When difficult client interactions stick: Processing their emotional impact

A client’s accusation can linger long after an interaction ends, even when colleagues affirm that the veterinary professional acted appropriately. In this episode of The Resilient Vet: Mind and Body Strategies for Success, Jennifer Edwards, DVM, ACC, CPC, ELI-MP, and Aaron Shaw, OTR/L, CHT, CSCS, explore why these experiences can be so difficult to shake and what can happen when the emotional impact gets pushed aside. They discuss separating the facts of a difficult encounter from the feelings it brings up. They also examine how to recognize when repeated experiences begin to affect interactions with clients and colleagues, and how intentional debriefing can help process difficult moments before they contribute to defensiveness, shutdown, or burnout.

Below is a partial transcript, which has been edited for clarity.

Edwards: We all know the situation. We know that we did nothing wrong, and everybody around us is verifying, agreeing, confirming, backing us up that we did nothing wrong, and yet the client is saying that we did, whether in a comment to us, an email, or even worse, online. So, even though we know we've done nothing wrong, we are still constantly replaying it all in our head, staying up at night, and having some distress.

I'm Dr. Jennifer Edwards, and I welcome you to The Resilient Vet Podcast: Mind and Body Strategies for Success. I'm a veterinarian, and I now work as a conscious leadership coach, and I work with leaders and teams. I'm also the founder of the Core Element framework for intentional life and leadership. I help people create confidence, communication, and culture that they are really looking for, and find that it is often very elusive, as we know.

So today, we're going to talk about something that I would suspect almost everyone in the veterinary field, regardless of role or position, has experienced, and that's the situation where, for some reason, a client's judgment carries a lot of weight, more weight than the truth that we know. And we're also going to talk about what it costs us when we—while we may complain about it—we swallow it down and we move on. So I'm here with my co-host Aaron Shaw. Aaron, tell us a little bit about yourself.