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Physician coach and marriage and family therapy graduate student Jillian Rigert discusses her article, “Fear of other people’s opinions nearly killed me. Here’s what freed me.” Jillian shares her harrowing journey through medical discharge from the military and transitioning out of surgery residency, which plunged her into guilt, shame, and a near-fatal struggle with self-worth tied to her career and others’ approval. She describes how isolating and starving herself, she reached a rock bottom where apathy paradoxically led to a turning point: publishing deeply personal articles on KevinMD. This act of vulnerability, initially a way to get her story out before an anticipated death, brought unexpected support and began to lift the shame. Jillian explains her process of recovery, which involved detaching her worth from career achievements and, crucially, from the fear of other people’s opinions. She emphasizes that understanding others’ judgments as reflections of their own biases, and cultivating a curious, compassionate, and non-judgmental mindset towards herself and others, were key to her freedom. Jillian’s powerful message is that your life is paramount, and she encourages listeners to question why they might prioritize external validation over their own self-perception, advocating for self-compassion and seeking support to reclaim their narratives.

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Transcript

Kevin Pho: Hi, and welcome to the show. Subscribe at KevinMD.com/podcast. Today we welcome back Jillian Rigert. She’s a physician coach and a marriage and family therapy graduate student. Today’s KevinMD article is, “Fear of other people’s opinions nearly killed me. Here’s what freed me.” Jillian, welcome back to the show.

Jillian Rigert: Thank you, Kevin. I’m delighted to be here.

Kevin Pho: All right, so tell us what led you to write this latest article and then talk about the article itself.

Jillian Rigert: Well, you were talking about physician coaching, and one thing that really comes up when people are considering changing their career or even going from a 1.0 FTE to a 0.8 is, “I’m so afraid of what people are going to think about me.” I was so afraid about what people were going to think about me when I left surgery that I spent three years suicidal and thought my only options were to continue in residency or take my own life. When I really dove deep into that, it’s because I was so attached to the performance-based identity, and I thought quitting was a sign of failure. I had all these narratives in my mind and an attachment to how I thought other people were going to think about me.

After I actually left surgery, it was even worse in terms of the guilt, the shame, and the worthlessness where I didn’t think I was worthy of food. I was dying from anorexia, and all of it, I learned later, was this facade that I created in my brain about what I thought other people would think about me if they knew I left surgery.

The article I shared on your site, the one titled “I risked my career to save my life,” was this catalytic, pivotal article that helped me to challenge the narrative that people would judge me and validate that I was a worthless person who didn’t deserve life because I left surgery. But many of us have this inflated sense that people are going to think those things. Really, what that article did was it helped release me of the guilt and shame and brought a community into my life who understood. I wrote the article that we’re talking about today because I imagine there are people trapped in their mind thinking, “I can’t do X, Y, Z that I really want to do,” held back by the fear of what other people are going to think about them, which is really something that they’re creating in their own mind.

Kevin Pho: So when you were thinking about leaving surgery, you were worried what other people thought about you to the point where you were suicidal? Who are these people? Whose judgment and opinions? Who are these specific people that you were worried about?

Jillian Rigert: Everyone. Anyone other than me. It’s interesting, not only the people in the program, but I had this sense of non-belonging. I’m in American Family Therapy right now. We’re learning about suicide risk, and the intellectualization of my suicidality kind of helped save me because I was thinking, what are the highest risk factors that I can work on to mitigate my risk? A thwarted sense of belonging and burdensomeness are two of the top things that lead people to contemplate taking their own life.

When I was thinking about leaving and had this identity crisis, I lost a sense of who I am without this and where I belong. I thought I belonged nowhere, especially with my coping skill being anorexia. It can be a very lonely condition where you feel misunderstood. I had that sense of being trapped, misunderstood, not belonging anywhere, feeling like a burden because I had all of these diagnoses that I made to mean that I was less than: the DSM diagnoses, anorexia, and high-functioning, quote-unquote, depression. I was making this all mean that I was a burden, that I didn’t belong. I didn’t see a light on the other side. All those factors contribute to higher suicide risk.

But back to your question: whose opinion? It was a construct in your brain. I personally thought anyone that knew my story would validate that I was a worthless person.

Kevin Pho: Now, was there any history from, say, your colleagues or the people around you who in the past judged your actions based on what you did? Did they give you any reason for you to think that way based on something that may have happened in the past?

Jillian Rigert: In one of our conversations, we talked about shame-based cultures. In our culture, we really develop performance-based identities where our whole worth can be contingent on our career titles and on our achievements. In medicine in particular, we’re so well trained to care about what people think about us on our rotations. It’s very subjective. In dental school, you get graded very subjectively. You care about what the patients think about you. You care about the reviews, and a lot of us abandon our own voice and our own opinions at the sacrifice of making sure we’re going to please other people. If you dive deeper into people-pleasing, that can start in early childhood as a way to keep yourself safe.

I think it’s so many different factors that all came together that made me hyper-fixate on what I think other people are thinking about me. Evolutionarily, we care about what people think of us because we’re meant to live in community. If you don’t fit in, you don’t belong, and you’re cast out, it threatens your survival.

Kevin Pho: You talk about that first article on KevinMD being a catalyst to a turnaround. Tell us what your mindset was just leading up to writing that article. What led you to contribute that first article in the first place? What was your mindset like?

Jillian Rigert: It was dark. Actually, I was apathetic. I didn’t want people to think that they were alone. At the time, in 2021, it was my last period where I was really critically ill from anorexia, and I knew I just couldn’t live the way I was living. I processed through writing, and I don’t know exactly what inspired me to share it. I just knew I needed to release it. It was this need to release. All the articles I shared on your website have been things from the most shame and guilt. I’m like, I’m just going to share this.

I noticed the articles got increasingly deeper. I paced myself into the “I risked my career to save my life” article because the initial ones that I shared were kind of like, “I want people to know this before I die, just in case I die.” Then I realized that that was so cathartic and healing for me, that I took a little bit more of a chance to say, “You know what? Those previous articles were so helpful. Let me just share something that’s really causing a negative quality of life impact for me.” Because I was so low, I didn’t think I could go any lower in terms of my mental health and my self-perception that I thought, what did I have to lose?

Kevin Pho: You mentioned in your article that this apathy that you were talking about paradoxically led you to become more vulnerable and be willing to be more unfiltered in the stories that you shared, and paradoxically, that led to your turnaround.

Jillian Rigert: Yeah, and it’s kind of still true at some points today. After I almost died from anorexia a few times, it’s interesting. Once you almost die, for a lot of people who face critical illnesses, there’s a before illness and an after, and you just realize so much of what we fixate on just doesn’t matter. It’s this carefreeness that sometimes the apathy can lead to a lot of struggle functioning. I leverage it to say, “You know what? I’m just going to live my fullest life and help people live their fullest life,” because we often constrict ourselves due to fear. A lot of that fear is really a facade in our own brain or fear of what people are going to say. Even if people do say things, that opinion that they’re crafting and their projection on us is really more about them than it is us and how we receive it and what meaning it has for us. That’s where we can do the inner work on ourselves.

Kevin Pho: After reflecting back, where you are now and after what you just said, that sometimes people’s judgment on you is really just a reflection of themselves, how long did it take you to come to that insight and realization?

Jillian Rigert: Gosh, I don’t know. I don’t know where that really sunk in. I think for me, it was more of working on my own opinion of myself that then helped me to see other people. I watched this documentary called Becoming Nobody that features Ram Dass, and he says in it, we look at the world through different channels. He says we can do this mental health channel where we’re really identifying other people’s mental health because we’re doing that. That’s kind of how we’re seeing ourself. Or we focus on people’s bodies, which I don’t recommend as somebody with anorexia; it’s very objectifying. Then we can go a little bit deeper. I forget what he says the third one is, but the fourth one is seeing people as shared spiritual beings and seeing the common humanity.

I think it was in my own healing that I could then see other people and develop self-compassion. I do think it probably started with your article, and then as I was just stripping down the layers of all of those societal constructs, that’s where you get a little bit more of a view and a landscape that helps you to reframe a lot of the things that we thought were true in life.

Kevin Pho: And when you initially shared that vulnerability, instead of being judged, you found a community of support, people who may be going through the same things that you were going through.

Jillian Rigert: Exactly. Yeah, that’s where that shared common humanity is. Even if it’s different, they can see part of themselves in your story.

Kevin Pho: Now, what kind of advice, knowing what you know now, do you have for others who may be going through that dark time that you went through years ago?

Jillian Rigert: People think it’s just them. I think where we find communities where you feel like you can be safe to be vulnerable… really, guilt and shame, the shame is a relational feeling. So to heal it, to mitigate it, it’s about finding a supportive community that will listen with compassion, curiosity, and non-judgment to help you release that guilt and shame burden that you’re experiencing.

Kevin Pho: Reflecting back to that time where you had to leave that oral surgery residency to where you are now as a family and marriage therapy graduate student, just reflect on how far you’ve come since I first met you years ago.

Jillian Rigert: Well, it’s interesting. When I was in surgery, I had a mentor who was in the Air Force, because I was in the Air Force at the time, and he said, “What would you do if you left?” And I said, “I would fix the eating disorder treatment centers because they’re all screwed up.” It’s just reflecting back to what I said, and my program director was so supportive. Even just the feedback I was receiving, my program director from oral surgery, I met with him last year. I was so disappointed in myself. He was never disappointed in me. He always put me as a holistic person first, and he always said, “You can definitely do this. You’re doing great. I think it’s your self-confidence.” He saw I was thriving on medical rotations, so he wanted what was best for me.

Just reflecting back to how I didn’t allow myself to receive that because I was so fixated on my own self-hate. We really see ourselves and what people are thinking about us through the lens of our relationship with ourself.

I realized in surgery, my ex-boyfriend died when I was in surgery, and I realized some of the existential angst I was having is I just saw how it was taking away my relationships. That’s the sacrifice people make in medicine and in a career, that your work hours are so long. But it helped me to realize that the experiences that I was having inside, the existential crises, the spiritual crises, were pointing me to what I valued. I kind of have more self-trust now. It took about 10 years, but what I valued and what I said in surgery are now my real life. I couldn’t have predicted where I’ve gotten to now.

If people are in the depths of that crisis, it’s really hard to imagine. You’re in survival mode. You can’t dream and scheme. So it’s really about first resting and taking yourself out of the environment, and then taking those turtle steps to allow you to get more in alignment with what matters to you and to strip yourself of those false narratives that sound so true in our mind because they’ve been perpetuated and they’ve been practiced for so long.

Kevin Pho: And you sum it up in your article: nothing in your career is more important than your life. How many of us don’t believe that?

Jillian Rigert: I didn’t believe it was true for a very long time.

Kevin Pho: We’re talking to Jillian Rigert, a physician coach and marriage and family therapy graduate student. Her KevinMD article is, “Fear of other people’s opinions nearly killed me. Here’s what freed me.” Jillian, as always, we’ll end with take-home messages that you want to leave with the KevinMD audience.

Jillian Rigert: I am very curious where people are with their relationship with themselves and how they’re impacted by their fear of other people’s opinions. The first step to change is awareness. So I invite them to reflect on what they gathered from the article and where they’re at, and then the next step that they want to take to reclaim their narratives, reclaim their voice, and reclaim their lives today.

Kevin Pho: Jillian, as always, thank you so much for sharing your story, time, and insight. Thanks again for coming back on the show.

Jillian Rigert: Yeah, thank you so much for having me. It’s been a pleasure.