“Reclaiming Your Life From Medical Trauma” with Dr. James Jackson

by on April 17, 2026

Nearly everyone has a story of medical trauma, whether it’s a surgery, a frightening diagnosis, chronic pain, a difficult birth, a long wait for answers, or even the seemingly-subtle experience of being dismissed in a clinical setting. 

These moments may not always be labeled as “trauma,” but they often leave a mark on our bodies, our relationships, and our sense of safety.

In this episode of the Allender Center podcast, Dan Allender and Rachael Clinton Chen sit down with Dr. James “Jim” Jackson, a leading expert in neuropsychology, long COVID, and survivorship care, to explore what it means to recognize and heal from medical trauma in all its forms.

The conversation opens up the often-overlooked reality that medical experiences don’t just end when treatment ends. They can shape anxiety, trust, avoidance of care, and the emotional lives of entire families. 

If you found this conversation helpful, we recommend checking out Dr. James Jackson’s new book, “Reclaiming Your Life from Medical Trauma.” It extends the discussion much further, offering practical guidance for patients, caregivers, and clinicians who want to better understand the emotional and physiological aftermath of medical care and how to move forward with greater care.

About Our Guest:

Dr. James “Jim” Jackson, PsyD, is a clinical psychologist and neuropsychologist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, serving as research professor of medicine and psychiatry. As director of rehabilitation and recovery at the Critical Illness, Brain Dysfunction, and Survivorship (CIBS) Center, he guides patients through the emotional and cognitive challenges of medical trauma. He is the author of more than two hundred peer-reviewed publications in leading peer-reviewed biomedical journals, including New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), The Lancet, and the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). His research has been funded by the Department of Defense, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and the National Institutes of Health, and his research has reshaped approaches to recovery from serious illness. His work is featured frequently in the New York Times, The Atlantic, Wired, CNN, and more, and he is the author of Clearing the Fog: From Surviving to Thriving with Long Covid (2023), a long COVID recovery guide published by Little Brown Spark. Trained at Biola University, he completed a psychology residency at the Veterans Affairs/Vanderbilt University School of Medicine Consortium while also receiving postdoctoral training in the treatment of brain injuries at the world-famous Oliver Zangwill Centre for Neuropsychological Rehabilitation in Ely, England. In his work, Jackson blends science, compassion, and faith. He lives in Franklin, Tennessee, with his family, drawing joy from their support.

Recommended Resources:

About the Allender Center Podcast:

For over a decade, the Allender Center Podcast has offered honest, thoughtful conversations about the deep work of healing and transformation. Hosted by Dr. Dan Allender and Rachael Clinton Chen, MDiv, this weekly podcast explores the complexities of trauma, abuse recovery, story, relationships, and spiritual formation. Through questions submitted by listeners, stories, interviews, and conversations, we engage the deep places of heartache and hope that are rarely addressed so candidly in our culture today. Join the Allender Center Podcast to uncover meaningful perspectives and support for your path to healing and growth.

At the Allender Center, we value thoughtful dialogue across a wide range of voices, stories, and lived experiences. In that spirit, our podcast features guests and hosts who may hold differing perspectives. The perspectives shared on this podcast by guests and hosts reflect their own experiences and viewpoints and do not necessarily represent the views, positions, or endorsements of the Allender Center and/or The Seattle School of Theology & Psychology.

To become a supporter of the Allender Center Podcast, click here. If you and your organization would like to partner with the Allender Center Podcast, please reach out to Clay Clayton at cclayton@theallendercenter.org

Episode Transcript

Dan: Rachael, let me just jump in with a quick question. How’s your body today?

Rachael: It’s fine. Everything’s fine. I’m great.

Dan: Everything’s fine. And how about medically in the past? Everything fine?

Rachael: No.

Dan: Yeah. So a way of putting it is our guest today is going to be of incredible assistance to the two of us because both of us would say we have some degree of medical trauma. And I would say that if you’re probably over the age of three, you have known something of the reality of medical trauma and probably even before that. So we will welcome Dr. Jim Jackson. It is so sweet to have … I’ll introduce you in a moment, but just wanted to say thank you for being with us.

Jim: Well, it’s lovely to be here. And I will say, as I’ve written this book, Reclaiming Your Life from Medical Trauma, I talk about medical trauma in Ubers and in Lyfts and on airplanes. And what you find is that this is quite a ubiquitous experience. It resonates with almost everyone. Sometimes a small trauma, sometimes a capital T trauma, but people understand this notion that you’re in the ICU or you lose a loved one unexpectedly or you have a difficult birth or whatever it might be. And it really leaves a mark. I think people really understand that and people know that it often leaves a mark that they don’t exactly know how to deal with. And one of the goals of the book is to help people find a way, an empowered, compassionate way to deal with that mark, which in many cases hasn’t gone away and without support probably isn’t going away.

Dan: Yeah. And though I agree with you, I also will push back and say, and I’ll name the book and something of your qualifications in a moment, but there was something about reading your book where I began to name the reality of, oh my God, that is something I’ve not addressed. And yet it put me in the position of being able to go, oh my goodness, my body has known not just the suffering of surgeries, but something of the post-effect of trauma. So this new book is exceedingly important. The title, Reclaiming Your Life from Medical Trauma: Recognize the symptoms, find treatment that works and heal your brain and body. And again, you’re a licensed psychologist, a neuropsychologist. Again, we could literally take much of the program just going over your remarkable qualifications. But as a research professor of medicine and psychiatry at Vanderbilt and as the director of the ICU Recovery Center, let alone the research that you’ve done with the Department of Defense or as War, depending on your view and other reality that NIH as well as Department of Veterans Affairs, I’ll just say it again, your qualifications, sir, you know your stuff and it is such a honor and delight to be having this conversation. So let me set part of the parameter. I had shoulder surgery three weeks ago, and as I began to look at, does every significant medical engagement have its own set of seen and unseen traumatic effects? I just sort of wanted to begin with that question.

Jim: I think the answer is yes, so many of them do. And I think related to your comment about shoulder surgery, very often I think we have thought of trauma, medical trauma, being a emergency cardiac surgery where they cut you open from stem to stern. People might agree, many people would, that’s a trauma. And some people would say, “If you haven’t had that happen, you probably really haven’t been traumatized.” And I think that’s a huge mistake. I think the truth is there are a huge array of medical experiences from experiences that some people would wrongly consider minor to experiences that don’t involve a scalpel, for instance, that might involve repeatedly being dismissed by a provider, maybe even a well-meaning provider. All of those things, I think, can be often are quite traumatic. Now, the degree to which people experience those as traumatic is influenced by everything from genetics to social support, to previous histories of a range of things. But I think too often we have taken a red marker, we’ve circled these big events, called them traumatic, and have dismissed the impact of 101 different medical experiences that we think might not reach that standard. And I would say in my thousands of encounters with medical patients over the years, I have learned that I need to be really careful, cautious to assume that something isn’t traumatic because it very well may be for that patient, and often it is.

Dan: Yeah. Well, one of the things that I would say about this really remarkable, well-written, compelling book, I mean, you will help people who have had any encounter where there is the potential to have the after effect of a degree of fragmentation and that process of numbing where we simply know something’s happened that has disturbed us. And it might be, as you put it so well, seem to be minor and yet actually have significant impacts. But one of the things that I really was impressed and so grateful for is you bring your life and something of your own story. So before we get into some of the work you’ve done, the research and the nature of the book, how now did you get yourself into a field like this and how did it bring you into the process to engage your own story?

Jim: It’s really interesting. I arrived at Vanderbilt in 2000. I was in my early 30s, so I’m really dating myself now, but in my early 30s. And I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to do in the field of psychology. We had a baby on the way though, and I had encountered now quite a famous critical care physician, Wes Ely, who had arrived at Vanderbilt a few years before I, and he was starting this research program focused on human outcomes after surgery, after critical illness. He was interested in asking what happens to people after they’ve been really sick, right? We studied this in laboratories with mice and with rats, but at that time, not with people so much. And he needed a psychologist on his team and it was really that simple. And again, we had a baby on the way and I felt like I had a little bit of a knack for research. I didn’t realize how nice that would be a fit for me, but we shook hands and I took the job. It was that simple. 20 years ago, no human resources, just a handshake. And I started working at Vanderbilt. And little did I know that it would take me down this winding path that would interact with aspects of my own life. When I had been in my teens, I had developed what I think now were early symptoms of OCD, and those had largely gone into remission, and I had been really grateful. And in 2018, almost 10 years ago now, during a stressful time in my life, those OCD symptoms came roaring back. It was like someone turned on a breaker switch almost, and it was really hard. It was so hard. And I went to see a psychologist, amazing, and I said, “Let’s get rid of this. I just want to get rid of it. ” And she said, “I don’t think we’re getting rid of it. ” And I said, “No, no, no. I get rid of things like other people don’t, but I do. ” And I think she probably thought, “Well, we’ll see about that.” And we did see about that. We saw that I was like everybody else in this way, that when a mental health problem develops, you don’t just scrub it, you don’t just get rid of it, you have to deal with it. Robert Frost famously said, “the only way around is through.” And so I found that out. There was no shortcut. And what I learned was that I had a chronic illness myself. It was a mental illness, it was OCD, but that dynamic, being diagnosed with OCD and fighting a battle that in some ways is ongoing, even though it’s much less intense than it was, how little did I know that that would give me a quality of empathy that I didn’t have before. That it would give me some insights that I think I needed, frankly, to be fully present with my patients. I don’t want to valorize. I don’t want to minimize how hard OCD was or has been. It’s been a tough battle for me. And most days, most days, today, I feel really grateful for what it has brought, what it has facilitated in my life. And one thing it has facilitated in my life is a much more authentic engagement with my patients who have trauma born from chronic illness because I can say, “I’m in the trenches with you. I get it, and I have found a way to live with this, and so can you.”

Rachael: I feel teary, so I’m going to apologize if I just full on lose it. And I think a big part of that was your compassion, your self-compassion, and your compassion for the multitude of people that you’ve journeyed with really comes through in a way that makes it impossible to dismiss what you’re inviting. And so I found myself, one, like Dan put words to in engaging your book, I found myself actually, and even though I work in trauma, and I don’t tend to minimize medical trauma as a thing, but I found myself actually having to pause and go, I think there’s some deeper invitations for healing for me in some various experiences in my life. And I too suffer from OCD that has mostly is in remission, but in the wake of having my beautiful daughter came rearing back up in a really powerful, intense way. And I think about my sister who has endometriosis that went undiagnosed for 20 years and the multitude of emergency room visits where they did treat her like, you’re just a crazy pain pill addict. And I mean, it just took so long for someone… I mean, she actually went in for an emergency appendectomy and they were like, oh yeah, your appendix is fused to your ovaries and various other organs. And I was thinking about your words and your writing. You just write such a holistic, thorough sense of helping people define, what am I talking about when I talk about medical trauma along the spectrum? What’s some of the impact? What’s the research tell us about trauma? But I was particularly moved by your, for families and loved ones who are also impacted by the medical trauma of the people they love. And I mean, I have probably seven people already that I’m like, as soon as I’m sending them your book, it’s going to arrive with a very gentle note, when it’s time, there’s some really good kind of way points for you because I think that that’s what’s so missing in the medical trauma literature and what you’ve provided are the way markers for finding language for what you’re experiencing. And I don’t know if I necessarily have a question other than just a deep expression of gratitude for the compassion that you brought to it because it’s very humanizing instead of stigmatizing. And I think that that is a very gospel oriented way of just inviting us to know there actually could be deeper healing for us. And like you said, it won’t mean we just magically get rid of these realities, but there can be tremendous freedom in healing.

Dan: So step us in, we’re sitting next to you on a plane as you go to a conference to teach on this and somebody goes, “So what do you do? ” You give them a little background and you use the word medical trauma and they go, “Oh yeah, I had this doctor just treating me like crap.” Actually includes that, but give your version of what is medical trauma?

Jim: Yeah, editors do what they do. As you know, they want you to define things. And I’ve struggled a bit to find a really succinct definition of medical trauma. I think it’s hard to come up with one, but medical trauma to me is an experience could be a surgery, could be a procedure, it could be a critical illness, could be a chronic illness, could be an experience of being dismissed that people experience as upsetting, as traumatic, and that leaves a mark. Now, that mark may result in problems like anxiety or depression or OCD or PTSD, or it may lead to a general disease, unease, or it may lead to a unhelpful pattern of avoidance even if a person doesn’t have PTSD perhaps. We’ve noticed that many people with medical trauma, they don’t go for their checkup. They don’t go for their skin check. They’re afraid that they waited too long and that might be a melanoma. So rather than lean into it, they’re going to hunker down and suffer. It may be avoidance separate from PTSD, but it leaves a mark. And as Rachael noted, that mark isn’t only on patients, very often it occurs in the lives of family members. And we see that in the context of the ICU, for example, where a large body of research shows that rates of PTSD are as high or even higher in family members than in patients. And it’s not only family members that are affected, but it’s really the whole family system. It’s the upheaval that is caused by the change in roles. It’s the financial impact in the ICU world. We call that financial toxicity. And all of these things feed off each other, create problems, which in turn create more problems. And I think our challenge is we’ve got to intervene somewhere to try to break this really unhelpful cycle. That intervention might be in the hospital, it might be after the hospital, maybe it’s educating people before they go to the hospital. I don’t know that it matters hugely, but I think the day of sitting by and sort of watching a train wreck unfold in the form of medical trauma and just shrugging our shoulders and saying, “Oh gosh, it’s really hard to be sick,” or whatever it might be, We need to do better than that. We need to do better than that. And I think one way to do better is to remind people that even if they can’t find the total healing from their medical illness that they would like, they can find a way to live with really difficult things and realize that they can thrive in the process.

Dan: Yeah. Well, I think one of the most important things is to be able to say, when you enter into a significant medical process, you are entering into a realm of uncertainty, of risk, of interpersonal dynamics between you and the physician or the surgeon and their staff and your own family. So I think because there’s so much threat, it’s just easy to either be blind to what’s going on, or at least in my case, I did a lot of research. I had a prior surgery on my shoulder, and then I began exploring the reality of what a revision and then reverse shoulder surgery. And I came to an article that had that little blue section that I could tap, and then all of a sudden I’m stepping into what I’ve come to call medical pornography. I’m watching the actual surgery I’m about to have, and I had about two minutes of watching this process, and I’m telling you, I freaked out. I mean, it was such a mistake, and yet I think it’s one that we have so much internet, so much information, so much diverse, and at sometimes contradictory information. So I don’t think any of us can step into significant medical issues. I’d love to hear what you would’ve said to me as I’m beginning to read that article.

Jim: Yeah. I probably would’ve told you not to read it, I think is probably what I would’ve told you. And I think you’re right, people are Googling all the time, and as that’s happening, their anxiety is going up. And sometimes they’re talking themselves out of doing things that are really necessary, and that’s really unfortunate. We have created, we call them pocket cards for medically traumatized patients, and those patients can take the pocket cards and they can hand them to their nurse, or they can hand them to their surgeon, and those pocket cards say, “I have medical trauma. I might have a hard time regulating my emotions. I might be a little more anxious than usual. Don’t take it personally. I might be asking a lot of questions. Please be responsive. I might need some accommodations. Can you help?” And I think this is the sort of thing we need to be doing because it’s really empowering.

Dan: Oh, well, I would say I’m a fairly bright person and I ask a lot of questions, but when I first went in and my surgeon looked at me and goes, “This could be catastrophic.” When he said the word catastrophic, I literally couldn’t find language. I was in the middle of already fragmentation and I said, “Are you saying this is fatal?” He goes, “No, no, no, no, no, no.” But I can’t believe in the initial interaction, I didn’t say, “What do you mean by the term catastrophic?” I was already in trauma. So I come home and tell my wife that it’s catastrophic, and she’s like, “Are you going to die?” So I mean, just that reality of a card, oh, it would’ve been so gracious to have.

Jim: Yeah. Well, I agree with that. And I think the thing that happens, what I’ve observed in the ICU and elsewhere is that very often surgeons and physicians of all kinds, they define success in the context of, “Hey, we got you out of the ICU, you survive, you survive this cardiac surgery.” And that’s one measure of success, you survive. But I think what our patients would say is, “I survived to what? I survived for what?” Now I’ve got a brand new set of problems I didn’t ask for, I don’t want, I don’t know what to do with. So it’s lovely that I survived, I guess is what some of them would say, but it’s not strictly speaking a big win for me. And I think those same patients, I think they really struggle because on the one hand, if they survive a complicated surgery or battle with cancer, on one hand, they feel deeply grateful. Often they’re told by family members, “You should feel grateful.” And when they acknowledge that there are other parts to how they feel, angry or sad or discouraged, they feel ashamed to raise those things because of other people who suggest, “Hey, just move along, just feel grateful.” And patients don’t quite know what to do with that. It’s a real conundrum for them.

Rachael: I actually have been very fortunate to encounter…. the serendipity of it all. Encounter therapists who specifically work on what they would say as medical trauma, but that’s not the word they’re using. So I think that language is going to be really helpful. It would be like, I work with survivors of cancer and chronic illness because that is such a unique need, exactly what you’re putting words to, that it’s like we say in trauma in general, when really hard, scary things happen that we’re powerless to control, even when we survive and come out on the other side, it’s like that two things can be true at the same time as now the rest of your life. When we think about it in theological terms, it’s actually getting closer to that notion of death and resurrection existing, coexisting as we reveal something of who God is. And for a lot of people, even just theologically, just have a much more triumphant… It’s easier to just be triumphant, right? We’re just going to focus on the good. We don’t want to have to get close to death or experiences that feel like death, even if it’s not literal death. And I remember this line in your book, I just kind of stopped my breath. I paused and caught my breath because you said in general, we’ve normalized medical events, even surgeries and procedures because they’re so commonplace, and in doing so, we brush right over the fact that they’re traumatizing to our bodies. We’re talking about ICU, cancer, different things. Those are those things where we go, oh, it’s okay for that person. But what you’re putting language to is these really common things are deeply traumatizing. So to know that even cancer patients feel like … Because in my mind I go, well, that’s when you clearly get to say, okay, I get to deal with my medical trauma. So it’s where I go, oh, the rest of us who would maybe say, we see this a lot in more abuse trauma, well, I didn’t have it as bad as that person. So the kind of minimization and also ways we’ve been gaslit even by well-intentioned people.

Jim: Yeah. Well, I agree with that. And when I used to work at the VA doing disability exams, a common thing over there is people were thinking about applying for disability for PTSD, common themes were that, hey, I had only been on one tour in Afghanistan and I had never really left the compound and all I had dealt with were mortars. I’d never been IED and therefore I don’t have the right to really complain about my PTSD. I would hear this a lot. And equally in the medical trauma arena, this is what people I think sometimes do. That is they say, had a surgery, but it wasn’t a triple A. I had a hospital stay, but I was never in the ICU and therefore I don’t think I quite have the right to complain. And so one of the things that I’ve tried hard to do in the book and elsewhere is to give people the space to tell their story and to own whatever experience they need to own and to continue to use that word and instead of but to bring things together as opposed to a part as in some people don’t consider my illness that significant and it still feels really traumatizing to me. Some version of that in the vein, again, of giving people permission. I appreciated, by the way, you using the word triumphalism or some version of that you mentioned. It’s funny because I really decry in mental health this triumphalism. I think in some ways, therapy is hugely effective, right? Psychiatry can be very effective. Absolutely, absolutely. And in many cases, it’s not as effective as people would like it to be, certainly not as quickly. And I think we do patients a little bit of a disservice when we say, there’s this elixir we can give you, could be psychotherapy, could be an SSRI or whatever. It’s going to fix things that’s going to make you as good as you were on your very best day before you got Parkinson’s disease or whatever it might be. I think that’s a huge mistake. I think a better message is to say, we’re hopeful that you can have meaningful healing, whatever that means, and we’re here to walk with you to whatever extent we need to if it doesn’t improve as much as you would like it to, because it probably won’t, and you can find a way to be okay.

Rachael: Well, and one of the things I thought was so profound about your writing as you talk explicitly about the need for other people that we heal in community. And I’m sure this has been your experience. I know for myself and just people I love who have gone through, I would say maybe even more acute or chronic medical trauma, it’s often lonely. So people scatter or they don’t know how to get near you or they get tired of the chronic illness and especially if it’s not explicitly presenting as a disability. And so I would love to hear just what you’ve learned in your work with people to help with that imagination of what can community look like when we’re either in the midst of medical trauma or even in the aftermath of it.

Dan: Yeah.

Jim: Yeah. I love your question. Growing up in Michigan, I always played team sports, thought maybe I would wind up at Michigan State one day. That was not to be but I love team sports. And I think I understood from the time I was young that things worked best when you were surrounded by a team. And that notion has been reflected in the work that we’ve prioritized at Vanderbilt, in particular, our reliance on support groups as a key healing modality. We’ve led probably six or 700 of them, 800 of them perhaps in the last five or six years. And I think if you force me to choose, I would identify those as the most effective vehicle to support people with medical trauma. And it has a lot to do with what you said, Rachael, which is people feel hugely isolated. They often feel like their families, well-meaning, don’t quite understand them. They often feel like even if their families are inclined to understand them, they don’t want to bring them into a situation that they worry will stress them out even a little bit more. So when you get all of these folks operating from the same page with medical trauma in a support group together, meeting each other for the first time, it’s a beautiful thing. I think it’s really a holy thing. The lights go on and people understand, “Hey, you get me, right? You get me in a way that nobody else gets me.” And it really is transformative, these rich and dynamic communities. I’m struck by, it’s not new to you or me, but the individualism that characterizes our culture, I think it’s such a huge problem. And it’s reflected in books like Bowling Alone or Habits of the Heart. It’s such a huge problem. And I think anything we can do to highlight that this is not a place, medical trauma, to go it alone. It’s not a good strategy. I think we should be all about that.

Dan: Well, and thinking about the context of community, here’s the bind that a good friend said to me, and he said, “I feel like if I ask, you’re irritated. And yet if I don’t ask, you’re hurt.” And I’m like, I think it’s true. There’s a party I don’t want to think about recovery and how I’m doing, yet for the people who don’t ask, and so there’s such a bind when you’re not well in that context. Is that a fair way of putting it or am I the only one?

Jim: No, I think it is a huge bind. And I think what I see often, I often think of a couple that I saw in the clinic and the ICU Recovery Center, an ICU survivor and his wife. And I remember him saying, if I talk about my experience, talk about my feelings, she will start crying. My wife will start crying. And I remember saying, yes, and then you’ll be crying together. You’ll be crying together and it’ll really be beautiful. You’re crying together. It’s going to bond you. So for me, psychologists differ with regard to how much they should disclose, how much of themselves they inject into conversations where the boundaries are. And I think boundaries, obviously, they’re hugely important. But in the groups that I lead at least, I tell my own story quite a bit. And in so doing, try to give other people permission to do the same. And I think for those of us who have been blessed to be in some leadership role or to have some influence, being willing to take the mask off a little bit and model authenticity and invite other people to do the same, I think it’s really vitally important.

Dan: Yeah. Well, and this good friend, as we worked through something of my ambivalence and his regarding all this, one of the things he asked me, and you addressed this so well in the book is some of us are somewhat drawn to hypervigilance and one can get … I mean, the reality of how many articles I have read on the research of revision and reverse shoulder, I feel like I’m pretty much an expert at this point because it’s been consuming. I want to know. I want control through knowledge, and the more knowledge I get, and also the more contradictions I see in the field itself, the more I’m like, “Well, what about this? And what about that?” And again, unfortunately or fortunately, I have a dear friend who’s a brilliant orthopedist. And so at one point he said, “I want to start charging.”

Jim: Yeah, I think it’s a really good point. And I think there are models of mental health. There are thoughts about what constitutes a healthy person versus an unhealthy one. But for me, if I had to come up with a list, being willing to live with uncertainty and find a way to make peace with that, that’s a mark of mental health, I think. That’s a characteristic that we should be facilitating in people. And it really is something that is a source of great difficulty for many patients with medical trauma who feel hugely out of control, who were sideswiped, who were collided with in the context of a surgery that they thought would have a good outcome and it had a terrible outcome. People whose stories are, “I woke up one day feeling fine. The next week I woke up on a ventilator. I don’t know what happened.” So when people have had that kind of story, they want to control the future as much as they can, understandably so. And yet that can’t be done, at least not completely. So one of the key goals is we’re going to find a way to help you live with uncertainty and perhaps somewhere along the path we’re going to help you even embrace uncertainty, although that’s a difficult place to get to.

Dan:And speaking then as to how you have helped family members, because I think, again, this is one of the elements to which as Rachael has a handful of people that she is planning to send the book, I do as well. And especially as a 73-year-old man, I have a lot of friends who are not well. So the people I’ve been thinking about whom I want to send a book to, a lot of them are the family members. How do you be of help to family members who either before, during, and after a surgery or a significant mental engagement, how do you help them engage the things that need to be addressed?

Jim: I think one of the absolute key things is to try to normalize for them what is going on, what it is they’re feeling. I think that is so important because for many of them, they have symptoms of PTSD, of course, but for many of them, they say, why on earth would I have symptoms of PTSD? I’ve never been to Vietnam. I’ve never been in combat. I haven’t been sexually assaulted or whatever the case might be. And so it really is introducing them to the idea that what you’ve been enduring is actually hugely traumatic. And when you endure something that is traumatic, here are the characteristic symptoms that are caused by that. These are the things you’re describing to me. And often that normalizing doesn’t solve all the problems, but at least it causes them to say, oh, does that mean I’m not going crazy? I hear this a lot. Does that mean that I’m not angry with my husband? Does that mean that there isn’t anything wrong with me? We have a support group, for example, for family members, specifically for family members. And that’s been really beautiful because I think even as patients struggle because they feel like they’re “complaining”, family members, especially those in the Christian faith who feel like they have to act in a particular way, they have to think in a particular way, they have to feel in a particular way. They feel incredibly guilty over the fact that they’re not happy with their spouse a hundred percent of the time or the idea that, well, I’m not being a good wife. I hear that a lot in our support group. That’s a source of great guilt to them. So acknowledging this is really hard. The fact that you’re experiencing it is really hard means that you’re a human, means that you’re feeling things. It’s what we would expect. I think that goes a long way. Just normalize it.

Rachael: Yeah. Part of what I find myself, in addition to this work with families, and I just so appreciate it, I just want to reiterate how you named that PTSD is so prevalent among family members, even if it’s really vicarious trauma that they’re experiencing. It’s trauma. They might say, oh yeah, that didn’t happen to me. So how can I … it’s almost like I talk to all people who feel guilty. They want to be so strong and it feels like, how can I take up space when I’m not suffering in my body what this person’s suffering or not suffering mentally or emotionally? And so I’m just really grateful for your language there. And it feels akin to … I would love for you to speak a little bit more… You wrote a book on long COVID. Thank you because I know a few people who are in that malaise and especially in the medical field that’s still trying to catch up that this is actually a reality and a thing. And as someone who has my own experiences with chronic illness or just that kind of those disabilities that come and go and can feel so unexplained, it seems like that might be also a similar work with people, that work to accept, that work to make sense of. And I would just love to hear a few more thoughts that you might have on that for people listening.

Jim: Yeah, sure. We started in 2020 or 2021 working with long COVID patients, and their challenges in concept are not that different than the challenges of survivors of critical illness or cancer or a huge range of things. They had a life that looked a particular way, and then they had an event that happened in real time, and now their lives look really different. They’re struggling to make sense of that. But I think the long COVID patients who do the best, the families who do the best, our families who have viewed this not as Jim’s problem or Dan’s problem or Rachael’s problem, the people who do the best view it as our problem. It’s our problem. And we are going to come together, we’re going to solve it together, we’re going to embrace the victories together, we’re going to embrace the sadness together. And I think that’s really the key. And there’s research to support it that says that, again, in the context of chronic illness and the context of medical trauma, the families that find a way to engage in post-traumatic growth in particular are the families that tackle the problem together. And I think that’s a really important concept. We’ve got to tackle this together.

Dan: Yeah. But that requires people to understand PTSD together, that this is not something either unique, as you put it so well to war zones, but actually likely something that even if it’s somewhat temporary so that it’s post-traumatic stress, maybe not even the word disorder, but post-traumatic stress has to be engaged in almost every significant medical process. I just, again, coming back to my own world, a lot now that I’m much better, Becky, my wife is now beginning to name something of her exhaustion, something of her fear. And it’s really been such a significant conversation to say, I want you to read this portion of Jim’s book. And it has been so illuminating, I mean, so free for us to be able to have a text, to be able to look at. It isn’t just me talking. It’s not that I don’t have impact in my wife’s life, but looking at your excellent work allows us the framing to be able to step further into the reality that now I’m better, she has more room to begin to own something of the shadow of my body having on her. And so it’s been so sweet to be able to, in one sense, have a context, have a conversation, and frankly, to have a book like yours. So we are so grateful for you. I don’t know how to say it so that it sounds anything other than perfunctory, but you have given a great gift.

Jim: You’re so kind. I mean, you’re so kind and both of you and being here is such a privilege. And honestly, doing this work is such privilege. You hear the stories of these patients and you see the needs and you understand how thoroughly their lives have been derailed. And to me, it should elicit such compassion, not frustration, not comments of, oh, they’re a lot, but it should elicit, I think, such compassion. And I think other healthcare professionals will feel the same if they take the time out of their busy schedules to say, I’m not just interested in how well your medical survival’s going, but I’m really interested in how you’re doing. How are you doing? Are you getting anxious when you come back to the hospital where the surgery happened? I noted you canceled some appointments. Why did you do that? How has this impacted your partner? What’s happened to your children? These are simple enough conversations to start at least, and I think we need to have more of them born of the recognition that medical trauma impacts millions of people around the world. And we can’t sit on the sidelines and decide to do nothing about it. That’s really the goal of the book to shine the light on a conspicuous problem that I think we can thoughtfully help improve.

Dan: Yeah. Well, we can see it as simply as this. You’re going to die one day and it’s not going to be terribly pleasant. Another way of putting that is everyone’s decaying to some degree. So the reality is you will have medical trauma.

Jim: Exactly.

Dan: And to have this gift, to be able to enter, to understand it, to have a better sense of the impact, but also, as you have done so well, to normalize what we need to be able to engage whether we’re suffering or whether we’re with someone suffering. So again, to say Reclaiming Your Life from Medical Trauma, this is just one of those books that I think has sort of that … It’s sort of the bible of the reality of what you’re going to face inevitably should be in your library. Yes. Thank you, Jim.

Rachael: Thank you.

Jim: Thanks guys. Great to be with you.