Despite presenting as high-functioning on the outside, many of the doctors I work with struggle deeply with anxiety.

Part of being a doctor is constantly scanning the horizon for what could go wrong. While an asset at work, this makes doctors vulnerable to developing anxiety. For others, this is exactly the type of quality that led them to work in medicine.

Some doctors fear that if their anxiety eases up, they’ll lose their edge. That the second they cut themselves slack, they’ll miss something. And when you work in medicine, this could literally be life or death.

But living with chronic anxiety has its own negative outcomes:

• It’s harder to focus

• You feel it in your body

• Things that “should” feel easy feel harder

• When you crash, you crash hard

In our work together, we help your chronically anxious nervous system find a healthy level of rest, so you can stay sharp without being constantly on edge.

Learn more about my approach to working with anxiety here.

When you sign up to become a doctor (that’s how it works, right?) you know you’re going to see suffering. What you usually don’t know is how trauma is going to impact you over the years.

For some doctors, trauma comes directly from work. Whether it’s moral injury due to administrative issues that negatively impact patients’ lives, or repeatedly witnessing human suffering up close, you’re going to be exposed to difficult experiences.

For others, trauma is secondary to their role. Residents and medical students are vulnerable to harassment, stalking, and sexual assault. Some come to the field from lives that were already steeped in difficulty.

Many doctors survive both work-related and non-work-related traumatic experiences. And they’re expected to continue as if they’re unaffected by it.

While everyone’s trauma experience varies, common features include:

• Intrusive memories, images, dreams, or flashbacks

• Avoidance (or attempted avoidance) of places, people, memories, conversations, and objects that remind you of the experience

• Emotional inhibition, suppressing difficult emotions, which can eventually make it hard to feel even the emotions you want to experience

• Starting to see yourself, others, and the world as to blame, unsafe, untrustworthy, or simply “bad.”

If any of these sound familiar, you don’t have to white-knuckle through it. Together in therapy, we work to help your body and mind feel safe and regulated again — sometimes for the first time in a long time.

Learn more about my approach to trauma work here.

When you’re a doctor, you’re used to being the one who has to come through for others. It’s probably something you like about yourself!

But when things are unbalanced too long, it can lead to burnout. When you get stuck in a cycle of people-pleasing because you feel like you have to, it doesn’t take long to feel overwhelmed.

In doctors, people-pleasing or chronic guilt can show up as:

• giving patients way more time than you actually have

• saying ‘yes’ to additional requests when you it’s hard to keep up with what’s already on your plate

• blaming yourself or taking it personally when patient outcomes aren’t what you’d hoped — even when you couldn’t have prevented them

• starting to feel resentful toward colleagues, patients, or people in your life who never seem to be doing as much as you

A paradigm shift for some doctors is realizing your job can’t be to take care of everyone else. Rather, you can only do your best to try to help them take care of themselves.

In therapy together, we work to get at the root of chronic guilt so you can stop overfunctioning and experience life without so many ‘I have to’s.

Learn more about my approach to helping clients struggling with chronic gulit and people-pleasing.