10/14/2025
I just finished teaching my first year of a course entitled, “psychosocial aspects of disability and disease.” This was by far my favorite class when I was a student physical therapist, and it feels very full circle that I now get to teach it.
It’s a course on the soft skills of patient care. How to talk with people. How to listen. How to hold space, to be compassionate, to leave your bias at the door. To sum it up, we’re talking about how to create a therapeutic space for our patients…ALL of our patients…regardless of how different we may be on the surface.
As you can imagine in a class like this, we talk about the awkward, uncomfortable, and unpleasant things.
In one of our class activities, students paired up with another classmate who they knew had differing opinions on religion, and the goal was to listen. The students had to ask with the intent to understand each other, and without any agenda other than that.
This sounds scary right?
Guess what: students reported that this was one of their favorite activities. They went in thinking it might end up in a conflict.
The opposite was true. Students reported feeling closer, more understood, and actually liking their discussion partner MORE after the conversation.
How about that? So maybe if we not only talked with each other more, but also changed HOW we talked to each other, maybe we could actually start to heal some of the gaping wounds in our society.
A girl can hope.
