In this episode of The Joyful DVM Podcast, Dr. Cari Wise explores the connection between stress, anxiety, and compassion in veterinary medicine. She discusses how the emotional highs and lows of the profession are natural and not indicators of personal failure.
Key Takeaways
- Stress & Anxiety Reflect Compassion – The extent to which we experience stress is directly related to how much we care. It is not a sign of failure but a natural part of being in a compassionate profession.
- Client Interactions & Emotions – Clients who appear aggressive or frustrated often act out of fear and concern for their pets. Recognizing this can help veterinarians maintain perspective and respond with understanding.
- You Cannot Control Client Choices – A veterinarian’s job is to provide medical recommendations, but clients ultimately decide on the course of action. Their choices do not reflect the veterinarian’s worth or ability.
- Comparison Leads to Self-Doubt – Assuming colleagues have it “all together” based on appearances can lead to unnecessary self-judgment. Everyone experiences stress differently.
- Veterinary Medicine is Full of Uncertainty – Outcomes are never guaranteed, and there will always be unknowns in veterinary practice. Accepting this helps reduce pressure and unrealistic expectations.
- Money and Veterinary Care – Charging for veterinary services is necessary and ethical. The cost of care does not diminish the value of the veterinarian or the services they provide.
- Letting Go of the Need to “Fix” Emotions – Experiencing stress and anxiety does not mean something is wrong with you. The goal isn’t to eliminate these emotions but to acknowledge and move through them without self-judgment.
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
This transcript is auto-generated and may contain typos.
Hi there. I’m Dr. Cari Wise, veterinarian, certified life coach, and certified quantum human design specialist. If you’re a veterinary professional looking to up level your life and your career, or maybe looking to go in an entirely new direction, then what I talk about here on the Joyful DVM podcast is absolutely for you. Let’s get started. Hello my friends. Welcome back to the Joyful DVM podcast. It’s been said that the extent to which we grieve is simply a reflection of the extent to which we loved.
And I really love that saying and can find that to be really true in my own experience and in vet med and life. I think we can take that one step further and see that the extent to which we experience stress and anxiety is a reflection and a correlation to the extent of which we actually care. When we can start to see that experiencing stress and anxiety is only the other side of the coin of caring and compassion, then we can start to understand that it’s an intentional part of our experience.
Now, I’m not saying that we should walk around being stressed all the time and feeling anxious all the time, but I think a lot of us, especially those of us who work in veterinary medicine, can very easily identify things that we believe are causing stress and anxiety. And when we look at the way that we are taught to deal with emotional experiences in our world, from the time that we are really little, we are taught to believe that if we are feeling some kind of negative or uncomfortable emotion, then there is something that we should fix or solve for.
Put another way, that if everything was going right that we wouldn’t feel bad. And in veterinary medicine, I just don’t think that’s true. The nature of what we have chosen to do as a profession involves both humans and animals. I know I’m stating the obvious here, but just stick with me because it involves both humans and animals. We have some complex interactions that we deal with every single day.
We’re going to be dealing with the other humans though, because every pet that we deal with has a human attached to it. Now what I think that we can conclude about every single pet owner that comes and seeks our help is that they care about their pet. Now that doesn’t mean that they make the choices for their pets that we would make for our own pets. That doesn’t even mean that they make the choices for their pets that we recommend that they make.
That’s independent of this other truth, which is that they actually do care. The reason we know they care is because they decided to Seek the help of a veterinary professional. So whether or not they follow our advice doesn’t actually matter. And we don’t have to use that as a criteria to evaluate their worthiness as a pet parent. Instead, let’s just use it as the most basic fact that it offers us, which is that the person who brought the pet cares.
The reason this is so important for us to anchor our entire veterinary client patient relationship in is because when the client interacts with us in a place where they seem like they’re aggressive or confrontational or frustrated or terrified, when they say things to us that maybe aren’t kind or that we would anticipate or suspect are disrespectful, we want to come back and realize that that is probably coming from fear.
So this person who cares about their pet, who doesn’t know what’s going on with it, who suspects that it’s sick, they come to us with some fear and anxiety on board already. And remember, fear and anxiety are also a reflection of how much they care. Now, what we do when we’re afraid, when we’re feeling anxious, when we’re feeling stressed that we are not on our best behavior, this is true for every single human everywhere.
When we are feeling the pressure of fear, we often interact with other humans in a way that isn’t and our highest integrity, we aren’t always proud of our words, our action, our tone, our behaviors. Now, I’m not saying that we aren’t responsible for it, and I’m not saying that we don’t have opportunity to help guide people back to a place where they have more comfort in the interaction.
But if we jump immediately to being offended when clients are not on their best behavior, then we miss the opportunity to help them, and we completely miss that they actually do care. Now, it is true that often the extent to which we are able to help is limited by the resources of the client. So whether that be their time, whether that be what they believe about a situation, whether that be their money, they get to decide how much we can use our professional information and services to help them.
What they decide, though, is not a reflection of how well you did your job. And you’ve heard me talk about this many, many times before. The reason that it’s so important for us to keep coming back to this is because as we go through the typical and normal experiences in veterinary medicine, which include things like cases that don’t respond the way that we anticipate they will end of life care for, for patients within a family, maybe multiple patients within A family, unexpected emergencies where patients don’t survive.
As we go through all of those things, if we don’t really understand how the emotional ups and downs impact us, and furthermore we don’t understand how much the emotional consequences are dictating decisions that clients make and behaviors of clients, then we might start to conclude that because we feel bad that there’s something wrong with us, we might start to conclude that because we feel stressed and anxious that we are doing something wrong.
And the reason that we draw this conclusion is because we’ll look around at our colleagues who are experiencing many of the same things, experiencing cases that don’t turn out the right way or the way that they want them to, they don’t get better, to put it bluntly, looking at cases where there’s euthanasias. Throughout the day we watch our colleagues and we watch to see how do they bounce back, how do they interact with the next case, what do they do with the next day?
And if we then conclude that they’re fine, that they’ve got it all together, they don’t seem to be impacted by these things that happen, then what happens is we then compare ourselves to our assumption of how well they’re doing. And because we can see that we aren’t doing so great, that we’re feeling stress, that we’re feeling grief, that we’re feeling overwhelm, that we’re feeling maybe even guilt and self judgment, when we notice that we feel all of those things, we make that mean that we aren’t good enough, that we aren’t as good as the colleagues who appear to have it all together.
And here’s what’s really interesting about this is we actually have no idea what any other human is experiencing unless they tell us. It’s all based in assumption. So that assumption for us starts in the exam room. When we make assumptions about what the clients believe about us and believe about veterinary medicine and believe about their pet, some of this they will overtly share, but they never share the entire story.
And when it comes to a situation where their pet needs some care in order to survive, and that care does come with a price tag, which we should not feel shame about because this is a business. And the only way that we can continue to help animals is to charge for what we do. When there is an emergent situation or an urgent situation where an animal needs care that is then going to require payment in order to treat it, and the client declines and tells you then that the reason they’re declining is because of money, many of Us get covered in shame.
And it’s because we believe that we shouldn’t necessarily have to charge in order to help. Like, we haven’t yet reconciled internally that helping animals and charging money for it is okay. Many of us haven’t reconciled that because we don’t necessarily believe that. And so when the client then makes a snarky comment about money, then we believe that, like, it’s just a reflection of our own internal narrative that we haven’t yet reconciled.
And that’s a lot of conversation for probably an entirely different episode. But the reason that I want to bring it up here is because so often it is these conversations that have us then experiencing so much stress and anxiety. And it is the anticipation of these conversations that has us experiencing stress and anxiety before we ever actually engage with the humans who bring the pets. When we come into any kind of interaction with another person from a baseline of stress and anxiety, we’ve already set the interaction up to be something less than what we want it to be.
We want to experience situations where we feel like we are in partnership with our pet owners, where they believe that we care about them and we care about their pets, and where we believe that we are part of a team to help that pet have the best outcome. That’s just the best case scenario, right? That’s what has people drawn into veterinary medicine in the first place, is this idea of being able to help.
And yes, we love the idea of puppies and kittens and all the fun stuff that we get to do. And we also know that veterinary medicine is so much more than that. And it’s okay that it is so much more than that. But when we come into it with an expectation that we don’t even realize we’re holding, that we will always feel great while doing our jobs, and then we don’t, and then we make that mean that there’s something going wrong.
Then this job becomes way more stressful than it was ever intended to be. Now, just by the nature of what we do, because we work with animals that can’t talk and they don’t have lifespans as long as ours, we are going to go through lots of stages with our clients. We’re going to go through that really fun and exciting stage when they first get their new pet. And at that point, for most pets, everything is great.
The pets are healthy. The clients are really happy and excited about their pet. They’re often very interested in following our advice. They’re very curious. And as time goes on, the pets age, problems start to pop. Up and life happens for our clients. Who they are five years into the ownership of a pet is very different than who they were the day they got it. 10 years, 15 years, 18 years, 20 years.
Some of our smaller companion animals, as you well know, live for decades. And who the clients are and where they are in their life stage is also going to change during that time. Now, that doesn’t mean that our recommendations need to change. Of course, with the evolution of knowledge in medicine of any kind, there are going to be things that we do change as far as recommendations. That’s just part of this ever growing knowledge base that we have.
But aside from that, the way that we practice, for the most part, is going to be uniform. The way that the client interacts with their own pets and the decisions that they make for their pets might be fluid. When we hold very tightly to a belief that if the clients would follow our directions and our advice, that their pets would stay well, we just want to notice that that really is an unrealistic expectation.
And when we believe that to be so true, then when clients and patients don’t behave that way, when patients do have problems and clients do or don’t follow our advice, then we experience a lot more stress than is necessary. Now, again, stress and anxiety are simply a reflection of how much we care about the pet. But it’s really, really important for us to stay in our lane, if you will, to remember and to come back to what we actually can control.
I don’t think the goal should ever be to eliminate stress in your veterinary career. I don’t think the elimination of stress in any of your life is actually possible. I think experiencing some stress in life is just part of the human experience. The problem is when we believe that there’s some way that we should and can behave or perform to then eliminate the experience of stress altogether. Let me say that again.
Many of us, in a different way, many of us are carrying around a belief that if we are good enough, that we won’t feel bad. Think about that for a second. When you feel bad, when you feel stressed, when you feel anxious, if you’re really honest with yourself, underneath that, are you carrying a judgment about you? Are you believing that if you were better, that this wouldn’t be hard, that this wouldn’t be stressful, that you wouldn’t feel anxious.
It’s surprising to me how many of us carry that exact belief. And if I’m being honest, I carried it myself for decades. It’s something that we’re taught from a very young age. No matter what our career field is, it doesn’t matter before we even decide what we’re going to do with our lives. From an occupational standpoint, many of us have already been taught that feeling bad is something to fix.
And when we realize that, we feel bad a lot. The normal conclusion, especially when you have a very strong analytical mind, the normal conclusion is that then there must be something wrong with you, that if you can’t fix this with your efforts, that it can’t be fixed. And therefore it is just simply an innate internal fault. My friends, this is just not true. You are already good enough, and when it comes to veterinary medicine and the practice of veterinary medicine, you are good enough to do your job.
You are qualified to do your job, and part of your job is going to put you in a situation where you experience grief and sadness and concern and curiosity and confusion. That’s just part of the nature of practicing anything. We’ve chosen a career that has built in uncertainty. And no matter how hard we try and how much we care, we will never know everything. When it comes to the patients that we’re here to help, we will always be working in the gray area where we are making our best educated guess with the information and the resources we have available to us.
That information and those resources will be limited to some extent by client decision, by what they tell us and what they choose to pursue when we make our recommendations and how it all unfolds. No human controls any of that. We aren’t powerful enough to control physiology. So therefore, there is no way for us to be able to control the outcomes. And in addition to that, no matter how much we try to be kind, to be professional, to run on time, to have enough staff, to have our prices quote, unquote affordable, no matter how much effort we put into any of those things, we will never be able to control how a client behaves when they interact with us.
Even when clients are at their very worst, remember, you can always come back to one truth, which is that both of you care about the pet in front of you. Now, that does not mean that when you have a client that repeatedly interacts with you in a way that does not meet the expectations of a client patient doctor relationship, that you can’t then dismiss that person from your practice because you absolutely can.
There’s a lot of truth in the saying that we teach people how to treat us. And there’s a lot of opportunity in veterinary medicine for us to be very clear with our clients about what we expect those interactions to be like and Then to follow through with those expectations on both sides. But aside from that, aside from the ones whose behavior is so egregious that we dismiss them, there’s all the others who come in in varying degrees of being completely easy to get along with, jovial in the room, a very pleasant human interaction.
To those that feel a little awkward and stressful for us internally, to those that are just flat out uncomfortable, if we think it’s not supposed to be that way, then we’re fighting a battle that we’re never gonna win. Humans are unpredictable beings, and the only human that you can control is you. But as soon as any of us start using the behaviors of the other humans as indicators of how well we’re doing our job and how good we are and whether or not we are good enough to continue, then we start to put additional pressure on ourselves.
It’s okay to sometimes feel awkward when you’re talking with a client. It’s okay for you to feel a little unsure in your interactions with them. There’s nothing wrong with that. If you’re holding yourself to an expectation that a veterinary professional, that a doctor, should feel confident every single time they communicate with a client, that they should never feel afraid about the outcome of a case, that they should never feel stressed out about everything that happens within a day, that then I want you to see that you’re just holding yourself to an unattainable expectation.
The human experience requires us to have both sides of the emotional coin. All of the happy and excited and motivated and encouraged sunny side up and all of the shadow sadness and grief and stress and anxiety. Without the dark side, we wouldn’t experience the light side. And it’s not a problem that it exists. It becomes a problem when we believe that we should solve for it. So when we carry forward the really inaccurate stories that we are taught as children, which is ultimately happily ever after, right?
That everything that is dark or bad or hard has a way to be fixed so that you never have to experience dark or bad, a heart again, we carry that forward. And when we carry forward a meaning, which is that the dark or bad or hard is because we are dark or bad or hard, my friends, that is just never true. Veterinary medicine is, like I said, it is gray.
It is going to have the highest of highs and the most fun days out there, and it’s going to have the lowest of lows and very dark days. And that’s okay. When we start to make that mean something personal about ourselves and start to use that roller coaster, especially the dark side of that as evidence that we aren’t good enough, that we should be better, that this should be easier.
When we use that side for that type of self judgment, then we really end up in a place that’s hard to shift from without a little bit of help. We should never use anything outside of us to determine our own self value and self worth. You are already good enough as a human simply because you exist. You are already qualified to do this job. We know this because you have a license that you worked to earn and it wouldn’t have just been granted to you on a fluke, no matter what your mind may try to offer you.
To the contrary, all of those demons that you’re fighting to prove yourself, those demons, you’ve already won all of those battles. You don’t need to try so hard. It’s okay to not have all the answers. This is the practice of veterinary medicine, after all. And it is okay for clients to be whatever they are and for you to decide where the boundary is to when their behavior is outside of what you’re willing to accept day in and day out from a client in your practice.
And when they meet that line, it’s okay to dismiss them. But everything else in between, the clients who are having a bad day, the clients that snark at somebody, the ones who make those comments about what your prices are, the ones that come in and say they care so much about their pets and then they decline everything. Whether or not you let those things create bitterness and resentment toward your clients and toward your career field, that part’s optional.
And the only reason that we do that is because we’re still using those things as indicators as to whether or not we are doing our job the right way. Many of us don’t even realize that we’re carrying around this belief that it is our job to fix animals. We’re carrying around the belief that it is our job to advocate for the pets and that what that means is that when we advocate well enough, the client agrees with what we tell them they should do, it’s false.
Advocating for a pet means we give them all the information. We give them the option we never get to control their choice, though. In the Practice act, where it says first do no harm, so many of us skew that the wrong way. We make that mean that if a client doesn’t move forward, that we’ve somehow harmed the pet. That if the price for the service that the pet needs in our professional opinion is beyond what a client is willing to pay, that somehow we have Hurt the pet with our pricing.
My friends, that is not true. Sometimes we take it to mean that if you give a vaccination and the animal cries that we have harmed the animal and giving that vaccination, also not true. And it’s all of these little things that we are putting meanings on that were never intended that then just add to our stress and our anxiety and our overall sense of not being good enough to do this job.
So what I invite you to do this week, as you start to notice some stress pop in, some anxiety, some frustration, some dread, I want you to think about what it is exactly that you’re feeling that in relation to. Is it just part of the normal cycle of veterinary medicine where we get to interact with humans who are unpredictable, where we deal with patients that do not always follow the rules as far as responding to the treatments that we recommend?
Or is it something else? The question that I think we should always be asking ourselves is what am I making this mean about me? So when I’m feeling bad, what am I making this mean about me? Am I turning this into some kind of self judgment? Am I feeling shame and guilt for my existence, for my even being part of this profession? If I am, then I’m just misinterpreting not only the situation at hand, but what my role actually is and how far it reaches.
You are not all knowing. You are not all healing. And you are never supposed to be. You’re never supposed to practice veterinary medicine in a way that clients are always happy and that patients always get better. That’s just beyond the scope of what we actually have the capability of doing. What’s true is that you are human in a human experience, who has the ability to experience both the light and the shadow side of any situation.
You can do that without making it personal, without taking that experience and turning it in on yourself as something that makes you bad or wrong or not worthy. It’s okay to start disassembling the belief that if you feel bad, there’s something to fix. Because as soon as you start to disassemble that belief and to let that belief go, then it becomes easier to let the stress and anxiety go as you encounter it in any given day.
We hang on to it because we believe it shouldn’t be there. And when we believe it shouldn’t be there, we’re trying to solve for it. We’re trying to figure out what we can fix to make it go away and to never come back. But as soon as we stop fighting it, as soon as we Start to realize that experiencing some stress and some anxiety, some frustration, some grief throughout any day in veterinary medicine is just some of the deal of this job.
It’s just a normal part of our experience. Then we don’t have to make it personal, we don’t have to make it mean something bigger than it actually does. And we can let ourselves off the hook for trying to manage it and solve for it in advance so it never comes back again. Because believe me, the more that you hang on to this belief that you, once you have it figured out that you’ll never feel stressed again, then the more you’re actually inviting yourself to stay in judgment of yourself because you will keep trying harder and harder and harder to avoid anything that creates stress.
And you will fail over and over and over again because the practice of veterinary medicine has uncertainty built right in. And you fail enough at avoiding stress, you really end up in a very deep pit of self judgment and shame. My friends, just climb out. We were never supposed to not experience stress. It’s okay. You just get to decide how long you stay there. You get to decide what you make it mean about you personally.
And it’s all right for you to decide that it doesn’t mean anything at all, that it’s just part of the deal, that it’s a human emotion, that you have the capacity to experience, that it’s not life threatening, that it’s not a deal breaker, and that experiencing it doesn’t mean anything personally about you. The same goes for those client interactions. When the clients are not on their best behavior, they’re not having their best day.
You don’t have to make that mean anything about you and what they think about your services and your efforts and your value either. You can just let it be what it is. And I think in this day and age, with everything that’s going on in the world where we have a lot of opportunity to feel anxious and stressed and frustrated and afraid, we need to realize that we carry that with us everywhere we go.
It’s going to come out in our interactions with others. It just is. And the more that we take it personally when somebody behaves in a certain way toward us, the more we continue to amplify that negative experience for all of us. If we will lean back into what I shared at the beginning, which is that the extent to which we share, we experience stress and anxiety is simply a reflection of, of the extent to which we care and have the capacity for compassion, then we can start to realize that underneath all of the fear and all of the stress and all of the bad behavior that those emotions drive is actually a human that cares a lot, that has a capacity for huge compassion.
And this may not be their best day, but that this too shall pass. Alright, my friends, just something to consider as you go through the next week. And I will see you soon. Bye for now.