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Holding Grief and Joy at the same time
Published about 1 month ago • 4 min read
Hello Reader,
Held together: on carrying our stories into the room
I’ve been thinking about what it means to show up whole.
Not perfect, not unburdened, just whole. Meaning: the version of you that has been through something, learned from it, and hasn’t completely sealed it away behind a professional face.
That’s the thread running through this week’s episode, and it’s one I keep returning to.
Dr. Rebecca Thompson is a family medicine and public health physician in Portland, Oregon. She’s also the author of Held Together: A Shared Memoir of Motherhood, Medicine, and Imperfect Love – a book that took more than a decade to write, involves twenty-two women (half of them healthcare professionals themselves), and reads less like a traditional medical memoir than like a long conversation between people who’ve been through something hard and decided not to keep it to themselves.
I invited Becca on because her work sits at an intersection I care deeply about: the tension between who we are trained to be in clinical and leadership spaces, and who we actually are. The fractured identity she writes about – healer and patient, clinician and caregiver, expert and person navigating loss – is something I suspect most of you know from the inside.
How the book began
Becca’s path to this project started with her own complicated path to parenthood. Early in her career, while finishing residency and starting her first attending job, she and her husband went through a series of pregnancy losses. As a physician on the patient side of healthcare, she described it as deeply isolating. The knowledge she’d spent years building couldn’t protect her. And like so many women in medicine, she was sometimes dismissed – told she was anxious when she was, in her words, “actually having internal bleeding.”
That experience reshaped her career entirely. She went back to do a second residency in family medicine, specifically to focus on women’s and children’s health. She had her son during that residency and her daughter just after graduating. And somewhere in the accumulation of patients, colleagues, conversations in coffee shops and on long walks – she started to see a project taking shape.
She wanted to capture the long arc of family life, across generations, and show that these stories – the ones we carry in private – are actually shared. The struggle feels solitary but isn’t.
The oldest collaborator in Held Together is in her mid-70s. The youngest stories touch on teen pregnancies. The book spans decades of experience, and it covers motherhood in every form: biological, adoptive, foster, surrogate, step-parent, and what Becca calls “how we mother our communities.”
On leading in imperfection
The part of this conversation I’ve been sitting with most is what Becca said about leadership.
Most of us who work in healthcare organizations – or who lead them – have been trained to cloak the personal. The expectation, spoken or not, is that you check your humanness at the door. You carry your grief and your fertility journey and your caregiver stress and your own health scares on the inside, where they don’t complicate the professional picture.
Becca makes a different argument. She says that when leaders talk about their own imperfections, they give other people permission to talk about difficult things too. This isn’t oversharing or a dissolution of professional boundaries. It’s something closer to authenticity – showing up as enough of your full self that the people around you understand you’re still figuring things out alongside them.
The cost of not doing this, she argues, is honesty. If we can’t show up authentically, we can’t expect our patients to either. If we perform certainty and perfection, we make it harder for the people in our care to ask for help with the things where they feel most imperfect.
“They want to know that as a professional, you’re guiding them, you’re advocating for them,” she said, “but I think they’re much better served when they also understand that you’re still figuring things out, too, and you want to travel alongside them to serve them more than to stand over them and tell them what to do.”
She also said this: “We can’t just assume that women should automatically be supportive of other women. There may be deep stories hidden behind what you see people presenting that may cause them to have sadness or resentment or unresolved grief from things that they’ve been through that they then bring to how they treat other people.”
That one stopped me. It’s the main lesson of the book, she says – and it’s a useful corrective for anyone in leadership who assumes alignment where there may be unexplored history.
What she’s building next
The book has been out for about a year. Becca and her collaborators are now traveling and doing events with residency programs, nursing training, social work schools, and medical education programs across the country. She’s put together discussion guides spanning topics from pregnancy complications and assisted reproductive technology to racial and cultural influences on family building.
Her dream is to bring Held Together into any teaching setting that touches primary care, women’s health, or family medicine – not as supplemental reading but as a framework for the kinds of conversations medical training tends to skip.
If you want to read the book, there’s an affiliate link on her website to Postpartum Support International, and a portion of proceeds go to their maternal and family mental health work.
One question to sit with
Becca ended our conversation by asking us to think about how we’ve grown through what we’ve been through – and in what ways we want to grow next.
Not to rush past the hard things. Not to “get over” them. But to understand them well enough that they become part of the story we carry into the room, instead of weight we carry alone.
Held Together is proof that these stories don’t have to stay isolated.
Listen to the episode wherever you get your podcasts, and find Becca’s book, discussion guides, and speaking inquiry at rebeccanthompson.com.
By Transforming Healthcare Coaching® Lillian Liang Emlet, MD MS CHSE CPC ELI-MP, Founder & CEO
Live well. Lead well. Grow Together. Weekly conversations to help you stay human in healthcare. We share practical ideas, podcast pearls, and curated reads that help you grow. Together, we can transform healthcare, one person at a time.®
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