Physician Families
Living with a physician brings unique challenges.
Every medical family’s elasticity and willingness keeps the medical system running. Our self-abnegation is expected in favour of the pressing healthcare needs of others. We love it, are proud of it, we resent it and are angry about it. It moves in and we are grafted to it like an extra organ in our chests. We are tired beyond tired. Because eventually that elasticity can go brittle, the willingness to self-sacrifice can go sour. And we question how do we put the caring part into balance?
Altruism = All-too-giving
I understand first hand the unique challenges of life with a physician. There’s all that equalizing work for us to do. My clients find self-leadership in the most unsuspected places. We work through the grief of lost careers and the dream of independence. We flush out useless internal narratives and imagine better ones. We consider the appearance the world has of us as financially secure, versus the teeter sense of near-poverty. We make room for the jealousy and resentment and guilt and pain and swear we accept it’s okay to feel them. We get beyond those mental routines spewed out by our unrelenting inner saboteurs. We even put ourselves first, yes, hopefully and maybe only for a brief moment in time. Ssshhh, don’t say we do that. But we do.