8 - Shame in Medicine: In Hiding
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What does the introduction reveal about the hidden masks clinicians wear?
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Thanks for listening to the Nocturnist's Shame in Medicine, The Lost Forest. If this is your first time tuning in, welcome, and I actually recommend you rewind and start at episode one. This is a series that builds on itself over time, so starting at the beginning will definitely lead to the richest listening experience. Enjoy the show.
The area that I work in, we encounter shame every day. I work in a community diabetes team and our patients are often experiencing a lot of shame because the kind of the media around diabetes. But people carry that weight when they come. Also, I carry a lot of shame because what my patients don't know is that I have anorexia. and I've been living with it for a long time, so probably about 30 years, to varying degrees. So I've kind of varied between being very unwell, being probably in the street, you'd just think I was slim, to, yeah, barely able to function. And this is something that I... I actually have shared with my manager, who's fantastically supportive, but I'm very loathe to share with the rest of the team and definitely need to protect my patients from.
So it's really complex.
What parts of yourself do you hide at work? Have you ever revealed something about yourself and then later wished you'd kept it a secret? Or maybe there's something you wish you could hide, but it's impossible to do so. As healthcare workers, what happens when we display the parts of ourselves that medicine teaches us to fix in others? What lengths will we go to to prevent those parts of ourselves from being seen? And at what cost? In this episode, we explore the tension between the threat of being exposed and the very human desire to be seen and loved just as one is. You're listening to Shame in Medicine, The Lost Forest, and this is In Hiding.
In Hiding
So often the things that I'm talking to my patients about, eliminating this idea of good and bad foods or overly focusing on weight, none of those things I understand personally. I'm recommending food and treats that I've never eaten or haven't eaten for 30 years. I'm recommending ways of seeing yourself that I don't adopt. I'm recommending kind of loving yourself and taking care of yourself, which I don't do. And I think it's really important that I continue to conceal it from my patients because I think I need to protect them from worrying about me, but I also need to protect them much more than that. I need them to trust me. So it would be really destructive for them to know that actually I'm not comfortable around food.
So I will say things in sessions like when we're working around sort of emotional eating, I will tell them lies. I will tell them, you know, just to kind of normalize because I think it's really important to role model as a practitioner.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What does the introduction reveal about the hidden masks clinicians wear?
0:00–9:40
2
How does the diabetes clinician describe living with anorexia while treating patients?
9:40–18:27
3
Why do healthcare workers feel compelled to hide parts of themselves at work?
18:27–24:45
4
What contradictions arise when a clinician advises patients on food while struggling with eating disorders?
24:45–33:43