Many people have trouble believing that caring doctors became an essential part of my Interpersonal Neurobiology-based trauma recovery plan. Some dismiss it entirely because they assume healing relationships have to happen with family, friends, a romantic partner, or a therapist. That was not my reality. By early 2020, two years of repeated psychiatric and medical abuse had narrowed my world so dramatically that doctors became my primary points of human contact. At times over the following three years, I had two or three appointments in a day, sometimes as many as twelve in a week. Those visits were with physicians, specialists, physical therapists, occupational therapists, psychotherapists, and body workers. Most days, arriving on time and within the bounds of good hygiene took almost everything I had. Afterward, I usually needed to go home and sleep. I didn’t have a social life or the capacity to build one. The harm done by the systems that were supposed to help me had stripped those away. Recovery had to begin with the few relationships that were available.

The clinicians who became part of my recovery did not simply provide pills and perform procedures. They became steady, repeated experiences of safe connection. They listened and respected my boundaries. Some stood beside me when others dismissed or harmed me. That counted even more because many were physicians, most were men, and they belonged to a group that had repeatedly held power over me and caused harm. Each appointment became another experience that gently taught my body it could expect better.  Human beings don’t heal in isolation. The quality of our relationships can determine whether we access care, whether our bodies can tolerate that care, and sometimes whether we even survive.

Thanks in large part to how these doctors have cared for me, I have rebuilt some of my capacity to feel safe in connection with others, and have started to build new relationships and deepen older ones, as well as to cast off those that impede my well-being instead of supporting it.

Many people with severe developmental, psychiatric, or medical trauma do not have the capacity to build friendships or community yet. Their reliable human contact may be limited to a few clinicians, home health aides, or other helpers. From an IPNB perspective, those relationships can become part of a person’s relational environment if they are characterized by consistency, respect, attunement, and safety. They are not a substitute for a broader community forever, but they can become the bridge that makes broader connection possible, as they did for me.