Attributed to Krishnamurti

As a physician in Ontario’s health care system, you are facing a unique set of challenges while managing your personal and professional well-being. This is especially true as we emerge from the evolving impact of the pandemic and a radically compromised system of delivery for health care.

On top of juggling life’s stresses, you may experience vicarious trauma, grief, reactivated personal trauma, ethical and moral distress or injury, burnout, and feelings of hopelessness and despair in your career experience. Psychotherapy is a collaborative process in which we work together to bring healing to the issues affecting your life and well-being.

Physicians are particularly susceptible to moral injury and distress, a psychological state of distress that occurs when events go against your values and moral beliefs. This trauma may occur but is not limited to the following situations: organizational betrayal, lack of respect for boundaries, and patient care performed in a situation of duty to a hierarchically imposed mandate that opposes your personal morals/ethics. Moral injury/distress hijacks your nervous system and can lead to PTSD symptoms, causing a profound loss of well-being and irresolvable anger and/or shame-based trauma.

Problematizing “Wellness” Discourses in Physician’s Lives

Wellness interventions can be problematic within the medical institution; teaching wellness without acknowledging the socio-political-cultural context can be not only ineffective but harmful. The concept of "wellness" in medical culture is tied to what Mark Fisher described as the "Privatization of Stress," which shifts the burden of well-being onto individuals while ignoring systemic barriers. This focus diverts attention from the need for collective solutions and structural change.

For physicians, this creates an extra burden: you must not only be a productive and perfect provider of medical care but also manage your own wellness without systemic environments holding a central value that your thriving is essential to your medical practice. Those who speak up and take action can experience being shut down and labelled as ‘the problem,’ further reducing self-worth and significantly increasing the risk of a severe degradation of mental health. Mental health gathers stigma easily in your life and can seriously affect your career. Your need to get support is then disempowered, creating a culture of silence and isolated suffering, increasing your risk of serious harms.

When wellness practices fall short, it reinforces a sense of personal failure, amplifying feelings of blame and inadequacy in an inherently flawed system. This is the essence of structural oppression—internalizing the narratives fed to you about your worth and capabilities.

And this is why in my therapy practice and retreats, I emphasize an intervention using critical reflexivity in context of home and work life. This lens of critical reflexivity looks out into society, environments with structurally embedded barriers, oppressions, and biases to identify these harms which are implicated in eroding mental and physical well-being. Then a lens can be shifted inward for reclaiming personal agency to make changes that pivot focus onto self-compassion for internalized shame, self-blame, and distress for the struggle caused or intensified by the systemic issues.

Physician support & (re)claiming well-being in the context of systemic harms

My practice is trauma informed, and sessions discuss personal life issues with a critical reflexivity on extrinsic systemic, cultural, political, and institutional harms affecting your mental health and personal well-being.

While psychotherapy is practised collaboratively, I bring an integration of a number of evidence-based therapy interventions, each of which include components of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy principles. These interventions help in reworking negative thought patterns, negative core beliefs that warp self-identity and worth, and feelings of hopelessness and despair.

These additional modalities (each with certified training standards) have over 3 decades of scientific research and are operationalized into therapy interventions for healing complex trauma. These are: Self-Compassion Therapy, Polyvagal Therapy, EMDR and Somatic EMDR.

Over the 2 decades working in institutional academic hospitals, in many individual sessions, group retreats, and including a specialization in oncology, I refined these skills to help patients discover their own ‘wisdom-making’ capacity. I called this an internal 'wisdom-compass'. You may learn more about this concept in my research (Butlin, 2018), and along with trauma therapy science, it affirms that the human psyche has an inherent, adaptive capacity to navigate life’s most profound traumas and existential challenges. In my private practice, this methodology has developed into a meaningful technique for supporting physicians to navigate the complex and seemingly unresolvable tensions intersecting between personal and professional worlds.

The process in sessions enables you to learn ways to support grounding intense emotions through the parasympathetic nervous system, create internal clarity, and identify small steps for meaningful, purposeful change. Then, you will find impactful ways to move those changes into professional and systemic contexts.

Over time, this process heals deep wounds, influencing both small decisions and larger life choices to enhance well-being and live a life that feels genuinely worth living.

I have also witnessed the immense toll on women physicians navigating the colonial-patriarchal structures embedded in the Euro-American medical paradigm that shapes your context of Canadian health care training and practice today. The strain is immense in a system that withholds the resources needed to care for ourselves and others. My therapy practice is dedicated to restoring the intrinsic worth and value of each woman, just as I have worked to restore it within myself. (link to blog/ read more)

I am approved and listed with the Ontario Medical Association’s Physician Health Program (PHP). While I regularly receive referrals from the PHP program, you may also self-refer by emailing me By Clicking This Link

As a Licensed Registered Psychotherapist, I do not provide diagnoses; prior to starting therapy, I strongly recommend a physical and mental health assessment with your family physician. Sessions always include mental health assessment and symptom screening. You may consult with your family physician or a psychologist/psychiatrist at any time for full medical assessment around any mental health symptoms.

Rebuilding your sense of self-worth and validating you as person with valuable qualities – regardless of outcomes - protects you from the systemic and interpersonal distortions in medical culture that can damage your sense of identity over time.

As Krishnamurti noted, "It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." There’s no more bandwidth to keep adapting.

Physiology of Change - Neuroplasticity Can Be Harnessed!

The organically formed ‘wisdom-compass’ methodology that my life and therapy practice is formed around uses the following core skills and therapy interventions that have been distilled over 24 years of clinical practice. These are the evidence based practices, skills, and therapy modalities that form internal capacity for healing and recovery from past trauma, professional vicarious trauma, ethical distress, moral injury and cumulatively harmful contexts in personal life and workplaces:

·       Critical reflexivity teaches each person to look out first and “name the things”—the invisible, impactful oppressions, discourses, biases, barriers circulating around and through your life, at home, at work, in public spaces, and recognize what harms are shaped into your lived experience through their silent but relentlessly forceful presence in policy, cultural norms, institutional culture, and so on.

·       Polyvagal therapy offers you a science and methodology for listening to and shaping your nervous system to grow a strong and robust parasympathetic regulating neurology that enables us to harness anger, recognize distress and numbing states, and heal them into an accessing of your own ‘wisdom compass.’

·       Self-compassion, especially tailored for busy women in a biased society, draws on decades of research by clinical experts and researchers: Dr. Paul Gilbert, Dr. Kristen Neff, and Dr. Christopher Germer. Dr. Neff's concept of ‘Fierce Self-Compassion’ (2021) specifically addresses women's unique challenges. I found Kristen Neff’s research in 2009 and started working self-compassion into my oncology support groups, and by the time I trained formally in the Self-Compassion Therapy intensive in 2021, there were over 3,500 studies demonstrating its benefits in areas like mental health, addiction recovery, and athletic performance. It works. But you have to figure how it can work for you sessions or retreats focus on the practical keys that work best for you.

·       Healing past trauma  - Past trauma is stored in your nervous system and memory networks. It renders you vulnerable to being re-triggered in the present, and old survival modes can be an autonomic method of coping that your nervous system habitually uses to enable your survival. But survival mode is not meant to be a way of life and eventually causes deteriorating mental health (brain’s loss of ability to manage stress). Often, when past traumas are combined with frontline exposure to human suffering, traumatic events where lives must be saved at all costs, including your own, along with the systemic under resourcing of your career, PTSD symptoms can develop. Brains can only recover so many times from overwhelming and prolonged chronic stress and trauma events. Healing past trauma allows present traumas and stress to be just that – present – and builds skills and resiliency in your neural networks to be able to recover in real time. Then you can work towards recovery and re-anchoring into well-being more effectively and quickly.