“The worst thing you can do when you’re sad is try not to be.”
Maria, a six-year-old girl who had lost her mother to colon cancer, said this to Laurel Braitman, PhD, while coloring during a children’s grief support session that Braitman was facilitating.
It was a concept that took Braitman more than a decade to understand on her own, she explained in a session led by the best-selling author and medical school student at Stanford University’s Grace D. Li at Learn Serve Lead 2023: The AAMC Annual Meeting, Sunday, November 5.
Braitman’s childhood, while privileged in many ways as she grew up on a citrus and avocado ranch in Southern California, was marred by her surgeon father’s many years of experience dealing with cancer and, ultimately, by her death by assisted suicide when she was 17.
Braitman’s last conversation with his father before his death was an argument on the phone about his college applications. She hung up without saying “I love you” or “goodbye.”
“I took those negative feelings and integrated them into work and excellence,” Braitman said. “I spent the next 16 years making a list of everything he wanted for me.”
She earned a doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in science, technology, and society, wrote a best-selling book, and eventually became director of writing and storytelling at the Stanford School of Medicine.
But by her mid-30s, Braitman was exhausted. Although she seemed to be thriving professionally, she noticed that she struggled with being vulnerable and avoided close relationships. It was while listening to a story on the radio about supporting grieving children that she realized she had never faced the grief she had been holding on to following her father’s death. It inspired her to train as a bereavement support group facilitator, but beyond that, it changed the way she lived her life and approached storytelling.
“We are meaning-making animals, and to do that we tell stories… The idea of constructing a narrative in which there is cause and effect and there is a point to remember. This is how we humans move through the world,” said Braitman, who wrote about his own grief, not only over the loss of his father, but also the death of his mother after developing cancer of the pancreas, in his book “What Looks Like Bravery: An Epic Journey from Loss to Love.
This idea of processing grief and enhancing empathetic communication through storytelling is the cornerstone of her work as a professor at Stanford. She teaches a writing course for medical trainees that includes a retreat in which students leave the classroom and travel away from the clinic to a farm, where they learn how to use storytelling to share and process their difficult feelings. It also manages at low cost virtual writing workshops twice a month for more than 10,000 people working in the medical profession.
This type of work is particularly important for the medical field, in part because it suffers from a culture that often punishes vulnerable people, Braitman said. She strives to make classes and workshops a space where people can express themselves openly and without fear, particularly on topics such as mental health, domestic violence and other themes that may be taboo in social settings. medical.
Braitman encouraged medical education leaders and faculty members to create opportunities for vulnerable sharing and storytelling in their institutional cultures as much as possible and not to fear the risks that might come from opening such forums .
“(There is this fear) what if we talk badly about suicide? What if we talked badly about mental health? So it’s better not to discuss it,” she said. “But what we try to cultivate is: be humble, apologize, but assume that everyone around you has good intentions… It doesn’t always work, but it also assumes that There’s not just one right way to do it, to be vulnerable, to talk about ourselves as a whole in the context of training.
The results of his efforts have been positive. In a survey taken after one of his workshops, most participants said it helped them find meaning, feel a deeper connection with others, and be reinvigorated to return to daily life.
Li, who is one of Braitman’s students, said the emphasis on writing has helped her in her medical training journey, not only as a coping mechanism for challenges, but by helping to become a better listener and better communicator with patients and colleagues.
“One thing this work does is uncertainty training,” Braitman said. “Healing professions often struggle with gray areas, we shame ourselves for not having the right answer… humanities education as well as clinical training offer opportunities to practice the struggle without always having the answer. “
