Healing the Healer: Treatment for the Disillusioned Physician

By Kristen Jemiolo MD

This is a collection of essays written for the medical profession. It is about healing, about healing yourself and finding the healer within you. It is for the doctor and the patient within you because you must heal yourself before you can heal others. It is the story of one physician's journey from a life in medicine experienced on the edge of a cliff through her journey of self-awareness and self-love to a place where healing energy overflows easily to others.

Dr Jemiolo explores teachings and meditative techniques which have helped her to accept negative emotions, to learn from them and let them go. These practices allow one to redirect energy inward to loving and caring for self. The author describes a spiritual journey connecting to the spirit within ourself, where one can access his or her own infinite wisdom and compassion.

This book could benefit physicians who are unhappy in their profession. It is a must-read book for all medical students. Each chapter is a discussion topic for a resident or practicing physician support group.

The message of Healing the Healer speaks to a new way of healing. The patient is no longer a problem to be fixed. The physician is no longer driven by fear trying to control the enemy in illness. The healer understands resistance to healing and allows death. When physicians learn to accept and love themselves, it will overflow to their patients honestly and openly, with respect and compassion. Patients will be heard and understood and healed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jan 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781543990614

Book preview

Healing the Healer

Copyright © 2019 by Kristen Jemiolo MD

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

ISBN (Print): 978-1-54399-060-7

ISBN (eBook): 978-1-54399-061-4

Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1 Medical School

Chapter 2 Healing from Childhood

Chapter 3 Residency

Chapter 4 Medical Practice

Chapter 5 The Journey

Chapter 6 The New Way

Chapter 7 Another Door Opens

Chapter 8 Healing

Chapter 9 Transformation

Notes on Healing

Introduction

Spirit of the Universe,

Shine down upon me.

Fill me with love and light,

Loving kindness, healing calm, gentle grace,

Strength and wisdom.

Fill all of me,

To the north, to the south,

To the east and to the west of me,

All earth, fire, water, and air of me,

My body, spirit, heart, and mind of me,

That I may find the peace of acceptance,

The healing of love,

The enjoyment and creation of beauty,

And the message of trust.

I call out to all intimidated medical students, all humiliated residents, all disillusioned physicians: It’s okay. Everything is as it should be. There is light in all darkness. There is a lesson in every bump in the road.

The lesson here is: You are a healer. You have been given huge gifts for this purpose and have been given this dream and desire to set you on your course. Do not let the mountains of knowledge you don’t have, the loneliness and grinding fear of responsibility, the burden of physical and mental exhaustion, or the tedium and degradation of computerized insurance-controlled medicine deter you. That is merely the logical result of medicine as business in this competitive, unsupportive culture. Do not get sucked into it. Do not let it define you. It is not a measure of your worth.

You can jump their hoops, play the game by their rules, but when the anxiety and anger come up, note them with a smile, return to the breath, give yourself a hug! You say, Isn’t it interesting! Isn’t it funny. Let go of the judgment of yourself and the situation. Cultivate some patience and forgiveness for yourself. And yes, congratulations and gratitude are in order.

In the morning meditation, process the emotion and you will be reminded to love and trust yourself. The question is, What do I want? What do I need right now, a run, a massage, a kind word, help? Ask for it!! Let go of shaming yourself and blaming the system. As a gift to yourself, create a support group, reach out to a friend, seek counseling. But the most important gift is to note it with a smile. Accept that it is what it is and redirect your energy to caring for yourself. Pretty soon, you begin to trust yourself and believe that you can keep yourself safe and healthy in any situation. And that is self-confidence. That is power. That is who you are. You are a healer.

I am a sixty-eight-year-old woman doctor, trained in family medicine but unable to practice it. I am familiar with how intimidating, challenging, and yes scary this profession can be. In the last twenty-five years, I have journeyed inward and have been able to find the healer within me. With the help of many wonderful teachers of mindfulness meditation, clinical hypnotherapy, cognitive behavioral counseling, twelve-step work, shamanic healing, reiki, and qigong, I have been able to create a unique practice using my special gifts. I feel confident and joyous at work. This is my story. I would love to accompany you and support you through your story.

The healer just is. No amount of education can make a healer. It is the soft voice, the gentle touch. The healer comes from the spirit part of ourselves, that is, the energy that flows through all things, that connects us all to the wisdom and compassion of the Oneness. Within each of us is the creative force of the Universe. It is that warmth you feel in the smile of a friend.

Each of us has the capability to heal ourselves and assist others in their healing. We just need to know that, to trust it, to want it, and to release it. The task of healing becomes the process of spiritual connection.

However, most of us live very disconnected lives. We have become our intellectual mind, the problem solver, which needs a problem in order to exist. It becomes you against the world, a very lonely place. We live our whole life that way, on the edge of a cliff, afraid of falling off, grasping for solutions. The people in our relationships at home and at work become the enemy. We are easily consumed by fears of failure and ultimate shame. This anxiety creates a constant state of hyper-arousal through the sympathetic nervous system and endocrine pathways. Immune system and other target organ burnout result in a host of chronic illness, heart disease, and cancer.

For many the physical illness becomes easier to hold than the obsessions that caused them. When we are sick, the injured part of our bodies becomes the enemy, something we have to fix. We become obsessed with judgment of how bad the illness is. There is no acceptance. There is no compassion. There is little healing.

You cannot find spirit on an MRI. In modern times, medicine has become a science limited to physical symptoms and solutions. Spiritual healing has been solely in the realm of religious organizations. Western medicine is very good at diagnosis and acute treatment, such as the use of antibiotics for infection or the casting of a fracture. But these tools are not adequate to treat chronic illness, whose basis is the stress reaction mediated by the fight or flight response.

With modern psychology and psychiatry the acknowledgment of emotional and thought pathology and their effect on the physical body emerged. With the advent of integrative medicine, influenced by Chinese medicine and Eastern philosophy, we began to talk about mind, body, and spirit.

Cultivating a practice of focus, i.e., meditation, we can live below the intellectual mind in a quiet place of being, or as they say, non-doing. We can become mindful of what’s going on in this moment, freed from the worry of future concerns or past mistakes. Here we are able to see the beauty all around us, contained in each moment. And we are able to radiate our own beauty, whether baking bread or being kind to a friend.

Spirit fills this place. Here one can access intuitive and imaginative thought and