Episode 90: When Medicine Changes You: Traumatic Stress and Healing for Doctor Moms Dr. Kemia Sarraf

Topics Covered

• Traumatic Stress in Physicians: Why Burnout Is an Incomplete Explanation
• Chronic Stress in Medicine: When “The Dose Makes the Poison”
• Secondary and Vicarious Trauma in Healthcare Professionals
• Compartmentalization in Medicine: A Survival Skill That Eventually Harms
• Why Physicians Avoid Seeking Help – and the Fear of Falling Apart
• Boundary Vulnerability in Medicine: Being Human Without Losing Professionalism
• Healthcare Culture and Leadership: Rebuilding Trust, Connection, and Safety

Medicine teaches you how to save lives.

It rarely teaches you what repeated exposure to suffering does to you.

Today’s episode is about traumatic stress in physicians – not burnout, not weakness, and not something you can outwork.

I’m joined by Dr. Kemia Sarraf – Dr. K – a physician, public health expert, and nationally recognized leader in trauma-informed education and culture change.

At one point she says, “Stress isn’t the problem. Unprocessed stress is.”

We talk about why compartmentalization works… until it doesn’t, how trauma accumulates quietly, and what it means to be fully professional without disconnecting from your humanity.

If medicine feels heavier than it used to, and you can’t quite explain why, this conversation will.

Let’s begin.

Find the full transcript and more resources for physician moms at inspiredmommds.com/90.

Traumatic Stress in Physicians: Why Burnout Is an Incomplete Explanation

Dr. Cindy: Today we have a truly remarkable guest joining us, Dr. Kemia Sarraf, or Dr. K. She is a physician, public health expert and global thought leader on the impact of traumatic stress exposure on professionals and first responders.

She is internationally recognized for developing and deploying leading edge programs and actionable skills to disrupt the impact of traumatic stress exposure and harm, restore resilience, and realign organizational cultures.

Dr. K is a highly sought leadership strategist whose work sits at the intersection of neuroscience, education, narrative, and organizational transformation. She trained in public health in internal medicine at the University of Utah and at Washington University in St. Louis.

Her 25 year career arc is extraordinary spanning patient care to public health, policy of nonprofit leadership, and state and national advisory roles. She founded Lodestar, a professional development consultancy specializing in advanced leadership development and culture alignment strategies.

Her keynotes are equal parts, rigorous science and human story (I can attest to this) and equip audiences to confront burnout, traumatic stress, exposure, moral injury, and systemic dysfunction with clarity, courage, and practical tools for repair.

She’s known for unflinching honesty, incisive storytelling, quick humor, and deep compassion.

Students at the Southern Illinois University School of Medicine are lucky to have her as adjunct faculty, and she has been honored nationally for her vision and her impact. And as a fellow doctor mom, I have to mention that she does all of this while residing on a working farm in Central Illinois with her physician husband, and four semi feral sons.

Dr. K: Oh, thank you. And yeah, heavy on the semi right. Probably fully feral. I mean, if we’re going to be fair about it, they’re probably fully feral sons.

Dr. Cindy: Which works because you have a farm. So, yeah.

Dr. K: It is exactly right.

Dr. Cindy: Now I looked up the word Lodestar, which is the name of your company, to find the official meaning. I kind of have an idea that it’s a star that’s used to guide the course of a ship, but it’s also referred to as the person or a thing that serves as an inspiration or guide. And I believe that is you. How did you come up with that name?

Dr. K: Yeah. Well, thank you. You know, I think it sort of appeared out of a number of conversations in which folks around me felt or were articulating that they felt so far off course. And we tend to, when we awaken to the fact that we’re off course from who we meant to be, where we meant to be, all of those things, it’s really disorienting.

And it also can land as shaming. Right. There’s, there can be a sense of shame that arises out of that.

And so this idea and these discussions that evolved from these conversations that none of us make a right turn. Most of us just drift, one degree at a time. Our organizations do the same, by the way, which is why we don’t talk about organizational change management or organizational culture change. 90% of those initiatives fail. What we talk about is realigning, okay?

Most of us have a North Star. When we don’t have a North Star, we can always use a lodestar. And what happens is that by degree, by a fraction of degree, over time we drift. And when we’re not reorienting continuously that one degree drift, you go 50 miles, a hundred miles, five years, suddenly you are 10,000 miles from where you meant to be. So it’s a bit of a mixed metaphor, but I really love it.

Dr. Cindy: I think it paints the picture perfectly.

Dr. K: Thank you.

Chronic Stress in Medicine: When “The Dose Makes the Poison”

Dr. Cindy: I would love to start with just defining the problem that your work is centered around, which is the profound impact of traumatic stress exposure on professionals. Can you help us understand what exactly that is? Are we talking about burnout, moral injury, everything? Can you help us define that?

Dr. K: Well, let’s open with something we learned together in our first year of medical school. The dose makes the poison. Basic pharmacological principle, right? Even the things that are really, really good and healthy for us, things like water. You and I both know, right? That if I sat here with your audience and I drank 10 gallons of water in the next 45 minutes, you would be dialing 9-1-1 on my behalf to ensure that somebody got me to the ER and probably into the ICU.

Because this thing that is essential to life can kill me if ingested too much too fast because I’ll go into a state of disequilibrium.

Stress is really good for us, so we have to start there. Stress is absolutely essential to normal healthy development. It is a part of learning, it’s a part of being alive. It’s a part of growth. It’s a part of childhood growth and development. It’s also a part of normal stages of adult growth and development. Don’t know if you learned about adult developmental stages in medical school. I know I didn’t. But there are these normal, healthy stages that we are moving through.

The challenge becomes when that stress is heightened or extreme for prolonged periods of time when the right conditions do not exist for us to navigate that stress. So we can navigate extreme stress if we’re resourced to do so. If the conditions are right for us to do so. When the conditions don’t exist, then it begins to harm us.

When the stress is too high for too long, that begins to compound. So I think that’s an important opening because to blame stress is inappropriate and it’s inaccurate. Traumatic stress is an interesting concept to begin to wrestle with because what might land as a traumatic stress exposure for you might not land as one for me and what might land as a traumatic stress exposure for me might not land as one for you. Again, depending on previous experiences, how well resourced we are.

Secondary and Vicarious Trauma in Healthcare Professionals

Dr. K: I want to caveat what I’m about to say with that – knowing that though, the reality is that most of us as humans are going to, at some point in time, have some sort of traumatic stress exposure. And I would go so far as to argue that most of us, particularly as adults living in this world at this moment, are experiencing traumatic stress exposure, some day in and day out without a break.

And this is again, we come back to the dose makes the poison. So, the exposure is going to happen. We accept that as reality. The question becomes, can we recognize when it has happened or is happening? And do we know what to do after?

Because exposure to this does not mean embodied trauma, does not mean that I then carry it with me forever as a traumatic experience. It simply means I’ve been exposed and for many of us exposure is in the job description.

So you mentioned that we work with first responders. So let’s take first responders, right? If, if you’re a fireman, a policeman, EMS, the job description includes running towards the danger. That’s part of the job.

Now let’s talk about another type of traumatic stress exposure. Physicians, nurses, healthcare professionals of all types, public health, the legal profession. Many of our lawyers, right? There is a very high dose of exposure to secondary and vicarious trauma, to being proximate to harm in others, whether that’s our patients, our students sometimes, our community, sometimes in our own family.

And the thing of it is, secondary and vicarious traumatic stress is processed in our nervous system the same way. We can actually see this on FMRI. We can see that the traumas that happen to me are processed in my nervous system the same way as that exposure to secondary and vicarious trauma.

Now again, this is what we signed up for. If you are a physician, if you’re a healthcare worker, you signed up to be proximate to people in pain. You signed up occasionally to be the deliverer of that pain, right? We are delivering diagnosis, we are delivering news. We are, we’re proximate to all of this. So that’s the job.

Compartmentalization in Medicine: A Survival Skill That Eventually Harms

Dr. K: We do the job well. We’re trained to do the job well. What we’re not trained to do is recognize the toll the job takes and disrupt that toll before it drifts us 5,000 miles from where we meant to be.

Sitting in a room with a patient when they receive a devastating diagnosis, being with a family after a loved one has died, these are supposed to hurt. And those are extreme examples. I realize it’s supposed to hurt and it’s also not supposed to permanently harm us. So the question becomes, are we skilled in what we do with the hurt afterwards? What do we do with the exposure afterwards, before it builds up? That dose becomes so great that it becomes embedded in us as harm.

And the answer to that question is, no, we don’t know what to do. We haven’t been skilled, what to do.

What we’re skilled in is compartmentalizing all of it. And let me just caveat this for anybody who’s going to come at me, right? Compartmentalization is a really important skill. If I am running a code, you do not want me feeling my feelings.

If I have dialed 9-1-1 and you are a first responder coming to my house, please don’t have feelings about it. Show up, ready to be in service to the need. We’re very good at that, and compartmentalization has its place.

And if I do not know what to do with how I feel about the patient, I wasn’t able to save. And the next one, and the next one and the next one. If all that is being modeled for me and all that is being taught to me, either implicitly or explicitly is to bury it, that is going to eventually harm me because our limbic systems evolved for us to feel with each other.

Limbic resonance exists so we can connect. Suppressing that, diminishing that dismissing, that compartmentalizing, that shellacking over that for years hardens us at best.

And the thing about trauma is that it demands some kind of discharge. We discharge it at others, we discharge it at ourselves, and either way, the results can be really, really devastating. Very long answer to your very straightforward question.

Dr. Cindy: I knew it would be. It’s a very complicated topic, and you did actually answer another thought I had about why do these high achieving professionals just keep taking on this stress, and I think you answered it.

You said that we’re trained to compartmentalize, shellac over it. We’re trained to push it aside. So how do we disrupt this pattern of what we are trained to do so that we don’t lash out at other people and ourselves?

Why Physicians Avoid Seeking Help – and the Fear of Falling Apart

Dr. K: Yeah. Well, I think it starts by recognizing and having hope that there’s something else that also works. It’s so interesting when I opened Loadstar a decade ago, I really intended it to sort of be a very bespoke opportunity for physicians, for our colleagues. Very explicit like it was going to be this narrow to work with them around burnout. Right, which wasn’t even a decade ago, wasn’t really even being talked about very openly.

But when you looked at the data, it had been rising for a very long time. And we were starting to get those, you know, we were starting to collect the data that said something’s really wrong with our colleagues because we were beginning to get the news that a lot of our colleagues were dying by suicide.

And so the intent originally that I had was to provide an opportunity and a path for beginning to have conversations that are absolutely essential that physicians were very resistant to going and having other places.

For a number of reasons, number one, because we all think we’re special and nobody, nobody could possibly understand the challenges and pain that we’re in. So that’s part of it. The other thing is there’s some very, especially a decade ago, some very real and perceived licensure risk associated with seeking help because you had to report it when you go to renew your license.

And so there were some significant barriers to this. And then also, again, we have a culture where, what do we say, “strong work”, right? We have a culture. All of us have been raised in this culture, this medical culture that celebrates, overwork, celebrates, being able to move from the one thing to the next thing, to the next thing. In that manner, it’s what is both spoken and unspoken.

And it was fascinating because when I started taking these calls, having these conversations with physicians, there was a very common theme around why they hadn’t ever done this before and it wasn’t the fear.

It wasn’t the fear of licensure. It wasn’t, you know, those were sort of the front men for why they hadn’t done it. It wasn’t, I don’t have enough time. You know what it was? It was, I’m afraid. If I start, I’m going to dissolve from structure to soup. I mean, I’m putting words to it, but that was, that was what was underneath it.

It was like, I’m afraid if I open this Pandora’s box, I’m going to have to spend the next five years sucking my thumb in the fetal position under my bed, because there is so much I’ve stuffed in there. It’s not possible for me to, I can’t manage it, so I’m going to keep it tucked away. Yeah.

And what is the hope, right, that immediately begins to boil up is, “Oh my gosh, I actually feel better and no, I am not falling apart.” Right?

We can begin to take that shellacking down. And return to who we want it to be. And the path back is faster than we think. I guess that’s the message I would offer to our colleagues. The path back is, it’s not easy. Well, nobody who went into medicine went into it thinking it was going to be easy. It’s also not as terrifying and far and distant as we think it’s going to be. The dragon under the bed is a paper dragon, I promise. When we pull it out and we get started, we’re like, oh, actually this is useful. And then the next step, and then the next step.

So I think that’s a part of it. And I think the other part is we just, it hasn’t been modeled for us. So it’s not just a blind spot, it’s a blind side. You don’t know what you don’t know. You don’t know that it is possible to show up fully professional and fully human at the same time, because where is it being modeled?

Boundary Vulnerability in Medicine: Being Human Without Losing Professionalism

Dr. K: The best professionals are the ones who show up fully human, honestly. And this is where I think Dr. Brene Brown’s work sometimes gets, sometimes deliberately misunderstood. Vulnerability isn’t about showing up and falling apart in front of. Vulnerability is about doing your work yourself with others, right? It’s not a solo sport. Doing your work so that you can show up.

Sometimes it helps, I think, to call it “boundary vulnerability”. Having metabolized my stories, my places of pain. You were saying you’ve heard the story, right? So one of the stories I tell is a story of harm. I absorbed in walking with my son through his illness. And it’s a metabolized story. It is a story I can tell because I’ve done my work. And then those stories become instructive.

Those stories become wounds that are alchemized to places of wisdom. That’s boundary vulnerability. Things that I can utilize to be useful to my fellow physicians, my students, right? My patients, my clients, whoever it is that I’m engaging with.

Dr. Cindy: You mentioned you learn that by someone who models it for you. Where do you find that model, how do you begin to learn? How do you begin to learn boundary vulnerability?

Dr. K: First, we know it exists.

Dr. Cindy: Yeah. Okay. Yes.

Dr. K: First step, we have a name for it. Sometimes we start to learn it by accident. I’ll tell you the first – I can actually trace a moment back – and I had forgotten about this until another interview I was doing a couple of months ago, but it struck me and it was so important.

My intern year at Barnes Hospital Wash U and I’m on the 11th floor. I can remember where I was on the 11th floor at Barnes Hospital. And I had a patient that I had been caring for for a while who died. Now, this is 1999. So I like think about how this has stuck with me and this patient was a young patient. They had died. It wasn’t wholly unexpected and I had been hopeful. And so I was sitting at the nurse’s station, this is back when we hand wrote all our notes. I’m that many old. And I was writing the death note. And I was crying and I wasn’t sobbing and I wasn’t dissolving into soup and I was sad and there were tears running down my face.

And I remember the chief who was one of those chiefs that scared the, I mean, I think when you’re an intern, everybody scares you. This particular chief in my head anyway, the story and the image in my head, he was tall and big and scary and brilliant, and knew everything about everything, and was the scariest person in my life at that moment.

He was walking by and he did like this double take and then this stop short and whipped around at me. And I remember only being capable of like one third bracing myself for it, right? Like, I was in my feelings and looked up and he looked at me. He says, “Are you crying?”

Now anybody of a certain age is going to pick up that line as the Tom Hanks line from, “There’s no crying in baseball,” right? “Are you crying?”

I said, “Yeah, my patient just died and I’m really sad.”

And I remember he stopped and he looked at me. He said, “You’re the doctor I’ll want someday.”

And he turned and walked away.

Now. I don’t think I recognized at that moment how impactful that would be. That was not a, “Oh honey, it’s okay. Oh, I’m so glad you still have your feelings.” It was none of those things. It was a simple statement from someone in a higher power position than me that affirmed that my feelings were appropriate.

That’s all it took. That’s all it took. And I look, I sort of trace that back and I’m like, wow, that was incredible permission given to stay connected to that part of myself. So I offer that story for a couple of reasons. One, because I look back on it as a pretty significant moment that I had completely forgotten over the years. Two as a reminder that it actually doesn’t take much.

I think sometimes the other reason that as institutions, as cultures, as teams, as leaders, as whatever we don’t embark on the path back, is because just like physicians who thought they’re going to dissolve from structure to soup and spend, you know, the next five years sucking their thumb. We think that the change is going to require so much, we have to burn it all to the ground and start again, that we don’t start. And I think we begin where we are and we keep our eyes on the horizon, and we keep our eyes on our feet and we move forward with intention.

Individual Healing vs Fixing Systems in Medicine

Dr. K: Providing more of those moments. And it’s, I don’t know why this is coming up for me, but one of the largest studies ever done on successful relationships over time shows that it’s not the big sentinel moments. It’s the small things done consistently. That is the greatest predictor of success.

I think we tend to look for what’s the huge thing we’re going to do. What’s the massive intervention that’s going to, and yet, and maybe this is the public health and primary care practitioner in me, right? I know that really health is built in the small things that are done every single day before anybody ever walks into my office. Or in a community before we ever think about anything else, it’s what are the small things done? What are the conditions that are created? Are we creating conditions for success? Are we creating conditions for thriving? Are we paying attention to how we teach and model for each other?

Being the professional who knows what to do. All of that knowledge matters. Are we also creating the conditions that say, “And you are human and your humanity matters to me?” And so we had a tough case. We had a hard loss. We had a thing that went really, really wrong. I’m not going to debrief on it probably immediately. I am going to come back and check gently and offer opportunities, and I’m going to model through saying things like, “That one was really hard for me. If you notice something’s coming up for you, let’s come back to it.” Small modeling over time adds up.

Dr. Cindy: So what I’m hearing is it starts with the individual. It starts with yourself. Instead of looking for that big answer, maybe start by taking the small steps.

I’ll speak for myself. Maybe I can start by taking the small steps to be a model for others, rather than say, there has to be some solution out there for me to be able to manage all of this baggage that I have.

Dr. K: Hmm. So this is dangerous territory.

Dr. Cindy: Ah, tell me.

Dr. K: I think it’s dangerous territory. Okay. So I’m going to say yes. It’s both, it’s, I want to really acknowledge that it’s both. Right? We have systems that are harming people.

Dr. Cindy: Yeah.

Dr. K: Right. We have a healthcare system that’s harming doctors. It’s harming nurses, it’s harming techs and other support. It’s harming patients. I’ll die on that hill. The system is doing harm and if we are waiting for the system to change first. I sometimes joke about a time that I called my mom absolutely falling apart as an intern. I fell apart a lot as an intern and she listened to me. She says, “Hang in there kid, but know that help ain’t coming.”

Why Culture Change in Medicine Fails – and What Works

Dr. K: The system may or may not change. If I tie my growth to things that are external that I have no control over, I’m going to stay small. So I think it’s a dangerous place to tie our own development, my development as an individual to things I have no control over.

At the end of the day, I have no control over the system, however we define it. I do have control over what I learn, what I practice, how I connect, when I connect, how I show up. And the interesting thing about it is this, is that keeping our eyes on our feet. The interesting thing about it is that when I change how I show up, I swear to you, the people around me change how they show up too.

When I learn to show up, when I skill myself to show up as a cue of safety, I watch nervous systems settle. And those individuals are now able to show up differently. So that’s a really important sort of the personal side of it. And it does not negate the fact that our organizations and our systems also have responsibility to which I say, well, what are organizations comprised of? Organisms who look like you and look like me. Now, I don’t question that they’re out there somewhere, but I’ve yet to meet the system leader, the organizational leader, and I’ve worked with a lot of ‘em, right? Who’s back there, like rubbing their hands together and twisting their mustache and just saying, “Well, how can I screw my people?”

That’s not what’s happening. At least in the rooms that I’m in, it is that drift and massive blind spots. And in some of the most harmed and harmful organizations and systems. Siloing and stove piping of information, lack of transparency, broken trust over time. What are viewed as performative interventions rather than human interventions. And always coming down to a complete and utter destruction of communication.

I like to sometimes say that the shortest distance between two people is story. The shortest distance. When I sit down and I listen to story, the person I am listening to ceases to be a them and becomes part of us, becomes a who. It’s a really, really powerful way of breaking down these silos that have been built over time.

We call these polarities self, individual responsibility, and organizational corporate systems responsibility. They both matter. And one of the places that we were already driving towards prior to COVID is this transactional interaction space. Becoming more and more transactional. I think COVID accelerated that.

Look, transactions matter, outcomes matter, widget making, if that’s what you want to call it. Those things matter. And if that is all that has our attention, we will cause harm. We are causing harm because what also matters is relationship, right? And these more interactive interpersonal, types of showing up with each other. And so it’s not that we abandon metrics and outcomes and all of these other things, it is that we need to bring greater focus for greater harmony. I don’t like the word balance, but greater harmony by focusing more with the interpersonal as well.

These are not soft skills. Connection is not a soft skill. It is the most challenging space for a leader to occupy right now. It is much easier as a leader to focus on numbers. I’m saying it’s easier. It is easier to focus on metrics, and what you think, how you’re interpreting those metrics. It is easier to focus on spreadsheets and profit and loss than it is to do the hard, heavy, intentional, relational team building safety, building trust, and building work.

It is so surprising to me that we absolutely, we continue to ignore the thousands and thousands and thousands of data points that have been collected by businesses, by profit driven businesses like Google, who have consistently shown that the most productive, the most successful teams have six metrics that all must be present. They have to have a sense of purpose. They have to have a very clear sense of what the mission is, what they’re trying to accomplish, right? They have to have competency. They also have to have very high psychological safety, very high trust, and very high connection. Why do we only talk about these three and completely ignore these three? If all six aren’t there? They are not high performing teams. This has been studied over and over and over again. And yet that’s not a part of most leadership paradigms or if it’s somewhere in something somebody learned at one point, they’re simply dismissing this as soft, and we even call them soft skills. If you don’t have these three, you don’t have a high performing team.

“We Used to Be Friends”: Physician Loneliness and Loss of Connection

Dr. K: And so when we begin to think about what’s missing in most of our organizations, let’s come back to just our colleagues, you know. Want to know what one of the most frequent laments I hear at the systems level from our colleagues?

Dr. Cindy: Mm. What’s that?

Dr. K: We used to be friends. We used to be friends. Not, we used to make more money. Not, we used to be in charge. Not, we used to have more control. Not, we used to have paper notes. We used to be friends.

The loneliness and isolation, sense of disconnection from each other translates into disconnection from our patients. And on and on and on. And what we lose when we lose those intercollegiate relationships is massive. It’s not just that we’re wired and driven for connection because we are. But think about what kinds of diagnoses and interventions and additional care and extraordinary outcomes grow out of those relationships because we’re curbsiding about things. We’re having conversations about things we might not otherwise have.

Just as an example. I mean, some of this is the loss of, listen, let’s set aside the hierarchy part of the physician lounge for a minute, because I understand why people have had a problem with that. The physician lounge also served a purpose in connecting physicians with each other to have these conversations, to build relationship. The dinners we used to do, the parties that were sponsored by our divisions. I grew up in a time when the attending physician at the end of a rotation took the team out to dinner.

You remember that? I mentioned that the other day in a group and this was a group of doctors who were about all, about 10, 15 years younger than me, blank stare. They had no idea what I was talking about, and I don’t know when that died, but it’s been a while. Right? That relational loss has repercussions in professional satisfaction in interpersonal, in our interprofessional development, but also I think there is an unmeasured cost to our patients.

So here’s what I was, here’s where that side quest story started. I was called to give as a visiting professor to a large hospital system, and they beautifully sort of called a group of us together and took us out to dinner the night before. And in that group, I think two of the physicians knew, it was only a group of six of us, two of them knew each other, the others did not. And then it was me and I didn’t know anybody. And so we’re talking, and asking lots of curious questions about what they’re up to, what they’re learning. And one of them was a researcher and the research they were doing caught the attention of a pediatrician in the group and all of a sudden. It’s like I have a patient who would benefit from, is there space in this clinical trial? I had no idea that this was happening.

Now, did they get the outcome they needed and wanted? I have no idea. But you can begin to see how the loss of these moments where we are befriending each other, where we’re listening to each other, where we’re having these conversations translate into missed opportunities for our patients.

You also begin to see how it translates into these very terse, very tonal conversations that you hear between physicians or between physicians and nurses. Because it is really easy to be a unmitigated jackass on the phone with someone you don’t know. And it is much harder when you had dinner with them three nights ago or when, you know they’ve got a new baby in the home. I mean it, oh, it just reconnects us with our humanity, makes it much more challenging to just pop off than it does when you have no idea. Right.

Dr. Cindy: I would probably have to have you back for a whole other session to talk about how you do help organizations realign, as you say. And I think you did touch on some of those things just now. I know we’re kind of wrapping up in time and I’m so sorry to wrap up.

Rebuilding Trust and Hope Through Small, Relational Actions

Dr. K: Well, I love that you’re paying attention to time and here’s what I’ll offer around that. The hope is in the fact that there is a way, and I would actually add to that. Now we have some pretty rigorously analyzed data that show that when we develop these skills as leaders, not only does our hope increase immediately, which is not surprising, right? We feel hopeless because we know there’s something we should be doing and we don’t know how to do it. So developing the skill, the hope follows the skill. The hope follows the action, always.

So developing these skills increases hope. Also, developing these skills allows the nervous system to begin to settle because we see that this is less time intensive than we think it’s going to be. It’s still time intensive, but it’s also less overwhelming. You don’t have to go get a PhD in trauma responsive skills, you have to practice them. And over time, this begins to restore in the same way that this work restores us, helps us to come back to who we meant to be. It does the same with these organizations.

Dr. Cindy: Got it. Yeah. And it’s not this overwhelming monster under the bed. It’s just a paper monster.

Dr. K: Paper dragon.

Dr. Cindy: It’s the paper dragon. Love that. Yeah. How can listeners connect with you? What’s the best way?

Dr. K: The best way is to come to our website. Okay. Which is Lodestar, L-O-D-E-S-T-A-R-P-C, lodestarpc.com. Reach out through there. And I’m actually not very hard to find on LinkedIn or Facebook or any of the other places either. So that always works with me as well.

Dr. Cindy: Wonderful. Dr. K, thank you. Thank you for your wisdom and your insight and sharing with us everything you’ve learned in your career arc. I appreciate it.

Dr. K: Thanks for the opportunity. I enjoyed being here with you today.

Links for Dr. K:

• Lodestar.com Website
• LinkedIn
• Facebook