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    Overcoming the Fear
    Overcoming the Fear
    Overcoming the Fear
    Ebook118 pages1 hour

    Overcoming the Fear

    By Resident Bolde

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    About this ebook

    Overcoming the Fear is Resident Bolde's answer to the blog post The Fear at the Resident Bolde website. www.residentbolde.org The purpose of this book is to teach entering women residents the lay of the land they are going into when they transition from medical school to residency training. The ACGME lists what its milestones are but what is not clearly understood is that residents will have to achieve these milestones within a high overhead, high risk business model. The resource that gets severely restricted within this business model is time. The restriction of such a vital resource breeds fear, tribalism and discrimination within a hierarchy with a very steep power gradient which essentially subjects women physicians to the domestic violence dynamic seen in intimate relationships. Given the universality of misogyny, women cannot rely on institutions to be supportive. This book gives a specific strategy and tactics for women to apply to protect their economic agency when there is no support within the workplace.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherResident Bolde
    Release dateApr 23, 2020
    ISBN9780578229966
    Overcoming the Fear
    Author

    Resident Bolde

    Resident Bolde is a physician who left her training in a surgical subspecialty early because it was clearly not supportive. Since she was the victim of more covert forms of abuse, it took her 5 years to discover that she had experienced the same dynamic as a victim of domestic violence after speaking with DV advocate, author and former attorney Barry Goldstein. Except this was not happening in an intimate relationship, this was happening in the workplace. While sexual harassment and physical assault are more present in the public's awareness, psychological and emotional abuse and gaslighting go virtually undetected in both personal relationships as well as the workplace. Resident Bolde wants to warn future women entering the medical field about the signs of abuse so that appropriate boundaries can be set early on given that so little research has gone into the domestic violence dynamic in the workplace. She gives specialized strategic and tactical advice on how to navigate abuses of power in a hierarchy with a very steep power gradient that has the potential to derail careers. She also compares the similarities of different methods of abuse perpetrators use in intimate relationships with the medical educational system as a whole. These methods include financial, psychological, emotional, sexual and physical abuse. Since the domestic violence dynamic also occurs outside the home, Resident Bolde believes that the term should be recategorized as a type of misogynistic violence.

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      Book preview

      Overcoming the Fear - Resident Bolde

      OVERCOMING THE FEAR

      ––––––––

      By Resident Bolde

      COPYRIGHT NOTICE

      Copyright ©2020 by Resident Bolde

      All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, please email the publisher addressed below.

      Resident Bolde

      info@residentbolde.org

      Website: www.residentbolde.org

      Ordering Information:

      Quantity sales. Special discounts are available on quantity purchases by corporations, associations, and others. For details, contact the publisher at the email address above.

      Disclaimer:

      This book has been written as a non-fiction memoir in the format of a self-help book geared for women physicians in training and represents the memories and interpretations of the author. All identifiers of people and institutions involved have been removed to protect their identities.

      Categories:  Self-Help, Non-Fiction

      Published in the United States of America

      ISBN: 978-0-578-22996-6

      FIRST EDITION

      PREFACE

      Dear Reader,

      I have written this book specifically to provide a heads-up to female pre-meds, medical students, residents, fellows and young attendings regarding early red-flags to look for when identifying abusers in the medical field. Abusers are everywhere in the medical profession because they congregate in places where there is money, power and prestige. Unfortunately, gender role conditioning from family, friends and society interferes with women’s abilities to detect and apply appropriate boundaries to abusers in the workplace as well as at home.

      Who is an abuser? Someone who likes to play an unfair power game to cause the degradation of their victim’s humanity. Abusers get a sense of comfort and inner peace when they see another person suffering. It gives the abuser more sense of control, power and importance. Sexual harassment is one of the abuser’s tools that they use to achieve control over a victim, but it is not the only tool— there are many. Sexual harassment has nothing to do with sexual attraction.

      While sexual harassment and physical assault are the two more obvious methods an abuser uses that get the attention of regulatory bodies like our legal system and human resources, they are not the most common. There is not a one-size-fits-all profile of an abuser’s methods. Abusers can use different combinations of victim control methods. These include financial, verbal, psychological and emotional methods, which are used to achieve submission and compliance of their victims. Abusers are diverse in their race, creed, education level and economic level. The indoctrination of misogyny as part of mainstream society has made abuse a gendered experience. Looking at both the big picture and historically, women make up the majority of victims, but there are movements that are creating research to blur this truth.

      It took me five years to realize that I had been horribly abused in my residency training program. I had to leave my program prematurely because it was clear that everything I was doing was not enough. I was told I was not clinically competent, lacked medical knowledge, was unprofessional and had no communication skills. For a long time, I believed this feedback. That was until I started practicing medicine as a general practitioner. Then I realized a lot of that feedback was nonsense. If I had stayed in residency or tried to get in a program somewhere else, I would have never discovered the lies and decontextualized truths I had been told by so many of my coresidents and faculty. The reason it took me so long to recognize the abuse was because I was not sexually harassed nor physically assaulted. Another reason is that abusers decontextualize events, especially when they are given positions of authority where they can provide feedback to those higher in rank. The psychological and emotional abuse I faced was indirect and hard to diagnose and treat. It would not be until I read about domestic violence that I realized my experience was similar to that of a victim of domestic violence. Years after leaving residency, I read that many victims of domestic violence, who were raped and physically assaulted in their intimate relationships, expressed how it was the psychological and emotional abuse which were the hardest to manage and also forms of abuse which they wished were recognized by our legal systems. Unfortunately, these covert abusive dynamics were not only happening in intimate relationships, but also in professional ones at work. Since our legal system does not recognize psychological, emotional and financial abuse as obvious markers for abuse in the same way as sexual and physical assault, it took me a long time to figure out what really happened to me in residency training. I just felt like I was losing my mind. Reading the stories of DV victims and speaking with a DV attorney validated my residency experience on many levels. It took a tremendous weight off my shoulders that I had carried for many years believing my derailed career was all my fault and I was not good enough.  But the biggest question I had was, Why me? What was it about me that made abusers at work target me? There are many layers in providing the answers to those questions.

      I had grown up in a relatively gender-neutral household, but I did not realize it at the time. I thought the civil rights movement of the 1960s had achieved more than it actually had. In many ways, I was raised like a boy, or I was, in fact, raised to be free. My parents raised me to believe I could achieve my dreams if I worked hard enough for them. What my parents failed to mention was the invisible force of misogyny that would try to shatter those dreams. Resident Bolde (my pseudonym) missed the memo on misogyny. When I entered residency training, the culture of misogyny shocked me, confused me, made me resentful, made me not trust my superiors and colleagues, and, last and most importantly, it made me afraid. I experienced fear because I had no words to describe why my ego was creating these emotions in response to my work environment. It is one thing to have a feeling, it's quite another to have the words to explain why those feelings exist in the first place. The ego gets a bad rap, but it can be used as a detector for when one’s boundaries are being violated. Misogyny dictates that women are not allowed to have egos or instincts that would be considered overanalyzing the situation. Women are supposed to have porous boundaries. I do not want other women to be like me and realize too late that they had been victimized by abusers using hard to detect control methods. By educating women to see these more covert dynamics early and to have words for them, it is my hope that they can have the tools they need to call out these abusive behaviors faster and can avoid damage to their mental health. I want to empower women to take the invisible veil of misogyny off to see and experience the world as free people with equality given to their humanity.

      The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) clearly states its milestones. However, what is not clearly stated nor understood is that all residents will have to achieve these milestones within a business model that is high risk and has a high overhead. The resource that gets severely restricted in such a business model is time. The restriction of such a vital resource for growth breeds fear, tribalism and discriminatory behavior in people. This behavior manifests as a hierarchy with a very steep power gradient. For women in residency training, this power gradient is even steeper due to misogyny. Misogyny is a bioethical and sociopolitical belief system toward women. This belief system functions to take power away from women on all fronts: reproductive power, economic power, identity power, cognitive power, etc. Women’s function is for the sole benefit of men and their reproductive and economic agency. Misogyny sets the sociopolitical stage for abusers to thrive and to target women. Anything that is seen as part of the divine feminine is policed into submission. When women enter professions that allow them to obtain authority and economic agency, it makes them targets for not only sexual harassment but the entire spectrum of harassment and microaggressions meant to take away women’s self-agency.

      Given the universality of misogyny, it has been normalized and made invisible to both men and women. This means the majority of workplaces will not be gender neutral, but rather will enforce gender normative behavior in women, making it difficult for them to achieve economic agency. Abusive men uphold strict gender norms to control women victims. Men are socialized to expect to be owed something from women; women are socialized to expect to owe something to men. This something means attention, ego stroking, ego protection, time, energy, additional tasks and sexual exchanges in the variety of forms they come in. Sexual harassment is just one of the end stage symptoms of the much greater disease of misogyny and its interpersonal application as the domestic violence power dynamic as seen in intimate relationships. This interpersonal application is also happening in the workplace. The term domestic in the phrase domestic violence is misleading as these same power dynamics occur in a

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