Difficulty listening to family members

[Chimed]

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I have found over the last year that I'm starting to have trouble coming home to my spouse, family members, and friend and being able to compassionately listen to their problems. I'm typically good about coming home and not thinking about my patients. However, I've found that after a long day of listening to my patient's issues, I just feel saturated and have a hard time listening to depressing issues with those close to me. I'm starting to feel guilty about not being as emotionally available as I use to be before starting residency. Anyone else having trouble with this? Any tips?

 

[whopper]

As far as I can tell, the emotional baggage that can come from patients or their loved ones was stuff that I didn't carry with me after work.

At times, there was some frustrations--the usuals. The Axis II cluster B patients, but after PGY-I they stopped bugging me. The families with high EEs used to also bug me, but its something that I learned to let go. You can't control them, why let it bother you when you can't change them?

There were a few times I was seeing a patient, couldn't figure out what was going on because the symptoms didn't fit the usual patterns, so I'd come home, locked onto the computer doing lit-searches for hours with a vengeance to find something that could explain what was going on. However those were more on the order of being very passionate, not being frustrated.

My wife & I had some problems, but I didn't attribute them to be a psychiatry resident, just being a resident. The long hours, & the days where you need to be left alone to study.

Do you have an outlet among your peers? In our profession, we can soak up a lot of the emotional problems of others. Its important you wring yourself out once in awhile.

 

[strangeglove]

Have you considered personal psychotherapy? I'm pretty sure this is one reason why psychiatry residents often seek this.

 

[OldPsychDoc]

Personally, when I'm having a bad day the arrow tends to point in the other direction--I'm ticked or worried about something at home and have to compose myself a bit before putting on my "doctor mask" and listening empathetically to the latest borderline complaints...
Work is generally a place where I feel sane and have the delusion of some control. 🙄 (At least when I write an order, it's usually done! At home it is rather harder to feel respected and listened to!) It helps to have co-workers, teammates, etc. to vent to.

 

[masterofmonkeys]

I do a lot of peer counseling and have never taken work home with me. The emotion of it, not the thinking about it. I think it's a pretty dangerous precedent to set early in your career when you let these things affect you.

I mean, we're all human and if we aren't affected at some level by what we experience and by what others share with us in confidence and trust, then we aren't doing our jobs either.

I guess what I'm getting at is that it's best to develop a sort of buddhist enlightenment about things. Life is suffering and all that. Not losing the ability to have emotion, but losing the ability to allow emotion well up inside you. Experience and release.

 

[Still Kickin]

Work is generally a place where I feel sane and have the delusion of some control.

👍

 

[billypilgrim37]

I guess what I'm getting at is that it's best to develop a sort of buddhist enlightenment about things.

Chimed's Weekend Things-To-Do

-laundry
-Trader Joe's
-reach Nirvana.

No sweat 😉

 

[Doc Samson]

I have found over the last year that I'm starting to have trouble coming home to my spouse, family members, and friend and being able to compassionately listen to their problems. I'm typically good about coming home and not thinking about my patients. However, I've found that after a long day of listening to my patient's issues, I just feel saturated and have a hard time listening to depressing issues with those close to me. I'm starting to feel guilty about not being as emotionally available as I use to be before starting residency. Anyone else having trouble with this? Any tips?

There's also the aspect that your patients (hopefully) have more significant stressors than your family members. I remember it being very hard to hear my sister complain about her cat's unexplained illnesses and how upsetting it was after a day of hearing about homelessness and rape from my patients. In my experience your internal barometer learns to cope with the differences, but I agree that going through psychotherapy yourself can speed this along.

 

[BabyPsychDoc]

I used to suffer much like yourself, Chimed, unable to sympathise with family/friends after spending the day listening to strangers - and being nice/supportive to them.

However, it then occurred to me that perhaps I would not have had to listen to strangers' petty grievances quite as much (I am not talking about rape/abuse/homelessness here, mostly about "my BF dumped me, what do I do?" or "my dog has lost its tail - I can't cope") if the said strangers had more supportive family/friends. This sudden realization helped me a lot to be nicer and more tolerant when dragged into "domestic soap operas".😀

 

[smarmy]

funny you should mention this....my sister recently told my mom that it was strange that i claim to like psych given that, "she doesn't seem to like talking to depressed people like me." how's a comment like that to make you feel terrible? the problem is that family is just too close to be objective. i have a much different (and i think more effective) interaction with patients precisely because I am not emotionally involved. hearing a family member upset, on the other hand, immediately makes me uncomfortable, even if i'm not immediately aware of it. on a lighter note, it's much easier to nod along to a patient's rendition of events that you were not involved in, and much harder to try not to say anything when a family member has a skewed view of events that you know to have gone down differently.

 

[BabyPsychDoc]

funny you should mention this....my sister recently told my mom that it was strange that i claim to like psych given that, "she doesn't seem to like talking to depressed people like me." how's a comment like that to make you feel terrible? the problem is that family is just too close to be objective. i have a much different (and i think more effective) interaction with patients precisely because I am not emotionally involved. hearing a family member upset, on the other hand, immediately makes me uncomfortable, even if i'm not immediately aware of it. on a lighter note, it's much easier to nod along to a patient's rendition of events that you were not involved in, and much harder to try not to say anything when a family member has a skewed view of events that you know to have gone down differently.

BING! Just recently, I had a huge argument with my mother regarding her obesity and her lifestyle. My husband, who was not emotionally involved, could not understand why I am "trying to change a lightbulb that is not ready to change"😳 It is just much easier telling your patients that they are going to die if they do not do X, than watching your own mother killing yourself in that fashion.🙁

 

[whopper]

My husband, who was not emotionally involved, could not understand why I am "trying to change a lightbulb that is not ready to change"

You can only lead the horse to the water....