After this patient encounter, I came to realize that my greatest strength, my finest therapeutic tool, was me—all of me.

Omar Sahak, a first-year fellow in the Division of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry and Child Development in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine in Stanford, California reflects on how sometimes the best way to help a patient is to be vulnerable with them.

The essay read in this episode was published in the Teaching and Learning Moments column in the July 2022 issue of Academic Medicine. Read the essay at academicmedicine.org.