Sarah Regan. With Lissa Rankin, M. Eliza Sullivan. Emma Loewe. Latest Articles Integrative Health. Abby Moore. Integrative Health. Kelly Gonsalves. Mental Health. Daniel Amen, M. Jamie Schneider. See What The Future Holds. People used to come into the hospital to die. If your care was too difficult to achieve at home, you were admitted to the hospital to die.
And this man came in riddled with cancer. He had an osteosarcoma, and his bones looked like Swiss cheese; all these lesions were cancer, and there were big snowballs of cancer in his lungs. And in the two weeks or so that he was with us in the hospital, all of these lesions disappeared, and they never came back, Krista. Now, were we in awe? Certainly not.
We were frustrated. Obviously someone had misdiagnosed him. So we sent the slides out to pathologists all over the country, and the pathologists sent back the slides saying classic osteogenic sarcoma. So then we had a grand rounds, and the slides were shown, the X-rays were shown, the man himself was shown.
And the conclusion of this large group of doctors was that the chemotherapy, which had been stopped 11 months before, had suddenly worked. Now, the embarrassing part of this story is that I believed this. For the next 15 years, I never questioned this conclusion.
I think too great a scientific objectivity can make you blind. Remen: I think that that was one of the purest encounters with mystery that I have ever had in my life. I have no answers, but I have a lot of questions, and those questions have helped me to live better than any answers I might find. Tippett: Something that I found interesting when you write about working with physicians — you try to make them comfortable with loss and to understand that as a part of their jobs, their lives, their working lives.
Tippett: Well, alright then. The way we protect ourselves from loss may be the way in which we distance ourselves from life. I also think that no one is comfortable with loss. When we are in the presence of a loss that cannot be fixed, which is a great many losses, we feel helpless and uncomfortable and we have a tendency to run away, either emotionally or actually distance ourselves. And fixing is too small a strategy to deal with loss.
What we teach the students is something very simple. They get to choose that, and then they spend six hours in small groups talking about their loss. And the group has one instruction: Listen generously. Now, prior to this exercise, we do another exercise with them where we ask them to remember a time of disappointment and loss and to remember someone who helped them.
What did that person do? What did they say? What message did they deliver that was helpful to them at a hard time in their lives? And they write these things down very concretely. Then we ask them to remember a time of loss in their lives and remember someone who wanted to help them but was not of help to them.
What did that person do and say, and what message did they deliver, and how did they deliver the message? And they write that down. And then we make a big list. And the only instruction is: Listen generously. Tippett: Again, it takes me back to how we began talking about the power of stories in human lives, and your analogy that the stories are the flesh we put on the bones of the facts about our lives.
There are many different kinds of losses in our lives all the time, and then this kind of stunning idea that you bring forth that the way we deal with those losses, large and small, can really help or get in the way of the way we deal with the rest of our lives, with what we have. Remen: I think this is so. I really do. How do I put this? Most people try to hold on to the thing that is no longer part of their lives, and they stop themselves in their lives in that way.
I have come to see loss as a stage in a process. What happens next is very, very important. And people respond to losses in different ways. When I first became ill, I was enraged. I hated all the well people. I felt that I was a victim and this was unfair. I was angry for about 10 years. I think all of that anger was my will to live expressed in a very negative way. People often are angry in the setting of a terrible loss.
They often feel envious of other people, and this is a starting place. But over time things evolve and change. And at the very least, people who have lost a great deal can recognize that they are not victims, they are survivors. They are people who have found the strength to move through something unimaginable to them, perhaps, in the past. What have you called upon for your strength? You say wholeness is never lost, it is only forgotten. Remen: Wholeness includes all of our wounds.
It includes all of our vulnerabilities. Because we have been wounded allows us to be of help to other people. Integrity simply means what is true, to live from the place in you that has the greatest truth. And that truth is always evolving as well. New Here? New to On Being? Intrinsic hope centers on bringing inner peace to your life.
Offering hope and healing involves the spiritual and emotional aspects of care. Some clinicians may defer these sometimes difficult discussions about hope with their patients to social workers, clergy, or palliative care or hospice professionals.
I believe, however, that all clinicians need to understand the different dimensions of hope and healing. After all, much clinical care occurs long before hospice or palliative care is indicated. Clinicians will face many instances when cure is not possible and focused hope is false. Ignoring or devaluing these kinds of skills harms not just patients, but also clinicians. When clinicians actively distance themselves from the emotional and spiritual aspects of care, finding personal reward in their work can be more elusive.
I believe that shutting yourself off from your own feelings — essentially, dehumanizing yourself — is contributing to the burnout epidemic in health care today.
Most clinicians did not go into health care, after years of training and hard work, to distance themselves from their patients and provide care as a robot would. They wanted to help people, to heal them. Consider this excerpt from our published article on the topic:. Being a caring and compassionate health care provider today is not easy. The best health care outcomes — and the greatest healing — arise from that collaboration.
Leonard L. The simple explanation for why psychology does not address the concept or process of healing is due to its strict reliance on the dictates of science. Science is incapable of recognizing anything about the mind that can become broken. An individuals brain can be broken through injury thereby causing some form of mental illness , but the primary treatment for that injury would fall into the hands of a neurosurgeon to repair a damaged brain, not a psychologist to cure the mind.
The brain is an objective, physiological entity that houses the subjective, psychological mind. Without being able to see anything broken within the mind, there is nothing recognizable to heal.
Nonetheless, the mind does require healing and it is entirely capable of being healed. Perhaps youve heard the allegory about a man looking for lost keys at night by exclusively searching the area beneath a lampost. A passerby asks if he is certain that the keys were lost beneath the lampost, and the man replies that this would be the only area where they could possibly be found.
Similarly, when it comes to the mind, there are realities that lie outside the lampost of scientific detection. There are, in fact, parts of the mind that can become broken, most often in the absence of mental illness.
Sooner or later, everyones heart break. Likewise, people suffer from broken spirits, trust, faith, will, confidence, and self esteem. Everyone also suffers from internal conflicts, evidenced when one part of their nature behaves in ways that another part judges harshly. Can you recognize how each of these conditions might create intense psychological distress to the point where you might need professional assistance? These are common examples of psychological harm that are not pathological.
None of these conditions can be cured. Instead, each is an example of psychological harm in need of restoration. There are countless ways in which human beings become deeply conflicted, divided, and damaged, none of which can be scientifically measured or cured. Such is the nature of the human heart and the subconscious mind, the two places where healing is needed most.
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