Sacred Lives, Sovereign Communities with Corbin Chase
Welcome to Sacred Lives, Sovereign Communities — a podcast about health, spirit, sovereignty, leadership, and the sacred future we are called to build together.
I'm Corbin Chase.
I believe your holistic health is the foundation of your peace — and that sovereign communities arise from sacred lives.
Here, we explore how to heal ourselves, strengthen our families, reclaim our power, and protect what matters most — in body, mind, and spirit.
Because your health matters to me. And the future belongs to the awake and the courageous.
Sacred Lives, Sovereign Communities with Corbin Chase
16. Are Your Partner’s Eyes Roaming? Let’s Talk About What That Means!
We reduce people to parts, categories, and objects far more often than we realize. When men check out women's bodies, when we refuse to use someone's preferred pronouns, when we dismiss a child's emotions as less important than adult convenience – these are all forms of dehumanization that create profound disconnection.
In this deeply personal episode, I share how my relationship was tested by the issue of wandering eyes and objectification. My partner Alex and I walk through our journey of healing this pattern – moving from anger and hurt to understanding and transformation. We discovered that what seemed like "natural male behavior" was actually a learned pattern that could be unlearned through spiritual awareness and intentional practice.
This journey opened my eyes to how dehumanization shows up across all areas of life. In parenting, we often treat children as less-than-complete humans, valuing obedience over understanding. In healthcare, professionals justify emotional detachment as necessary for clinical decision-making. In politics, leaders claim they must turn off empathy to make "tough choices." Each instance represents a failure to see the whole person.
The remedy lies in cultivating a radical form of empathy – one that sees beyond physical appearance to recognize the soul within each person. It requires acknowledging that everyone deserves love, even when that's challenging for us to accept. This spiritual practice isn't just about being nicer to others; it's about reconnecting with our shared humanity in a world that constantly pulls us toward fragmentation.
Have you experienced dehumanization in your relationships? Are you working to see people more holistically? Share your experiences and join the conversation about how we can cultivate more wholeness in our connections with others.
Want to dive deeper?
Head over to my Instagram account, @spiritualhealthexpert! I answer follow-up questions to support you on your spiritual journey.
Hi, I'm Corbin Chase. Welcome to Spiritual Health Expert Podcast. There is a holistic and spiritual remedy for everything. On this podcast, we talk with experts from various fields of life, health and healing who prioritize integrative and spiritual approaches to wholeness and happiness. Let's talk about it, hey, and thank you for listening. Before I get started, I just wanted to talk directly to you and if you've been coming here, coming back to this podcast, listening to me and what I have going on, I appreciate it and I really enjoy what I do. My goal is to help you and others understand functional spirituality, how spirituality is part of our health and how this dynamic needs to be considered more in our everyday lives.
Speaker 1:I have a private practice in holistic medicine in Maine. I also have this podcast. I have a website where I have a bunch of recipes and articles about these topics. I have trainings that I'm launching very soon and I'm writing a book on wholism how to be the whole you. So I just wanted to take a moment to acknowledge that you're here and I'm here and I'm excited to get into this topic today. I also wanted to mention that I'm joined with me on most of my podcasts is my producer, alex. He's also my partner. We live together with our two girls. He and I edit these podcasts together. He also owns his own business in videography and photography it's called the Basement Studios, and Alex is here with me today for this podcast as well, and I'm just very grateful for you and thank you for being here.
Speaker 2:Of course, love.
Speaker 1:Today we're going to talk about dehumanizing behavior, where I think that it happens way more frequently than we acknowledge. It happens in our relationships, in the way we raise children, we do it to ourselves and, on a larger scale, it happens in politics and in large-scale business structures. So I'm going to start off by talking about something that has been a personal trigger for me ever since it became one in my life that I have been working on, especially this past year, since it became one in my life that I have been working on, especially this past year, and I've noticed this behavior in people and men specifically for a long time and it has sat really just unwell with me and has been an issue in pretty much every romantic relationship I've had and I'm talking about men, but obviously this is about any partner doing this to you, right? Or you doing this to your partner. But I'm going to speak about this in the context of my experience. So this is when I have been with men who check out other women period, but especially when I'm also there. Both I categorize as dehumanizing behavior Anytime a man looks at another woman for her body.
Speaker 1:That is dehumanizing. It is wrong when men look at other women to like check out their body. That's dehumanizing, because you are denying to look at someone as a whole. You're choosing to look at them for their bodies and not their whole, choosing to look at them for their bodies and not their whole being, which is it is dehumanizing. But it's also such a low consciousness way of existing and participating in the world To think that you can look at someone like what's like, like they're a, you know, physically, a snack or whatever, like just to have those thoughts, to have wandering eyes like that, to think that women's body parts are yours to look like not of the collective it's. It's so rude and dishonoring to the person that you're with or the person that you might be with.
Speaker 1:One day, alex and I had a situation early on in our relationship where we were on our way to Aspen and I saw him check out another woman's butt in front of us walking in the airport and it like it. It crushed me, like I was so upset I I immediately like all of my energies retreated, my walls went up, I was so hurt that I was going to be so vulnerable to get undressed in front of you and share my physical body, my like, my traumas, my emotional. Give you all of myself and you would have the audacity to check out other people as if I wasn't enough or as if that part of you, like that part of you that's still, you know, looking for a partner is still on like your radar for like, honestly, I don't even know it, just it's horrible. Like I would hope that that's not what you would look at anyway, although I think most men do it. So we got into we got into like a very large argument about this, and this showed up in other ways where I'd be with one of my friends and I'd see her partner like fiance, whatever, checking out other women everywhere we would go, and it made me like kind of hate him. You know, I was in that moment. I was judging him because it was a trigger within me, which is why I was having a hard time being objective at the time. But I would get so upset that I would even like look at him and be like hey, just get his attention on me and be just like I don't know what to say. I'd just be like stop. Like you are dating my best friend, who's like this amazing person, why are you looking at all these other women?
Speaker 1:And, uh, alex and I got like pretty much like, uh, like the whole trip while we were in Aspen. This was like a topic that we discussed. We kept bringing it back up and how I didn't feel safe in our relationship. We really talked about it and you had to be honest about it and, um, the process where we kind of settled with or one of the things that we talked about was when, when, why does this happen to men? Because, like, the excuse isn't that, oh, I'm just like made that way. You know, that's not true. That's not true.
Speaker 1:And we know this because when we are whole, when we are born, we, when we're little kids, we don't look at people as physical objects in terms of their attractiveness. We connect with the eyes and the energy and the love and the intention. It's not until we grow up and we go through puberty where we are interested in different body parts in that sexual way where we think that, you know, seeing people, when we start to see, notice the physical parts of people as attractive or not, when we're kind of like learning that aspect of self through puberty, it's like that switch is turned on and then for a lot of people it just never gets turned off. For a lot of people it just never gets turned off Because, yes, that is a part of partnering with someone, but it's like also the least important part and for some reason, you know, we find a partner and then men, in particular in my experience, just tend to keep having those wandering eyes and I think for me I remember, like during puberty, that was turned on for me, but then when I went with someone I intuitively, like I just honor them, I'm like I'm, you know, I don't think about people that way. I don't see people that way, I see them.
Speaker 1:I kind of think about people that way. I don't see people that way. I see them. I kind of like see their spirit first. I know that I'm like a spiritual teacher and like I have these gifts and like I see the world in this way, but I don't think it's.
Speaker 1:I think everyone can live this way. Imagine a world where there were no bodies and the way that we saw people was for their like truth and energy. We can still do that, even though we're in a physical form, and that's the highest and I feel like the most appropriate way to see people and that is humanizing. That's like acknowledging the wholesome, the wholeness within someone. You're acknowledging all, all of them. And it's physical body really last right, because that's the part that isn't really real. The part that's real is our soul and our energy. That's the part that lives on over and over and over again, goes back up to spirit world. Our body is going to die and be disintegrated or burned or you know.
Speaker 1:So my expectations of then Alex was I was like I can't be in a relationship. I can't, I won't do it to myself, because that would be like dehumanizing myself. I cannot be in a relationship with someone who doesn't only have eyes for me, like I feel like that's what I deserve and and I, like you know, only have eyes for Alex. I don't ever think about checking someone else out. I just don't. I don't see it that way anymore. Like I, I just don't.
Speaker 1:And then you know we had a conversation about attractiveness, about how humans find other humans attractive, and I think that still stands. But when it gets to humanizing is when it's sexualized. You can observe beauty and nature and people and things and scenarios and music and art. But when you make it sexual is when it's disrespectful, categorizing, objectifying. It gets dirty because you're only finding the physical attributes attractive in a way that makes you want to have sex and get aroused instead of being aroused by the connection and the love and the wisdom and the uniqueness of that person. Right, and the relationship that I require is where that's the case with my partner.
Speaker 1:And so Alex, you know we talked a lot about this and he's been working really hard at shifting the way he sees things in the world women and we already like don't we're not going to make this more difficult on us so we already don't watch shows that have, you know, sex scenes and stuff like it just feels disrespectful within the container of our relationship to watch these. You know people that like what society thinks are like the most attractive. You know, like we're subconsciously kind of like wired to think that this is attractive and this isn't. Like I don't want anything that's going to feed into any of that, because within the container of our relationship it's like we have authentic beauty, we have the connection, and there are outside things that come into like temptations that you know are difficult, so we don't participate in, you know, things that might make things more difficult for us in that way.
Speaker 1:I also don't condone, like I think in a lot of shows, like there's sex scenes, just to get people to watch it. You know it's not necessary, just to get people to watch it, you know it's not necessary, um, and I think that's uh wrong and malintentioned and it lowers the frequency of the show. And, alex, I wonder what I've done a lot of like talking about are, you know, very personal things to us, um and about you, so I want what was your experience like? So?
Speaker 2:my experience with this is not dissimilar to yours. You deserve to have only eyes for you and I feel I deserve the same, and that is something that, since we first talked about this at the beginning of the relationship, has been such an important part of what I'm working on within myself. To really see things that way, like you deserve that and I want to give that to you and I have and will continue to do everything in my power to give that to you, and I know that there are times where you have felt like my eyes are only on you. I think what I struggled with at the beginning was like the language for it. You know, I was single for a long time before we met and I was very much out on the prowl. None of this is an excuse, but it I I think I had specifically formed a habit of like. I remember in one of our first instances of this, we're at a bar and there was this person who would walk by and like force a habit like my eyes were just like drawn there.
Speaker 2:And I was like what is? Drawn to her breasts was drawn to her as a person.
Speaker 1:It's really like it's not but that's where your eyes went no, it's, it is.
Speaker 2:It's not like I'm like zeroed in and I don't see the rest of the person. It's like you know it. There is a peripheral, it's not so? Tunnel vision.
Speaker 1:But you did look at her boobs.
Speaker 2:As a whole of her, like that's. It's just.
Speaker 1:I disagree because I think that if she hadn't been a young 20-something wearing a very low-cut shirt and it was, let's say, a larger woman dressed in like a baggy black t-shirt, you, you, you, your eyes wouldn't have wandered yeah, that's very likely true.
Speaker 2:Like I very much agree with that.
Speaker 2:But I remember it being such a like a instinctual reaction and this was like fresh at the beginning of us dating, like I was still coming out of single guy mode, which is like again, none of this is meant to be an excuse.
Speaker 2:It's more to just frame where I was at and also to make the point that it's like there has not been a situation where that that is something that I consciously wanted to do, like I've never wanted to do that to you or make you feel this way. Hence the like dedication to the work on this, because I know how triggering that is. And so I've been doing a lot of work on removing that lens and there's been a lot of pendulum swings where even just looking at a woman in any way felt uncomfortable and wrong, and then transitioning back to like I can look at a woman, but it's, it's. I just have no attraction for them, and I really do feel like I've gotten to a place where I can view other women in a way where there's no attraction, and I know that you felt that the only thing that really turns me on in life is our connection.
Speaker 2:And I know that you've felt and seen that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think we're introducing a lot of remedies that we've explored for this, because it has been a problem in our relationship and if I feel like I see you checking on another woman, it ruins our night, doesn't matter what way we are what we're doing. I am like on one about it, like it triggers me so deeply. Even if I'm aware of the trigger, it still gets me. I get so upset and I we lose our flow in our relationship.
Speaker 2:I know and.
Speaker 1:And it's very disruptive. So the things that we've done to try to work on this is one we've looked at this from the holistic and spiritual perspective. What's actually going on is like men dehumanize women. Two there's no excuse for it. It's not okay. It's not okay. No excuse for it. It's not okay. It's not okay. It's not okay. It needs to and he really needs to stop. Three, we talked about uh, defining attraction, which I discussed yeah you can find things that are beautiful without it being sexual.
Speaker 1:four we have been practicing like this spiritual skill of seeing people, not for their physical first, but their soul, like how do you look at someone and just like skip over the physical body and like look at their essence, you know, because that's what really matters.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:You know, yeah, matters yeah, you know, yeah, the physical body like. It's like an ultimate world, is like for you to move around it and participate in, like the physical world that we're in and it's for health care professionals to use as a tool to see what could be going on from the inside out. That's like the physical body yeah um, because it doesn't really have anything to do with sex that much no, I feel, oh sorry, go, oh sorry, go ahead.
Speaker 1:Five. We were like, okay, I'm not, I am upset with you and men and the situation, but it's something we're taking on together to work on this. So what can we implement in our relationship? Was the question of how I can feel safe, hold you accountable and we can both work on this together, because when we stop spiritually growing together, the relationship is no longer compatible. So we both want to be in this relationship.
Speaker 1:So whenever you did check out another woman where you're looking at her butt or her boobs or her hair, like whatever, in that way, you would tell me and you would need to have like the confidence to tell me and I would need to have like the confidence to tell me and I would need to be able to hold space for it. And sometimes we would talk about it more and you know, and those conversations would get into like I'd ask like, well, what did you like about her butt? And I'd want like a lot of specifics and we'd get into like how that then makes me feel, because I don't have those body parts, you know.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And like how damaging that is for me and dehumanizing that is for me and really help you, put yourself in my shoes.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, well, I think that that is like a lot of this has been like really helpful for understanding your perspective and, like I, I do feel I've come to a place where I I do, I feel confidently that I do understand your perspective and it's been a long time since I've come to you with that, and that is because for a long time, I really like, when we go out downtown, the people around us they're just noise. It's just noise, and I think that we're still healing from a lot of the earlier instances and I'm here, as long as it takes and longer to get through that, so that you feel confident that you have what you deserve. I feel very confidently that I don't look at people in that way. We're still going through healing on that, which makes the opportunity for these instances to happen very anxiety prone.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, like I sometimes am like if I peripherally notice that there is a woman, honestly sometimes I'm like is it a dude? I don't even know, it's that peripheral. Like I will feel uncomfortable about looking if people are crossing the road before like driving past it or looking in like both directions on a street in case someone's coming down that way. And that has been, it's been a part of our balance.
Speaker 1:It's anxiety inducing for both of us.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Because we've been on this journey of figuring out what to do and how to move forward, because we still want to be in a relationship Like that's the highest truth and I don't want you existing in the world, where you feel nervous everywhere we go, that you may accidentally look at someone and then I'll catch you and then I'll you know whatever like it's just, and so we have been spending what? Um that?
Speaker 1:we probably almost a year now yeah like working on this and we've come to like a much better place, yeah, and so I'm going to move on from this topic. But again, I'm talking to you, listening that if this is a topic that you're interested in, you gotta let me know and I can do like a full episode on it. Yeah, I'm also going to write an article about it on my website and I'm going to go back to like some of the journaling I did and write out the steps that we took. I also work couples and so if this is something that you're struggling with in your relationship, again go to my website. I do a free consult to meet with both of you.
Speaker 1:But I want to get into other places where we see dehumanizing behavior, because just this one part where like again in my experience I'm saying men check out other women frequently, it's really disruptive for my life. That one thing is like one of the biggest issues that's been in my life and that's just me. And there are so many other ways that people experience dehumanization on all different kinds of skills. One of them is not using the terminology that people prefer and for how they identify.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah.
Speaker 1:That's dehumanizing. If someone identifies as they non-binary, whatever it might be, refusal to participate in the way that they identify is dehumanizing.
Speaker 2:Active disrespect.
Speaker 1:You are not accepting the whole of them and the issue isn't with them, it's with you. There's a blockage there, right? That's something to look at, just like how it's like men use the excuse of like oh well, I'm just like, always checked out my whole life. That's just like what men do. We're just wired that way. That's absolute and complete bullshit. The same way that people say like oh well, I've been saying he and she and my whole life, and I just can't, I'm just way. That's absolute and complete bullshit. The same way that people say like oh well, I've been saying he and she and my whole life and I just can't, I'm just like, that's just how it is. Like that's also bullshit.
Speaker 2:Like change is can be difficult, but we need to have respect for how, the whole way that people decide to show up there's a great comparison because, truly, like this was a difficult internal process for me, coming to terms with a lot of things that I was told are true or thought were true the amount of reddit forums I've been on trying to research this, just it, you know. But in the same way that, yeah, it is difficult to get used to a new pronoun or someone's new identity, yeah, it's going to take some readjusting for you, but compared to that person it's peanuts. But it comes down to are you willing to put in the work to learn this new skill?
Speaker 1:What it comes down to is empathy, because if we don't have empathy, we can't make ethical decisions from a place of wholeness, place of wholeness.
Speaker 1:Without empathy, we don't have the ability to take everyone on exactly as they are. We see this how the elderly are treated in nursing homes, are treated in general old and unable, sometimes unable to speak. Handicapped doesn't mean they're any less human or valuable or deserving of any less love and attention and care than everyone else who's more in their middle age. We see this in ways when people are in a coma or are suffering from mental diseases like Alzheimer's. They are not any less human than we are. We see this in children and the way we raise our kids. This is a big one. This is for me. I was raised during a time when adults were the final say on everything, because they were adults. It wasn't like I was seen as like a fellow human. I was part of this ship that was being driven and my place was to sit down and behave. There wasn't room for the whole of me to be nurtured, explored, cared about. I felt like no one was that curious at a really deep level of what I cared about, and that's dehumanizing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, to say like my place is to be a well-behaved, well-dressed, polite child. You know, women experience this. Their place is to stay home and cook. That's dehumanizing. What about the rest of them? So I have two daughters. You know, if you've been listening for a while, you know this. They are five and three years old and my I have been exploring my parenting style. It's been like one of my main focuses over the past, like again year. I pretty much all yeah, I do a lot of self work, but, um, I think I'm learning that the best I I parent is.
Speaker 1:I heard this thing once where it was like you treat your children with respect and they will treat you with respect back. And I think that's a humanizing behavior. When I bring myself to meet my children where they are and just consider they've only been alive for 32 months. They have no idea how to regulate their emotions and they are more capable physically than we think, considering what happened in their world today, what their specific soul wants to do here, reminding them that I'm grateful that they're here and this family unit wouldn't be the same without them. That I, I, you know we picked each other. You know of all the souls and little little babies like we picked each other. So when they're like having an outburst, I try to come down to their level and and understand what's happening with them and help them to regulate, instead of the dehumanizing behavior of. I am the adult, I am the tower, I am the authority. You need to be in your place and if you don't, you get in trouble for it, right.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:You see the difference. One is like acknowledging the whole of the person, of meeting them, where they are just seeing them as another human versus I am the power.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, all of this, the way you said. You know empathy is such a good term for how to handle this, because it's all just the symptom of each person getting so stuck in their own perspective and their own world, Like it's so easy to forget how devastating it is to have a friend at school not want to play with you that day. We're so far removed from that that. Yeah, like that's going to upset your child's entire day, entire week maybe, and we're just caught up in.
Speaker 1:I'm just trying to get enough time to cook dinner and then to expect them to come home and behave a certain way. Yeah, that's not addressing the whole person, child or not. The we got to start looking at the whole people and this is where we see dehumanizing behavior. This also shows up when we um like to call someone crazy or insane. That's dehumanizing. Again, you're not. You've got to see the whole picture. This is like part of what my book is about, like wholism. Right, this is what my whole business is about. In order to be healthy, we have to be whole and be willing to see ourselves as whole and other people as whole. Calling someone crazy is a judgment for starters, so that immediately comes from within you. It invalidates their experience and it takes their like humanness out of their spiritual experience. We're in a human experience. We're supposed to go through the ups and the downs and to call someone else's experience crazy is dehumanizing yeah to be racist is dehumanizing to.
Speaker 1:This is back to like the, the men checking out women thing, other people checking out other people sexually.
Speaker 1:It's like to judge someone for the color of their skin I don't really even have the words Like it's so low consciousness, it's so down there. It's so down there, like we are one species and we all look different. We are one species when we look at what the soul of the person on their journey. We're all in the same school. At the same time. We're all in the same species. We came down for like a similar experience. If you're looking at it like really high, but we didn't come down and be trees, you know we came down for like a similar experience. If you're looking at it like really highly, we didn't come down and be trees. You know we came down to be humans. Like that's what matters. We're all just supposed to help each other grow and learn and love. Like that's what we're doing here.
Speaker 2:We're playing out different scenarios so we can all learn and like find more love, be of more love it's funny how we're all sort of fighting to have the other person understand our perspective in varying ways, you know, because it is a lack of willingness to understand the others.
Speaker 1:That, but we shouldn't have to fight for it if we live this way. So exactly another place that we see dehumanization is even those guilty of breaking the law should receive fair trial, and like they shouldn't be subject to any sort of cruel or unusual punishment. You know like, yes, and like the structure that we live in this world right now. We have these laws and if you break them there are consequences, that's like. But they're still humans. It's OK to make make mistakes, even the big ones. It's okay to have those experiences. It's like I understand this is complicated, but it's like if you put in the context of a child, if a child makes a mistake, like we help them, we help them understand and heal and they're very, usually very receptive to guidance and love. In that way, and if an adult you know who's still, you know just a child, just older, makes a mistake, it's like our collective responsibility to help them heal, because us helping them heal is us helping ourselves heal and vice versa, like you know yeah doesn't mean just because they make a mistake does not mean they lose their humanization yeah, it
Speaker 1:doesn't mean they become like an object, something without emotions, in an entire internal world, right? I think a lot of times, we dehumanize Trump because people are so upset about what he's doing. It doesn't mean, though, that he's not a human just like us, right? We see this a lot Like, I think, in order to have like an effective political system, we have to doctors in a minute, but we see it in politics, too, in leadership, where they say, well, in order to make these big decisions, I have to turn off my emotions, and I know that there's like some evidence about this where it can be effective in terms of decision-making, but the outcome usually is for the worst. So we then need leaders who have an incredible capacity for empathy and have an incredible capacity of holding space for everyone's experience, to then make a decision from the place of the heart, you know, and not letting other things get in the way, and I don't think we have a lot of leadership, empathetic leaders of, like the expert level. Does that make sense?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it does.
Speaker 1:Decision. Making an organized business like presidency requires dehumanization to make big decisions that's what you know they say, which means empathy is removed, when actually what is required is more empathy to truly make those big decisions. That's in the highest good for the collective of everyone, which means we need a leader with the capacity to expand their heart in tremendous ways, to be able to have empathy for all and co-create with the universe, like the matrix that we live in, to make a decision with everyone in mind and to move the collective forward. So why don't we consider, then, the openness of someone's heart when they're running for presidency? Because eventually we're all going to become better energy readers and we're going to be able to look at a president and be like I can tell how open their heart is, and I think that should be a factor. The belief that reductions in empathy automatically lead to improved problem solving is not supported by that scientific evidence I was mentioning earlier, the belief that empathy is incompatible with problem solving. There's evidence that shows that empathy is a necessary and crucial element of problem solving in the social domain. The humanization of our organizations and, ultimately, the rehumanization of our society is what needs to happen next in politics. I think so. I want to bring up doctors next, because this is a huge one for healthcare professionals and physicians.
Speaker 1:There has been, there have been, cases argued that dehumanization is sometimes necessary and beneficial, especially in like the world of healthcare. For example, it has been argued that dehumanization and moral disengagement allows physicians to inflict pain on their patients, which is sometimes necessary for diagnosis and treatment. Right, and this is this is the argument, that it goes beyond the medical context that helps people in positions of power to make the tough decisions that I was talking about before that may cause pain and suffering for others. Right and my like lord, like making decisions without empathy. I just that's what we've been doing and it has been working. And why they say this helps is by allowing these decisions to be made in a more distant, cold and rational manner.
Speaker 1:You know it's argued that by dehumanizing patients, health care professionals can protect themselves against burnout from the emotional demands of working with suffering patients. So the dehumanizing of patients, in the form of decomposing people and their symptoms to physiological systems and subsystems, is necessary for higher level medical problem solving. Does that make sense to you? Whether, but like I question, like if this functional dehumanization is truly like a beneficial strategy. Well, I know that it's not.
Speaker 2:I'm just trying to think of a situation and you know I'm no medical professional, but like I'm trying to think of a situation where it would be for the actual, like patient's benefit, versus trying to save the medical professional more emotional burnout. Which then is the question like why are we prioritizing the medical professional's ability to endure more emotional burnout, like if they're already at that point? Isn't that an issue enough?
Speaker 1:Well, that's part of the solution is like the solution shouldn't be we need to dehumanize the patients. It should be that we need better coping strategies and they need to work less. That's part of the structural problem. That's what we call the biomedical model. Is the dehumanizing model where it's been more rejected, where you're looking at more of the full picture of someone which takes away that dehumanizing factor, like it's a more humanized perspective of oh, we have to consider. This is like holistic health. Let's consider the whole person, which still we don't see a ton of in Western medicine, but it is being more accepted. But this is a real problem for healthcare professionals and this is why who's your doctor you need to know, you need to know about them and how. I don't want a doctor who isn't taking care of themselves. I don't want a doctor that's dehumanizing me. I don't ever want to see someone who's just looking at the science and make any kind of decision based off of that. It's like you're looking at 10% of me.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:You know. This is why whole person health, holistic health, is so important. And we need better coping strategies in doctors as well, so they don't have to dehumanize their patients. And having capacity for empathy, being empathetic, for empathy, being empathetic, being able to tell people really big news about their health or family members. You need that. This is where, like, spiritual health comes in. If you are a physician, you do not have spiritual health. You don't have that foundation, the belief system, the knowing that you're not actually in charge, like it's the soul One. It takes the pressure off but it also like helps to put you in your place of the bigger picture of like how you're helping humanity, like our species. That context is really important.
Speaker 1:At the end of the day, humanizing, rehumanizing your behavior and outlooks is a very personal experience. Rehumanizing your behavior and outlooks is a very personal experience. It's a personal process and that's where it starts is with you of recognizing where you aren't seeing the whole person in everything, where you're not acknowledging the full life, the full experience of another person, taking into consideration someone's energy, their spirit, their soul, a really just like a higher consciousness way of thinking, like looking at everyone. You know, we're all the collective, we're all here together. Everyone deserves love and respect. Everyone is deserving of love. Everyone is deserving of love. Everyone, everyone is deserving of love. And that might be a good place to start. If you're like, oh well, trump doesn't deserve love, or this person in jail doesn't deserve love, or Hitler doesn't deserve love, right, this is where you start.
Speaker 2:Okay, it's where you start, because everyone deserves love yeah I think that that's where we start is with the empathy yeah, if any part view is triggered in any way when thinking about this, that is the place to look.
Speaker 1:It's not an easy thing no, it's spiritual, it's spiritual, it's, it's, uh, it's spiritual first, yeah yeah all right. Thanks for listening. Questions, send them in. Reach out to me on my website. I'd love to know your thoughts.