One of those events that you live in fear of as a resident, as a physician, where you and everyone around you, and there were a lot of people in the room, know that something has just gone terribly wrong.

And it's almost like time stopped. I feel incredibly uncomfortable and incredibly

exposed. And what I see are the eyes of the people standing around me. And I feel the judgment.

And the only thing I know to do in that moment, some sort of subconscious, primitive impulse, is to leave the room.

A couple years ago, I got an email from a philosopher in the United Kingdom named Luna Dahlizal.

Luna had been listening to the Nocturnist for years,

and she wanted to know if I'd ever noticed

that the emotion of shame was coming up again and again in these stories.

I had not noticed this, but I went back and listened to several of our old episodes,

and I realized that she was right.

I started to see shame everywhere

in medicine. And what was stranger was that nobody was talking about it. And so Luna and I decided

to team up with Dr. Will Bynum from Duke University to investigate this incredibly powerful emotion

and how it manifests in medical culture.

Your brain tells you the most unkind and outrageous things that are totally ridiculous.

But the only way that you find out how ridiculous you are treating yourself is when you talk to your colleagues

about their own experiences and you realize how universal some of these shame experiences are.

He presented it in a way that said, you should have known this, you missed something big. And at that

moment, I felt my stomach drop and felt like I wanted to sink into the

floor. When I think about this, the words just sort of go away. It's almost like there's a

protective mechanism that's tripped off that says, hey, that's not something that you should be

talking about. And why? Why did I beat myself up over it so much?

...