Physicians routinely witness severe injuries, deliver heartbreaking diagnoses, and comfort grieving families. Every life-or-death decision, medical error, and other critical incidents can add layers of psychological strain. To make matters worse, many doctors do not have time to process these experiences because they are too busy taking care of patients to look after themselves. Instead, they suppress their emotions and move onto the next shift.
Throughout this CPTSD Awareness Month, it’s worth recognizing that repeated exposure to traumatic experiences can affect physicians in ways that look remarkably similar to burnout, chronic stress, grief, and compassion fatigue.
Acute vs. Ongoing Trauma
When most people imagine post-traumatic stress disorder, they often picture it stemming from a single catastrophic event. But trauma can also result from repeated or prolonged experiences. The World Health Organization’s ICD-11 recognizes complex post-traumatic stress disorder as a distinct diagnosis that includes the core features of PTSD along with persistent difficulties involving emotional regulation, relationships, and self-image.
Throughout their careers, physicians accumulate traumatic experiences that leave an emotional imprint. Even though you knew you weren’t choosing an easy path when you enrolled in medical school, you aren’t immune to its possible psychological effects. Maintaining a professional detachment can allow you to continue working, but the emotional walls you build at the hospital may follow you home and separate you from the people and things you care about most.
Many people live with the effects of complex trauma for years. If you don’t recognize these symptoms for what they are, it can be much harder for you to explain to others why you no longer feel like yourself.
Unprocessed Trauma Can Affect Your Coping Skills
Physicians are remarkably skilled at working through distress. Unfortunately, appearing functional doesn’t necessarily mean you’re well. Strategies like throwing yourself into work or numbing yourself with drugs and alcohol after a distressing experience may temporarily quiet racing thoughts, but they also allow you to pretend your problems don’t exist.
For this reason, The Practice always works to help our clients identify underlying causes rather than treating them in isolation. Healing from trauma doesn’t require forgetting your patients or becoming less emotionally invested in medicine. Nor does it mean you must stop being capable of compartmentalizing during a crisis.
Treatment can help you process experiences you may have spent years setting aside, understand your reactions, and develop healthier ways to regulate difficult emotions. The Practice provides a private retreat designed specifically for doctors. Through comprehensive assessments, evidence-based therapies, trauma-informed care, and connection with other physicians, you can begin addressing your immediate symptoms.
Medicine teaches you to keep going because others rely on you, but continually moving forward without allowing yourself to process what you’ve witnessed may come at a high cost. If your years in practice have left an imprint, reach out today to learn how you can receive the time, privacy, and support you need to begin healing.