"In clinical medical practice business, married physicians
are forced to compromise their time and energy
of varying degrees to maintain a reasonable balance
between their obligations and responsibilities
inherent to their profession and to their families."
The life style of work/home balance is so limited to personal conscious and subconscious influences that the integration of such a complex issue into your professional lives often
becomes a task relegated to a time after a tragedy has already occurred.
It’s a tragedy that results from the imbalance in the equation, commonly ascribed to an increasing distance between home responsibilities and obligations verses the intense desire
and need to reach your highest level of competence, skills, and medical knowledge in your profession… no matter what it takes.
There is, however, a way to look at the issue and to resolve it for you if both participants can conquer two primary issues…
- The mutual depth of love and commitment to the marital relationship
- The belief that the greatest happiness comes with an agreement
by both marital partners to provide enough time and energy to
the relationship and the profession to satisfy the both of your needs.
The problem then is how to accomplish it without a wrestling match or worse. Either
you agree to change a few things permanently or you get a divorce.
First, as a professional, you need to make some tough decisions about your relationship
with money, your medical career objectives, and where you find your greatest and enduring satisfaction. Yes, you are the professional that rides on the heavy end of the stick.
Second, you have been the victim of the extensive subconscious impact on your place in
the practice of medicine. Everything fed to your mind during the medical school years, and specialty training after that, serves to brainwash you into the need for maximizing your
capabilities. You reach a point when nothing else matters… you have no choice and you just
have to do it. That imbedded emotion continues to persist from medical school on into your medical practice years… a time when earning money drives you even more.
Third, your new professional credo in the beginning becomes your standard for your professional life and your relationships with your family. Is it easy to change? Hell no. At this point you expect your spouse and family to agree with your thinking and actions and must go
along with it. Why would they disagree when you are providing everything for them that is
needed or wanted? Unfortunately, your spouse will only take that for so long… following you
into your goal-driven paradise… not hers (or his).
You may be thinking that your spouse must be happy having all the advantages of a medical doctor breadwinner and career social order, high income, upper middle class position, and the social position your spouse is raised up into. At first, satisfaction with the arrangement seems
important and contributes to the welfare of both people. But it doesn’t last longer than a
cigarette or bottle of tequila… seems like.
For a spouse who also has a real job and is earning money and gaining the advantages of
their position both in the workplace and home, the widening distance issue starts immediately.
As a professional, you have your fulfillment, satisfaction, joy in what you do and is fed to
you in daily doses in your medical practice business mode, while your homie spouse spends the
day in relative isolation working on chores without a real paycheck… at least none that he or she ever sees. Have you ever considered becoming invisible and following your spouse around for 12 hours a day in your absence, to see what your spouse is really doing, feeling, and confronting.
If you could do that, it might make you somewhat more considerate of their situation.
You may think you’re providing the family with continued huge benefits so there shouldn’t
be any complaints. Your spouse doesn’t perceive your formidable “benefits” as anything more
than normal life experiences showing up now and then. It’s a different world on the other side
of your dollar bill.
What you have now is, more often than not, a complete lack of communication in the areas
of personal wants and desires. You may believe, “She already knows me, what I’m trying to do
for the family, and why it’s important.” The truth is that both you and she are silently making personal sequential adjustments to your goals, desires, and, most important of all, your expectations of what your future will be like.
The verbal updating of the changes that you both hold in your own minds never seems to be important enough at the time, so the conversation never happens. Ask yourself, when was the
last time you both sat down and discussed what new issues are, or will be, now starting to affect your relationship? It’s so easy to avoid a serious conversation and so hard to bring up potential problems that might cause friction.
Your wife will never admit, or tell you, that she is unhappy. Why? Because she’s supposed
to be happy in that environment while you are at the office, so she pretends… until the
frustration bubble eventually bursts.
Some conclude that it would be much better if physicians never got married or
had families of their own. But we all understand the innate nature we were born with that invites
us into family relationships. Most of us start out with a loving marital relationship which over time becomes a burden. No one has been able to come up with a set of guidelines for wives or
husbands to follow to maintain the work/life balance. The strategies for doing so are numerous.
There are some things that professional husbands or wives have to do for themselves… and
one of them is to actively keep the family circle tight. Doctors usually have a big advantage over their spouse because you can fall back on your medical practice management for support, validation, and self-esteem. Housewives don’t or can't.
Now it’s time for a calm level headed discussion with your spouse…
First, you have to learn to recognize the symptoms of an impending clash with the home-boss. Of course, you won’t be able to do that unless you are looking for the right signals. All medical professionals at home should be paying attention to one of many leading tip-offs of pending trouble. If you’ve already made the unilateral decision to split, then don’t continue to hang
around pretending to enjoy home-life… get out. Otherwise the torment and anguish within the family will persist. Both are suffering too much, make the break now.
Pretending doesn’t last for long. It becomes obvious to the spouse simply by intuition… yes, you just talk and act different. Body language, even without opening you’re your mouth, unveils your mood and temperament.
Do you “know” when you are irritating your spouse or even your medical patients? Most physicians recognize it happening. You also quickly recognize when your spouse is worried, irritated, short tempered, and lack of communication with you.
Often both your spouse and you are aware of a disintegrating relationship, but both refuse to bring up the problem for fear of the many consequences that can occur as a result… just better
to stay silent and pretend as long as you can. And one day in the future something, some words, some event, some activity, some upheaval, will trigger a cleansing of the mind. Think of a mind that has been heaping up piles of frustrations, blame, torment, and anger just waiting for the
trigger to explode.
It seems normal for people to avoid the final clash as long as they can because there is always the possibility that things will magically be rectified without a battle. That thought can be the
thing that precipitates a reconciliation or restoration of the relationship. Nothing will change by getting back together again unless both agree to changes they have to make, or at least work on over a short trial period of time.
Second, by recognizing the problems early enables time to face them and intelligently work
out the solutions so both end up happier and more satisfied with the relationship. Your children often recognize what’s going on sooner than the adults. Prolonging the agony and insecurity of your children impacts their emotions forever.
Third, your discussion with your spouse must be only between you two, isolated from interruptions, and at a time when thoughts about recent conflicts have dissipated. Either person must make a decision, not just intend to, to start the conversation and choose the
right time to do it.
The most productive approach to the problem relationship between doctor
and spouse...
Many couples contact their minister or other religious leader to use a counseling approach
that is framed around Biblical admonitions. If both doctor and spouse are strongly into their religious beliefs there is a better chance that a pastor can really help them mediate
their differences.
The majority of professionals, physician or not, seem to have a greater resistance to counseling and counselors. Understandably, doctors are quite adept at counseling their patients which may create in their minds the belief that they are just as qualified as a pastor or other outside person
to resolve their own issues. That’s the way I with my first wife felt about our pastor's counsel.
I’m not an expert on this topic but I believe that marital counseling with individuals outside
the family only helps to persuade the two people to look at the positive possibilities available to them. Then they can decide between the two of them what to do about their situation.
I also believe that religious leaders are not qualified to counsel professionals about marriage, because their solutions are based on their religious beliefs in one way or another. During such highly emotional and potentially explosive sessions, the religious elements being introduced just seem to add fuel to the fire. Adding church and a religious agenda to the discussion should be handled at another time after the marriage interaction is resolved, in my opinion.
If one or both of the couple being counseled are deeply religious, then the introduction of religious references only serves to create even more self-induced criticism, humiliation, depression, and self-destructive thoughts… contrary to the intended result of counseling. Like, "I'm a complete failure in the marriage relationship and haven't had enough self-discipline to approach my spouse about resolving issues, so better to just end it all."
I’m not saying that a pastor’s counseling is unproductive, only that their limited span of knowledge and experience outside of religion, compromises their thinking and advice. It’s no different than a physician counseling their patients, because their solutions to their patient’s
medical problems may not be what the patient wants or needs. To prove the point, just try to talk a patient out of not needing narcotics for treatment of their pain.
In the case of a patient, the consequence of losing the patient by refusing to prescribe medication has to be considered. And in this day and age loss of a good but demanding patient
hits at the core of a doctor's money problems, might be self-destructive motivation compared to your obligation to serve your patients the best you can. The same fear is present in the marital situation with comparable consequences. The question that arises is, "Which action is more important to me?"
Physicians are unlikely to discuss their marital problems with their peers. And if they do, the advice they get is somewhat inappropriate or twisted by their own poor marital experiences.
Before I get to the meat of this article… I want you to be aware of a few of the facts from a recent survey of “doctors vs. divorce.”
The divorce rates in a 2015 report, a large study done at Harvard of 40,000 physicians and
200,000 other health professionals, provided some interesting results. ( https://hms.harvard.edu/news/doctors-and-divorce )
The study included a wide range of health professionals. Physicians had the lowest divorce rate among all of the medical care professionals. The rates were for dentists 24%, healthcare executives 31%, nurses 33%, pharmacists 23%, lawyers 27% (for comparison), and physicians 24%. The overall divorce rate in the USA has dropped over the last two decades seems to indicate that less of them
are getting married and are simply living with their partners.
Considering that about 50% of physicians in the U.S. are in private medical practice today… about 500,000 in number, leaves 125,000 that do get divorced. That means about 125,000 practices are essentially destroyed or severely compromised, moved, or sold. Additionally, the same numbers of families are disrupted.
Because so much of medical care is reduced during those instances, many in the profession are looking for a means to reduce the incidence of divorce among health professionals. No doubt those who are divorced are wondering who was responsible for causing the divorce and how the divorce could have been avoided if that was the intention.
Good honest communication between marital partners, regardless of fear of consequences, is by far the most satisfactory and important factor in resolving marital issues. Otherwise, the relationship will always become worse with time and results will commonly be the same as they would have been way back then. The difference is that the months and years of delay in having that conversation increasingly effects all aspects of your medical practice.
That's because over time, your irritation turns to frustration, frustration turns to anger, anger turns to abuse, and abuse turns to actions that you will always regret.
Now back to the most successful means for physicians to remain married and maintain their families while continuing to practice medicine. Dr. Andy Stanley, well known pastor, on You Tube, on TV, Internet at www.YourMove.is and highly regarded in the business industry as a motivational speaker and writer lays it all out for you to use effectively yourself. Rev. Jimmy Evans also teaches about marriage exclusively, on Sunday TV.
Dr. Stanley calls the process “Breathing Room.”
All medical professionals understand that they will, for as long as they practice medicine, primarily in a private medical practice business, be spending much more time with their medical practice than a 9-5 job requires. The problem is that their medical professional duties may require hours, days, and sometimes weeks away from their families well beyond the 40 hour work week. Spouses need to be reminded about that obligation to your profession, success should
be your goal.
I believe strongly that before marriage the non-physician spouse must be made fully aware of what disruptions will be occurring in the marriage as a result of your thankless job of trying to balance your profession with your family life.
For most physicians that are married early before the full gamut of medical education has been completed, sex, companionship, and emotional needs usually obliterate any attempt at being honest with their spouse about the challenges he or she will face later. Likely, most wives have no true realistic idea about what may happen later to their marital relationship.
Resolution thoughts...
The first question to ask is, “What would be the ideal situation/solution that would prevent the increasing antagonism and unhappiness between the two of you?”
This avoids starting out with a list of mistakes, abuse, faults, irritations, lack of concern for, and neglect of the spouse.
Since the spouse is usually riding on the high end of the stick and more vulnerable, the physician should begin with the sentence above. It opens doors and permits discussion on the critical
things first. Most often the critical issue is that you are not spending enough time with the
family. In effect it says that you have transferred all responsibility for the family to her/spouse.
Most wives/spouses accept that because they assume that you will come back home and take back the responsibilities at home… but you never do. The promise to do better never happens
and things don’t ever change.
When excuses, reasons, delays, and promises to do better routinely continue, then trust is
lost in the physician by the spouse for the relationship ever to get better. This relationship will
then become irreparable.
Physicians love progress. When you get home there is not much chance for progress. Your
need to make more progress in your practice and career eventually will become out of your control… maybe so automatic that you don’t recognize it.
Your wife may ask you to come home at 4 PM instead of 6 or 8 PM every day. If you agree, then you are giving up your emotion and drive to do more in your practice. You then have your own fear of what will happen to your medical practice if you actually trade office time for home time. It becomes a big obstacle for you. Your employees can handle your office for short
periods of time and you know that’s true.
As a physician there are two keys that spouses require above all others…
- Be a husband to your wife (or visa versa) in real terms
- Be a dad (or mom) to your kids, something she (he) can’t do
Dr. Stanley’s advice is to trust God completely to resolve your absenteeism with your family. When you do, then the elasticity of your limits becomes compatible with spending more time with your family. If not God, then activate your due diligence to your marital contract.
I believe that this is the same magic or supernatural experience that happens to those who
step out of their box or comfort zone in spite of their skepticism. This experience is something that has been confirmed by neuroscientists and brain function researchers. Maxwell Maltz, MD, discusses this concept in his book, Psycho-Cybernetics, written back in 1960. It has been read
by 30 million people and remains a standard classic still applicable today.
The experience goes like this…
When you finally decide to step out of your comfort zone, vault over top of all of your self-induced limitations, and step into the mist of entrepreneurism, something very unexplainable happens to your mind.
Suddenly, you discover that new ideas, thoughts, solutions, and information flow into your mind spontaneously. This has been explained to be the result of the subconscious mind being given the order to search the memory banks of the brain and pulling out any and all information that might have to do with resolving the issue that pushed you our of your comfort zone in the first place.
This activity goes far beyond the capacity of the conscious mind to get access to.
Millions of people have confirmed that it has happened to them. It’s the factor that enables entrepreneurs to accomplish more than most can and do it much faster. One just has to believe that it will happen. Once you experience the triggering power of stepping out of your "self-limitations," belief follows.
Comment...
Most physicians don’t seem to understand where true happiness originates. You may think that the accomplishments you make in the practice of medicine is what drives your satisfaction, happiness, and fulfillment. But your greatest and enduring happiness originates in your relationships with our families. Medical practice can disappear suddenly for many reasons, but families continue on for a lifetime.
Being successful in medical practice business management and your career, helps, but is prone to be victim to destructive governmental and societal changes such as we are seeing today. A loving relationship with your wife/spouse is perpetual and enduring regardless of external circumstances, quite the opposite of a medical practice.
Remember, medical research scientists report today that about 10% of the brain function is allotted to conscious thinking. The other 90% is managed by the subconscious mind. The secret about using the subconscious mind is that it has to be "asked" to do its part and may need a
trigger to make it happen.
----Professional Probe----
Disruptive Reconciliated
Marriage Marriage
The smile you have, seeing these image comparisons, makes for a wonderful day of thoughts about a better life.
Articles © 2013-2022/CGG INVESTMENTS LLC. All rights reserved. #73, 3-16-22
