When patients take advantage of you
What would that mean for your career fulfilment and your relationship with your patients if you knew that they could never take advantage of you?
Clinicians will often tell me that they're frustrated and resentful, or unhappy in their career because patients take advantage of them. And I get it; I used to say this too. But I've actually come to believe that patients can't take advantage of us (unless they're literally being abusive, which is a different scenario entirely).
When you and I perceive that patients are taking advantage of us, it usually comes down to one (or both) of these two things:
Our brain's meaning-making (or narrative)
A lack of boundaries
Take a moment to think about a situation in which you felt a patient was taking advantage of you. This tends to be things like:
they asked me to look at another complaint when when we were about to end the appointment
they phoned me to ask questions and get advice
they wanted to book an appointment in my lunch break or after I'd already closed for the day
they emailed me to ask for additional exercises
etc.
The above are the "facts" of the situation. The thought you have that "they're taking advantage of me" is your narrative ABOUT these facts. In other words, one clinician might see a patient asking to book an appointment in their lunch break as "taking advantage", whereas another clinician might see it as a completely neutral request that they can say yes or no to. When a patient asks a series of questions, one clinician might be celebrating the fact that the patient is curious and wants to know more - while another clinician sees it as being "taken advantage of".
I have many resources for exploring your brain's meaning-making system, so let me know if you want to dive deeper into that. But even just separating out what ACTUALLY happened from your narrative - and exploring the idea that it is, in fact, a narrative - is already incredibly helpful. You can also ask yourself this simple question: what ELSE could be true?
And the second reason is the thing we all love (to hate): boundaries.
If you don't have time to look at another complaint (and do it well) in the time you have left in an appointment, you can let the patient know that you will not be doing so
If you don't take patients in your lunch break, you can let them know that it's not possible
If you don't have time or all of the context necessary to answer all of a patients' questions on a phone call, then yep.... you just let them know
Another way to put this is reframing "they took advantage of me" as "I gave past my limits". Boundaries are things you can always enforce because they are related to your behaviour (i.e. what YOU will do in any given scenario) vs a request, which is asking someone else to change their behaviour.
So whether it's your narrative or a lack of clear boundaries - the good news is it's in your control. This no longer needs to be a source of disconnection and resentment, and it doesn't have to be the reason you quit your career (let's do that for FUN reasons 😉). Shifting one or both of these isn't necessarily easy but it IS simple and solvable, without relying on your patients to change their behaviour.
I'd love to know from you what scenarios YOU feel taken advantage of by patients, and whether you can identify a narrative or boundary-related struggle at play?
