I wasn't thinking about values at the time, but I was seeking, like advocating for what I thought would be not unreasonable,'cause, and I ended up, being able to work 8-5, but it, everyone hated me for it, mm-hmm,'cause I wouldn't tow the party line, even though everyone at the hospital was working 8-5. Yeah. So it just things, that's just an example, yeah, but I think there were so many instances where, I was doing the right thing, things that we even suggest people do, coachees do in how they live their life, but I was doing them with the idea that I won't be okay from a mental health standpoint, which is, is basically the truth for all of us, right? Mm-hmm. That's why we set boundaries ever, yeah, is because this isn't gonna work for me. Mm-hmm. Unfortunately, it just came with me as, because I'm not as good as everyone else. I'm not as resilient as everyone else. Mm-hmm. I'm not as capable, competent, confident, able to ex, subsist on this little bit of sleep, or whatever it was. Mm-hmm, um, so it's ironic,'cause I got what I wanted, and what I asked for, but it never felt good. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, you enjoy it. Yeah, um, what comes to mind for me is, yeah, you, you know, you kind of doing things that you needed to, to do for your family and, and like you said, being labeled as difficult, and that, and yet everybody else, you know is kind of like, at least that, the question that I've heard from people before is like, well, that person couldn't take it. They couldn't hack it, you know? And so they had to leave and it's like, well, no, this is a really unreasonable situation and maybe you guys are just used to it or, um, or have different support structures or whatever. I mean, I, I, um, when during my, the years between, my divorce and, um, marrying my current husband, um, there were periods, where, with my, uh, daughter's dad and I split custody, and so there were periods where she was under my, I I had to be the one to, you know, I took her to school, picked her up like it was me, and because she was my responsibility for that week, um, and I couldn't really negotiate around those things. And yet there I, I, I heard comments, not, I didn't hear so much about me, but I heard comments about other, other people in similar situations. Um, and I heard we, our organization operated outta multiple time zones. And so if there was an early meeting or a late meeting, then it impacted negatively somebody in one of those time zones. And I heard comments about people that were an hour behind in an early meeting and had to be on the, on the phone instead of on camera,'cause they're dropping kids off or the other end at the, the end of the day, and I just, I heard so many comments about it and I'm just like, this isn't right. Like, where's the humanity in this? Well, there's, and everyone, again, this is about, it's about the person who is the person who's at the meeting, who's feeling like, I didn't wanna be here either. Right? But I made these arrangements. So there's a bitterness and a resentment toward the person who's actually taking the action step that, that they maybe they both held that to be a priority. Mm-hmm. But one made the decision to be at work and the other made the decision not to. Right. And then like there's, someone's gonna, you're gonna pay the price either way, right? Right. Either at home or at work. Yeah. And so what's it gonna be? Yeah. Yeah. Choose your heart. And what's interesting is, yeah, choose your heart. Uh, when you were saying about, about, I forget what you said just a minute ago, but I was thinking, I found out after I left that practice that since then they hired a bunch of people, but also something like 18 or 20 people have left because of that, oh, you had mentioned the couldn't hack it and that that's still the, the mantra for people who enter a super busy radiology practice and can't keep up. Mm-hmm. The list keeps accumulating because images can now be acquired much more rapidly than anyone can interpret them, and so again, back to humanity. This is not something where you can just like a machine turn up the speed on a conveyor belt or some kind of mechanization. Like Lucy and the Chocolate Factory. Mm-hmm. I don't know if you've seen that, right? Oh yeah. Where she coffee episode? Yeah. She and Ethel are working on the chocolate line and they're trying to put them in a box and it starts going somehow, they accidentally turn it up and it starts going faster and chocolates are falling and they're just eating them and trying to contain them. Mm-hmm. And yeah, humans, can't do that. Right. And it's not, uh, I, I know everyone in medicine feels completely overwhelmed and everything is not, nothing is happening at a pace that's sustainable or mm-hmm, within human bounds. And for those listening who are not in radiology, it does tend to serve, it, the people who don't wanna interact with other people can keep up with that type of thing better, who aren't distracted by. How someone else is feeling in the room. Yeah. Or how, what anybody thinks. Yeah. Those people can do that work for hours and hours and hours. Yeah. In the dark alone. Better than those like me who mm-hmm. Who have a real depth of the human experience. Mm-hmm. And want that. Yeah. Yeah. That's in your value set. So yeah. Yeah, connection. Connection is really important to me. Connection to self, my authenticity and conte connection with others. Mm-hmm. Belonging and just so ironic that I would go into a field where that was neither was an option. Mm-hmm. Um, which is then how I led, how, what led me to. To these other steps when I realized there were some shifts happening in the practice and I thought, it's only gonna get worse. So I don't know what I'm gonna do instead, but I know it's not this. Yeah. Yeah. I think, you know, it probably had to happen that way for you to really realize that this isn't the right environment for me, and to really create that for yourself. Yeah. I mean, I stayed in that practice 16 years and that was in addition to the 10 years of training. Right. Yeah. So I guess I'm just a slow learner. Well, tell us about, tell us about your work. Tell us about the daring Way. Tell us about the expressive writing. Tell us about all of that. Yeah, so the Daring Way, well Daring Greatly was Brene Brown's second book, and I had not heard of her. I happened to pick up that book on the way to the beach with a family vacation. And again, as I mentioned, I had always been a huge fan of self-help, all with the intention of, oh, if I can figure out myself and figure out what's wrong with me, I'll be able to be better and do better. Mm-hmm. When I, reading that book was the first time I encountered the word shame or the definition of shame, of believing you're inherently flawed. Unworthy of love or belonging. And I felt so seen, like I was like, oh my gosh, that's it. That is, that is the way I've been feeling. And I tore through that book and then got her first book, which is called, I Thought It was Just Me, but it wasn't, which she ended up having. She had to publish herself because people didn't wanna hear about shame and vulnerability. And I felt like vulnerability. That's what I've been doing. I've been being vulnerable and she makes it sound like it's okay. So why has it been so awful? And why do I have shame if vulnerability is the way we get all the things that connection and the things we really want? And so, uh, again, it was this awakening, but also, how am I supposed to now blend? This insight with my reality. Mm-hmm. And that was tricky, but at least there was so much recognition in just naming it and being able to be. Realizing, okay, there's, this book is out there, other people are reading this. This isn't just happening to me. Mm-hmm. And this is, this is something that someone studied and done research on. So that made it valid to me. And then I, you know, every time a new book of hers would come out, I would read it and it would, she and I are, uh. Similar age and life development. So I always felt like, oh, she scooped me. Like I should have written this. I always felt like we were, I mean, I don't have the research background or anything. Yeah. Social work background, but it felt so much like, yes. And so I had read, I had read Rising Strong when it first came out, but then after I left my job, I read it again through a totally different lens of like, okay, I put myself out there, I fell down, it didn't go well. Now I'm. Dusty and dirty. What do I do now? And I got excited. There was something in the back of the book about. Re reaching out to or working with a Daring Way facilitator near you. So I hadn't noticed that before the first time. So I went in and looked on the computer and I found that there was someone in my community, a social worker, a licensed clinical social worker who was doing small groups. I joined a small group that was called Rising Strong for Women. It really ended up being an AA type situation where. Eight women from all different backgrounds in all different life circumstances. Were going through this workbook together and talking about these feelings of not enoughness, what happened? What? I'm bad. I did something wrong. I don't know what to do with these feelings. This is what I typically do. This is what I was raised to do. This is how other people modeled hard things and emotions in my family. It was just really, really wonderful because we all could witness each other and just being in that space with other people who were going through hard things that were, not even my hard things, but hearing them talk about their hard things in a safe space where there were free of judgment and. It just was really incredible. It was really life shifting because I'll, I'll circle back to when I had declared psychiatry as my specialty. They had grouped all the med students into smaller groups of areas of potential. Practice interests and residency interests. And so I had been in this group my first year of med school that was all future psychiatrists, and it was led by this prestigious psychiatrist at the university that taught our group lecture class, and everyone loved him. He had a really, he was very charismatic and appealing person and told great stories. In those small groups, he led with questions like, how are you doing? Really? How is this really impacting you? And I thought, okay, like this is, this is where I can talk about what's happening to me. And I shared in that group things like, it's not going well. Yeah, I am having a really hard time. I can't keep up with the reading. Apparently. I don't know how to read because. I got through college by taking meticulous notes and memorizing my notes and didn't really read a lot. I didn't read. As a kid I love to read now, which is another irony, and I, I felt like this was a safe place for me to share what that was like. And I would cry and I would say, I'm not sleeping well. And he would pull me out into the hall, like away from the rest of the group and sort of. I didn't think about it then, but in retrospect, I'm not sure what his goal was, but it was as if we need to separate you from the group because you're really, you're really expressing a lot right now. And this is, this is a lot. I'm gonna just give you a minute of privacy. Whereas I wasn't feeling like I'm losing it here and I shouldn't be. I was feeling like this is what we're supposed to be doing here. Right. And at the end of the rotation, so we had, you know, it was a class or there was some kind of evaluation at the end of this. The only thing he wrote on my evaluation at the end of the year was, seemed younger than the rest of the group. Oh wow. So I don't know how you interpret that based on the expression that you're sharing. Yeah. I took it to believe that how I had shown up was immature. Yeah. That's how I would take it too. Yeah. And, uh, wrong. So again, that was another thing about psychiatry is not right for me because I can't be an emotional person in medicine anywhere. And so this, this witnessing this thing. After I left my private practice job felt so good that I just went more for toward things like that. Mm-hmm. And I ended up doing some integrative health coach training and then when I, I applied to, you know, there was a waiting list at the time, but applied to become a certified during Wave facilitator and went through that training, uh, by Brene Brown's Education and Research Group. It was like a year long training and I thought that that would be. I thought this is gonna revolutionize the world. Mm-hmm. And I still believe that Brene has gone on to do other things now. Mm-hmm. She's involved in Silicon Valley and NASA and global projects mm-hmm. That are really about inclusion and, and a bunch of things that we certainly need on a really huge scale. I still find for me that the work that matters most to me is that is her early work. Mm-hmm. Of, I think I do better one-on-one. I think I do better in small groups of really fostering a safe space to talk about what's real. Yeah. To witness that and to normalize that. Yeah. And so that's what I. That's what I sent out to do. Um, again, I thought it would be this golden ticket to be certified in her work. Uh, and that's another story. But it, as you know, most of us have to promote ourselves in order to get what we want. And I think, you know, I could, I could say I wanna be the Brene Brown of medical culture, but the reality is I don't want that kind of accountability. Mm-hmm. I'm a little tired and I wanna just. Live life on a smaller, more intimate scale. Yeah. Uh, but, but I do still really believe that, that everything that's wrong with, with medical culture and society and people in general is, is a lack of vulnerability of being able to sh share what it's like to be real and in struggle and have that heard and held with compassion and connection and, um. So I'm, I try to create those spaces and what you asked about, um, the expressive writing. I know I'm talking a lot, so you can, I can pause if you'd like me to. Yeah, you're good. You're good. Uh, but the expressive writing is almost like a gateway into that space for people, because some people, I remember Brene being asked the question or one of the. Exercises was, oh, this vulnerability thing sounds great. I'm gonna practice it over here by myself. But her thing is like, no, you can't practice vulnerability alone. Vulnerability is showing. How you really feel to someone else, and that being risky and uncertain and risking emotional exposure. But I remember hearing Abby Wambach talk about her definition of vulnerability as being really authentic and true to yourself and sharing that with someone else. Mm-hmm. And. Back to the expressive writing, I actually believe that there are many of us walking around who can't be vulnerable with ourselves. Mm-hmm. Who don't even know ourselves well enough, or trust ourselves to value our own opinion, to believe what we think and feel is real and normal or legitimate. So the expressive writing ends up being a way to have. One-on-one conversations with yourself, responding to prompts that lead you to answer yourself in a voice that doesn't seem to be accessible. Mm-hmm. Except through writing. It's a, it's a right hemisphere activity. It's more creative, more original thought. It's not the intellectual brain that we've all been trained to hone the left hemisphere. There's this whole part of us that's not, that has to be accessed intentionally and in a safe way. Mm-hmm. And sometimes many people in those workshops, I lead with expressive writing, and you can attest to this, sometimes people want more dialogue and, and want, why we, why are we doing this? I wanna, I wanna hear from other people. But for some people, just having that kind of honest conversation with themselves mm-hmm. Is new. So illuminating and scary at and new that it just, that's there where they have to go first. Yeah, yeah. Rather than sharing out loud something. They're too, they don't even, can't even put a finger on right. Until delved deeper. So I had taken a course in that early on after leaving that job as well and just felt like the marriage of. Those concepts really felt in alignment with, mm-hmm. With each other and with this idea of self-trust and benevolence and joy and Yeah. All the good things in life. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, having been a client of yours and participated in your, the workshops and then, um, having a, a shared client, a client of mine who worked in your, who participated in one of your workshops as well, I've just seen the power of it. And, um, so thank you for putting all your amazing gifts out into the world. Well, thank you for seeing them as gifts. Yeah. A lot of people still are like, what, what are you doing? You know? Yeah. But, um, okay. I, I no longer need. Thankfully, I don't know. I no longer need the validation I used to need Yeah. To be doing the thing that I wanna do. Yeah. Yeah. It's so good to talk to you. Thank you so much for being on. Thank you so much for having me and for, for providing, uh, this opportunity to have some really meaningful, in depth conversations with, with people about what it means to be living on purpose. Be a doctor and be a human too. Yeah, I love it. And we'll put links in the show notes to ways that people can connect with you if they wanna learn more about you.​Terrific. Awesome. Thanks so much, Tracy. While I am a physician, the information presented in this podcast is for educational purposes only and should not be considered medical advice. It is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Please consult with your own healthcare provider before making any significant changes to your lifestyle or routine. By listening to this podcast, you are not creating a physician patient relationship. Thank you for listening to the Purposeful MD Podcast. If you like what you hear, please rate and review the show. Please also visit my website, www.thepurposefulmd.com for free downloads or to discuss working with me as your coach.