Has someone ever guilted you into picking up an extra shift? Made you feel like you can’t really take time off without negatively impacting your coworkers and patients?
Within the medical field- I’ve seen guilt used as a weapon. A way to manipulate the good will of healthcare professionals
We went into medicine because we wanted to help people- and now that is being used against us.
In this episode you’ll learn
Why I think guilt is a scam
A powerful tool for navigating and dismantling guilt.
Tune in to see how you can free yourself from the heavy-ness of guilt once and for all.
Join my FREE Live Training on July 14th Plan Your Pivot: How to create an exit strategy and find work you enjoy [that doesn't burn you out] in the next 120 days. Register HERE: https://coachchelsmd.com/pivot
Has someone ever guilted you into picking up an extra shift? Made you feel like you can’t really take time off without negatively impacting your coworkers and patients?
Within the medical field- I’ve seen guilt used as a weapon. A way to manipulate the good will of healthcare professionals
We went into medicine because we wanted to help people- and now that is being used against us.
In this episode you’ll learn
Why I think guilt is a scam
A powerful tool for navigating and dismantling guilt.
Tune in to see how you can free yourself from the heavy-ness of guilt once and for all.
Join my FREE Live Training on July 14th Plan Your Pivot: How to create an exit strategy and find work you enjoy [that doesn't burn you out] in the next 120 days. Register HERE: https://coachchelsmd.com/pivot
In our society, we tend to think that guilt is a good thing. That it's this moral compass or some kind of internal regulator that helps us to be good people that promotes ethical behavior, positive change. And we tend to think that if we don't have guilt, we'd be these raging sociopathic murderers. But is that actually true? That's what I want to explore in this episode is guilt necessary to have a functioning society is guilty, helpful emotion for positive behavioral change. Or is it a scam? Is it a manipulation or control technique? That's used to keep us in line. My goal in this episode is to actually free you from guilt. You're listening to life after medicine, the podcast for health professionals who want to make a difference, make a living, and still have the freedom to enjoy their lives. My name is Chelsea Turgeon, and my mission is to help you, the lost health professional, find your authentic path to helping others and generating stable income without having to sacrifice your own health and happiness in the process. so first let's talk about the definition of guilt what is guilt? I first started to understand this emotion. When I read the book. Awaken the giant within, by Tony Robbins he says that emotions are messengers each emotion has something to communicate to us. If we can listen and understand the message. Then we can actually use the emotion for positive change. Each emotion has a message. So what's the message of guilt. He says the message of guilt is that you've broken a standard that you have adopted or held to be true. And then the purpose of experiencing guilt is to help bring you back to those standards. So that you can calibrate your behavior according to how. You want to behave in the world and who you want to be. Another definition of guilt. From Brené Brown's book Atlas of the heart. She talks about guilt as a very socially adaptive emotion that essentially represents cognitive dissonance. It says. I have done something or failed to do something that's aligned with my values. And it feels awful. I need to make amends. As much as I love Brené brown and Tony Robbins. I believe that there are some pieces missing from this definition. Because within both of these definitions of guilt, there's this assumption that the standards that we've internalized and adopted are supportive for us and that their standards, we want to continue upholding going forward. And I think what's missing. From these definitions. They're assuming that our values and our conscience and our standards are all properly wired, that they're all wired for us and not wired. Based on the subscript of society what I've seen with so many of my clients is we experience guilt because we're trying to uphold other people's standards for our lives. We experience guilt because we're trying to live by the values of society. Without actually taking time to question. Are those my values. Do those actually work for me? But we've been living by these values and these standards for so long that we have a really hard time separating them. And so we feel guilt even when it's no longer an adaptive emotion for us. I want to talk through my own experiences of guilt, what it's been like for me throughout my life. And then I want us to critically examine guilt. Brené brown talks about this definition of guilt that I've done something bad and shame is that I am bad. What I've realized is I've never experienced those separately. There's something deep within my programming. And I'm not sure what it is, but the moment my brain has registered at the I've done something bad. It automatically jumps to the conclusion that I am bad. I have personally never experienced guilt. Without shame. And I don't know if that has something to do with being brought up in the Catholic church. Within the Catholic church. There's that concept of original sin. This concept of. Like I'm bad at my core. and it creates this pervasive feeling of shame. And it's like any time you sin, it's almost this proof of like, look you're bad. There's original sin popping up again. And I think possibly growing up within the Catholic church, going to Catholic schools, just having this sort of nailed into me. That when you do something about it's proof that you're bad inherently, I've never been able to separate those two for me, guilt comes then shame is right there. And I've never heard anyone talk about that before. Everyone's talked about shame is this thing and guilt is this thing, but what if you experienced them at the exact same? What if one triggers the other and vice versa? And so I share that because I've never heard someone talk about it like that before. I hope that it's helpful for me to share my experience of that, but also because I want to share that I have gone on such a journey with guilt and shame, and personally have had to release so much of that over the past five years. So I come from this background. Of feeling so weighed down by guilt and shame. And over the past five years, I've really learned how to free myself from so much of that. And so I want to talk about. How, how I've gotten to that point. but first I want to talk about what gives us this programming of guilt. some examples of how society has programmed guilt into us. especially our medical training has programmed guilt into us. So I want to talk through that and then I'll walk you through my flow chart to help free yourself from guilt. So in the medical field, we have deeply conditioned into guilt. Most of us get into the medical field because we want to be good people. We want to do good in the world. And that can be used against us in some pretty manipulative ways. There's that concept of being a team player? That we have to take on this team responsibility. This happens pretty early on. So employers will stress to you, the impact of your absence on your colleagues, essentially saying like, look, if you don't step up one of your coworkers or your co-residents like someone else is going to be burdened, if you don't get it together. And this is why we have a really hard time taking leave, taking time off, reducing our call shifts because we're worried about burdening others. We're worried about not being perceived as the team player. And we're worried about other people having to do more work on our behalf. So we're conditioned very early on. If you're not going above and beyond. That has a negative impact on people taking mental health days, taking sick days, reducing your workload negatively impacts other people. So when I was on my leave of absence and I was talking with my program director and sharing with her, where I was at telling her that I wanted to leave, that I didn't want to come back. One of the first things she said to me was. That's going to make things really difficult on your co-residents. And it was in that moment. I really saw that. We have entered into this pact of mutual suffering together. It's this team dependency that we've been conditioned into that in order to be a team player, you need to make sure that your suffering the same amount as everyone else. And if you take some time off to reduce your suffering, That's going to increase the suffering and the workload for someone else. But the only reason that this pact of mutual suffering exists is because we all opt into it. We all believe it. So here's the thing. If I'm leaving residency. It doesn't have to be harder on my co-residents. That's not the only option. Now it was, it ended up being that way. People had to take call. People had to do moonlighting for my shifts. Like it ended up being a burden on my co-residents. But it didn't have to be that way. There were other options. The hospital could have hired additional support staff to cover my shifts. They could have paid attendings overtime to take call if they wanted to do that, things could have been eliminated entirely from the program. They could have looked and said, okay, well, do we actually need residents covering this external hospital? Is this something that we actually need manpower to do? Could we outsource this? Could we delete this? But within the medical field, There's not really creative. Problem-solving. There's only this mutual belief in suffering. So hospitals are not going through and doing these monthly reviews, seeing what can be deleted, delegated deferred. They're not doing time audits. They're not critically looking at where their resources, including our human manpower is going. Nobody's looking at that. They're not looking at certain tasks even need to be done. They're just not doing that within the hospital. And so what that leads to is this mutual pact of suffering. That in order to be a team player, you have to keep suffering to at least this degree. For it to be acceptable. And what I want you to get from that is. It does not have to be this way. And the longer we buy into this and allow ourselves to be manipulated through guilt. We're all losing. Everybody's losing. when we do that instead of actually thinking well, could there be another way? Another way that guilt is used to manipulate us is through patient care using patient outcomes. What's so messed up. I was in a Facebook group one time. And someone's screenshot of this email from a hospital admin within the email, there was layers and layers of guilt of like, How is it possible that nobody's picking up extra shifts? We need these shifts covered, like didn't you take the Hippocratic oath? What about the patients? How are the patients going to be? And it was blowing my mind. it was just this deep demonstration of the way that guilt is used to manipulate the Goodwill of healthcare professionals. I think we can actually learn a lot about guilt from studying sociopath's perception of it. So I found this quote from a sociopath that said, I believe that guilt is a control mechanism used by people to punish you. For doing things that benefit you. I think it's a very toxic and unnecessary emotion. And what I've noticed is that whenever my actions are based on guilt, I ended up in some pretty bad situations and I tolerate poor treatment. I was recently spending time with this person who used to be a friend in the past. And I noticed that he was saying things to me that were just like doing these digs into my character, criticizing me, insulting me sometimes subtly sometimes pretty overtly, but acting like it was a joke. And essentially saying things that made me feel really bad about myself. And I was looking back at like, why am I spending time with this person and when I traced it back, it's because I felt guilty of something that happened almost two years ago that I had apologized for, but was still carrying it around with me. And because of that, I was allowing myself to be treated really poorly. And there's this argument that guilt can help you learn a lesson that it can help you develop your moral code. And. I can see how that could be true. You're less likely to repeat mistakes when there's pain associated with it. And guilt is painful. But I think that at this point in your life, it's really possible. For the most part. I tell people that we need to honor your emotions and trust your body. But I think guilt is actually one of those exceptions You can't trust your guilt. At face value because you've been conditioned and programmed in a way that makes you feel guilty about things that essentially mean you're just not benefiting other people. So capitalism makes you feel guilty for resting. Because resting is something that benefits you, but it doesn't benefit the system. It doesn't benefit productivity. And so I think we need to be really wary. Of our guilt. Really skeptical. I know you have a skeptical mind. And so what if we apply that. To guilt So I want to teach you a process for critically examining. Your guilt so that you can rewire it. So I created a guilt flow chart that I'm super excited to walk you through. And the premise of this flow chart is that guilt can be constructed if experienced in very short periods of time. But it's not something that we should be stewing it and just feeling this chronic. Sense of pervasive guilt just like they teach you in the Catholic church. Like we're just always feeling guilty about being this dirty, messy, imperfect human. But if you're stewing in that all the time, it just. Oh, it feels so bad. And so the point of this framework and this flow chart is to free you from guilt so that you're not living in that low level of guilt all the time. So whenever you experience guilt, you're going to start with the flow chart. The first question you want to ask yourself is what is the standard or the moral code that's been violated? And you want to turn this into something that's like a broader standard. So for me, for example, when I was talking with my program director and she said, okay, well, if you're going to leave, that's going to make it harder on your co-residents. If I felt guilty in that moment. I would ask myself, what is this standard? That was violated. Maybe it's like, if you don't suffer, someone else has to suffer or I should be a team player by continuing in a job, even though I'm unhappy because I want to prevent other people from suffering. that's pretty long. So you want to simplify it as much as you can, so maybe it would be. I should keep working in this job so that I can be a team player. So once you've identified the standard, then you want to ask yourself this question. Do I want to opt into that? To examine that even further, you can start to ask whose moral code or whose standard is this. Who said that as a standard. Who says that for me to be a team player, I need to keep doing something I don't want to do to prevent other people from suffering. Like according to who. I guess like medical culture. The hospital administration, just the culture and dynamics within residency programs. Okay. So once you identify who's, it is. Who said that? Then. That can already. Help you start to distance yourself from it. Another question you can ask. Does that align with my higher self. Is this something I want to choose to believe? Yes. I want to be a team player. I want to care for other people, but not at the expense of myself. I don't want that. Another question you can ask is, do I truly believe this is wrong or has society told me that it's wrong? And sometimes going through this questions is going to be hard. It's not necessarily going to be straightforward and cut and dry. Because this is a process of separating your own personal moral standards from society's moral standards and we're entering very nuanced territory, but it's important to start asking these questions. So do I truly believe this is wrong or has the society just told me this is wrong? And if you decide, you do believe it, right. If you want to opt into it. You still don't want to be stewing around in the guilt. So after you go through the flow chart, you identify the standard or moral code you go in and you say, do I want to opt in or out? If you decide you want to opt in, because you believe in that standard or moral code. You still want to process this quickly? So you want to ask, how can I correct these behaviors? Is there something I can do to make amends? Is there an action I can take? Or how can I learn a lesson? Maybe it's something that already happened in the past. You can't really go back and change it, but can you learn a lesson from it? Then you want to forgive yourself? And move on. Because you don't want to keep stewing in guilt. It's just not productive. Now, if you decide you want to opt out. What you must do is correct the perception. The reason you're experiencing guilt in this moment is because of a flawed perception. You are perceiving something as morally wrong as violating a standard. But now you're deciding no, we're opting out of that. That's actually not a standard I'm going to hold anymore. That's not how we're going to perceive it anymore. So you need to correct the perception. You can do that by asking yourself, what do I actually believe to be true here? In this instance, my belief was. This does not have to be true, that we all suffer. If there's a better way. My absence does not have to inconvenience other people. My absence could provide jobs to somebody whose jobless. It could provide a chance to critically examine. What actually needs to be done here. And certain things could get eliminated entirely because it's just busy work. My actions of leaving residency did not have to inconvenience someone else. There could be creative solutions. And so that's what I decided. That's what I believed that was my new perception was that there's another way there doesn't have to be this way. And I also distanced myself from trying to force that perception on them. Right. I decided. It's not my problem. Honestly. Like, it's just not my problem. I'm not opting into this mutual packed of suffering anymore. Everyone else can choose that as well. Everyone else could choose to stop opting in. And until they do, it's just not my problem. So that's what you need to do. You just correct your perception. You believe your new perception and then you take the old one and you just say, That's not mine. That's not my problem. And you feel how freaking liberating that is. So essentially to summarize all of this guilt is this emotion that we experience when we feel like we violated some kind of standard or moral code. But it's not always reliable. We can't always trust our own guilt because we've been programmed and conditioned in a way. To hold certain moral standards that might not actually benefit us. They might just be benefiting systems or old ways of life that we're upholding. And so we have to critically examine our guilt. So when you experience the emotion of guilt, first thing you want to ask yourself, what is the standard or moral code that was violated? Do I want to opt into that? If not, then you have to correct the perception. What do I actually believe to be true? What is right. And what is wrong here? And then you distance yourself from the guilt by looking at that. old moral standard and saying that's not mine. No. Thank you. Opt out. You're not doing anything wrong. Your not bad. There is nothing to feel guilty about. You wanting to make decisions that make you happier, more joyful, less stressed. There's absolutely nothing to feel guilty about. And if other people want to stay in their misery. That's not your problem. It can't be your problem because you can't get miserable enough to help other people get happy. And you can't be exhausted enough to help other people thrive. There's no universe where people are benefited. by you destroying yourself by you suffering. It just doesn't make sense. And so you don't have to feel guilty for taking care of yourself. You have permission to say no. Permission to take time off. You have permission to quit. You have permission to leave your coworkers hanging? Because that's not your problem. That's the administration's problem. And not everyone else's problem for not opting out. Everyone else has problem for continuing to opt into a harmful system. You have permission to radically pursue what is best for you? Because if you're not taking care of you. Literally, no one else does. It is actually your job to take care of yourself. And when you're not doing it, everyone else suffers. So. My loves. May this episode free you from guilt. Give you permission to put yourself first and help you become just a little bit more of a sociopath.
