Crying in the Supply Closet, Doctor: The Hidden Struggle of Women in Medicine

RELATIONAL TRAUMA • March 18, 2026

LAST UPDATED: JUNE 2026

Last reviewed: June 2026 by Annie Wright, LMFT

This article is psychoeducational and is not a substitute for individual medical or mental health care. If you’re in crisis, please contact a licensed professional or, in the US, call or text 988.

IF YOU’RE GOOGLING THIS AT 2:00 AM

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Four Minutes, Then Back to the Floor

It’s 3:40 on a Tuesday afternoon, and Farah is sitting on the narrow bench in the supply closet with a box of blue nitrile gloves pressing into her hip. She’s an emergency medicine attending, forty-four, the physician the residents page when a case is going sideways. The door has clicked shut behind her. On the other side of it, the monitors are still beeping, and somewhere a family is still asking the question she couldn’t answer well enough. She has her phone face-up on her knee, and she’s watching the clock. Four minutes. She’s done this so many times she no longer thinks of it as crying. She thinks of it as resetting.

“Any longer than four minutes and someone comes looking,” she told me, the first time we met in my Maine practice, over video. “Any shorter and it doesn’t do anything. I need the whole four. And then I wash my face, and I fix my badge, and I walk back out, and I’m fine. I’m good at being fine.” She said that last part almost proudly, and then she stopped, because she heard it. “I don’t know when being good at being fine became the problem. But I think it did.”

Here’s what I’ve come to notice, after more than fifteen years and thousands of sessions with driven women, a meaningful number of them physicians. The supply closet isn’t the problem, and the four-minute cry isn’t the problem. They’re the receipt. They’re the visible, timestamped evidence of an emotional load that a woman in medicine has been carrying with no structural place to set it down. Farah didn’t come to me because she cries at work. She came because the crying had started to feel like the only four minutes of the day that were honest. (Names and identifying details throughout this piece are composites, changed to protect confidentiality.)

In short: Women physicians burn out at higher rates than their male colleagues because the structural demands of medicine were built without women’s psychological reality in mind.

The Supply Closet Is a Symptom, Not a Weakness

When Farah retreats to that closet, she isn’t hiding because she’s fragile. She’s responding to a nervous system that’s been pushed past what it can hold. The human body is built to meet threat with a fast cascade of physiology, fight, flight, or freeze, and in emergency medicine the threats don’t stop. Life-and-death stakes, the demand to perform flawlessly, and, for women physicians, an extra layer of gendered expectation and institutional silence around anything that looks like feeling.

That’s the piece I want you to hold. The tears aren’t the failure. They’re the seam. When you override your emotional response all day so you can keep functioning, the feeling doesn’t evaporate. It waits, and then it finds you in a stairwell, a parked car, a bathroom stall between patients. What Farah calls resetting is her parasympathetic nervous system, the branch that’s supposed to calm and restore you, making a desperate four-minute grab at doing its job before she asks her body to go back into sympathetic overdrive.

Here’s the part that matters clinically. Those four minutes are a valve, and a valve is not the same as recovery. When chronic sympathetic arousal keeps overriding the body’s capacity to rest, the closet stops being enough. In my experience with physician clients, roughly speaking, the crying is a better sign than what tends to come next. Not always, but often enough that I’ve learned to ask about it. Because the alternative to overflow isn’t calm. The alternative is numbness, and numbness is the harder thing to come back from.

Why Women in Medicine Cry Alone

Medicine’s mythology was built on stoicism and invulnerability, ideals that have been coded masculine for a very long time. A woman inside that hierarchy has to demonstrate competence and steadiness in a male-dominated field while contending with a stereotype that files any emotional expression under weakness. So she learns, early and thoroughly, that tears in front of colleagues buy her judgment or pity, and neither one makes her safer.

Farah learned this in her intern year. A patient she’d worked on for six hours died, and she felt her face start to go, and an attending she admired put a hand on her shoulder and said, kindly, that she’d get used to it. Kindly. That’s the part she couldn’t shake. The kindness was the instruction. It told her that the goal was to stop feeling this, that the mark of a real doctor was a face that didn’t move. She spent the next twenty years getting very good at a face that doesn’t move, and the supply closet is where the face she actually has goes to exist for four minutes.

Layered underneath is the arithmetic of gender and power. The microaggressions, the being mistaken for the nurse, the having to prove her competence one more time to the same colleague who never has to prove his. This is the emotional labor Hochschild named, the unpaid, unmeasured work of managing your own feelings and everyone else’s so the room keeps running. It never shows up in a productivity metric. It shows up in a supply closet, which becomes the one place a woman in medicine is permitted, briefly, to stop performing.

The Four-Minute Rule and the Coping That Stops Working

Farah’s four-minute rule was a small work of genius. A way to hold her own vulnerability inside a container tight enough to protect her professional image. Coping like this is everywhere in medicine, and for good reason. It’s forged in training, where survival depends on compartmentalizing feeling and keeping your feet moving. At first these strategies do exactly what they promise. They manage the flood, they hold off collapse, they let you keep your hands steady.

The trouble comes with the years. The same strategy that saved you in residency turns on you in practice, and it isn’t the strategy’s fault. It’s the sustained use of it with no room for genuine processing anywhere in the system. The four-minute cry, the composed face, the swallowed reaction, they’re all forms of emotional triage that trade long-term wellbeing for the next hour of function. And the residue builds under the surface, quietly eroding the resilience you keep drawing on as though the account were bottomless.

What worries me most, clinically, is the feedback loop. When the body and mind get denied the space to fully feel and integrate pain, they reach for more extreme measures to cope. The breakdowns get bigger, or the numbness gets deeper. The very skills that let Farah survive the crucible of medical training are now the walls of the room she can’t get out of. She built the container so well that she got sealed inside it.

Farah told me once about the day she realized the closet had stopped working. She’d gone in for her four minutes, set the timer the way she always did, and the tears wouldn’t come. She stood there in the dark next to the shelf of gauze and saline, waiting for the release that used to arrive on schedule, and there was just a flat, gray nothing. “That scared me more than the crying ever did,” she said. It’s the moment I listen for with physician clients. The crying is the body still asking. The flatness is the body giving up on being heard, and that’s the harder place to come back from.

What Your Body Is Trying to Tell You

Suppressing emotion under chronic stress isn’t a character flaw. It’s a physiological event with a bill attached. The body doesn’t neatly separate emotional threat from physical threat, both trip the same survival wiring. Each time Farah held back tears at a bedside, her body stayed in heightened arousal, releasing cortisol and adrenaline. Useful chemicals for a genuine emergency. Corrosive ones when the emergency never ends and they never get to clear.

Think of the autonomic nervous system as a home thermostat that’s supposed to swing between “activate” and “rest.” Chronic suppression jams the dial on activate. The system keeps scanning for danger without ever getting the restorative input of release and real connection that would let it stand down. What this looks like on a Wednesday is the jaw she wakes up clenching, the sleep that doesn’t refill her, the flash of irritation at her kids over something small, the stomach that turns before every shift. Her body has been saying the same sentence for two years. This is too much, held too long, with nowhere to put it down.

Learning to hear that sentence is the whole task for a woman in medicine who cries in the closet. Those tears aren’t weakness leaking out. They’re a somatic request for integration, a plea for self-compassion and for structural conditions that treat the emotional weight of medical work as real. When the body finally gets heard and tended, it can begin to recalibrate, and the capacity for presence and steady care starts to come back. Of course you’re tired. You’ve been running an equation the culture rigged against you and then grading yourself for not solving it faster.

Both/And: Your Success Is Real and So Is Your Pain

Some of the deepest healing I watch happen in my office arrives the moment a driven woman stops running her life as an either/or. Either I’m strong or I’m struggling. Either I’m grateful for what I have or I’m allowed to hurt. Either my life is objectively enviable or my pain gets to count. Here’s the reframe I keep offering, and it’s the one that tends to loosen something. The honest answer is almost always both.

Chidinma is a hospitalist in her early forties, Nigerian-born, trained partly in Lagos and partly in the States, raising two children she plainly adores. On paper she’s flourishing. In my office she described a feeling she called “smiling underwater.” From the surface everything reads calm. Underneath, she said, she hadn’t taken a full breath in months. She didn’t want to complain, because she knew exactly how enviable her life looked, and the guilt of complaining was its own separate weight. So she carried the ache silently, and the silence made it heavier, the way holding your breath makes your chest hurt more, not less.

This is the paradox I see over and over. The women who’ve built the most impressive external lives are frequently the ones carrying the heaviest interior loads. Not because the success caused the suffering, but because the same early relational conditioning that drove the achieving also taught them to perform wellness instead of feeling it. Both are true at once. Chidinma is genuinely accomplished, AND she is genuinely struggling. The over-functioning was wise, it built the career and kept her safe, AND it is now the exact thing standing between her and a full breath. Healing began the afternoon she stopped forcing herself to pick which of those two realities she was allowed to hold.

The Systemic Lens: The Weight You Carry Isn’t All Yours

Driven women are trained to look inward for the cause of their suffering. Burned out? Set better boundaries. Anxious? Try more mindfulness. Relationships strained? Communicate better. This framing isn’t an accident, and it isn’t neutral. It keeps the spotlight on individual behavior and off the structural conditions that make the individual behavior so expensive in the first place.

Look at what the typical woman in medicine holds in a single day. High-stakes clinical work. The emotional labor of her relationships. The mental load of a household that still defaults to her. Caregiving in both directions, children and often aging parents. Her own health, squeezed into the margins. And the constant performance of composure required to be taken seriously in every one of those rooms. No one designed this load to be sustainable, because no one designed it at all. It accrued. It’s what you get when women walk into professional spaces over decades without the domestic and institutional scaffolding ever being rebuilt to match.

Naming those forces out loud is itself part of the work. When a woman realizes her exhaustion isn’t proof of personal inadequacy but a predictable response to genuinely impossible conditions, something in the room changes. The shame loosens its grip. The self-blame softens. You’re not broken. The system was never built with your flourishing in mind. And once she can see that clearly, she can start making choices from what she actually needs instead of from what the culture insists she should have been able to handle. Here’s how the inheritance lives in a body: it’s the shoulders that climb toward the ears during rounds, the held breath in the car before the shift, the way a pager tone tightens her chest three hours after she’s clocked out.

How to Heal When You’re Running on Empty

The physicians, surgeons, and residents I work with tend to arrive as experts at outrunning their own distress. They can recite the DSM criteria for burnout. They know the statistics on physician suicide by heart. And they still can’t quite admit, even to themselves, that what they’re living is serious. If you’ve ever cried in a supply closet and then walked straight into a patient room, composed and functioning, you know the exact skill I mean. That compartmentalizing kept you alive. It’s also quietly costing you something.

Healing for a woman in medicine doesn’t look like it does for other people. You can’t just “set boundaries” and “practice self-care” and call it finished. The structural pressure is real, the way your identity has fused with the role is real, and the grief of a career that’s taken more than it’s returned deserves to be treated as real. What I’ve found is that the work has to happen on two levels at once. The nervous-system level, where the chronic stress actually lives in your body, and the identity level, where a question like “Who am I if I’m not the doctor who sacrifices everything?” finally gets room to breathe.

One approach I lean on with physician clients is Somatic Experiencing. It was developed by Peter Levine, PhD, a psychologist whose 1997 book Waking the Tiger is still the cleanest account I’ve read of how survival energy gets stuck in the body after a threat. What the somatic work does, as Payne and Levine describe in their 2015 paper on interoception and trauma therapy (PMID: 25699005), is rebuild the connection between your body’s signals and your conscious awareness, slowly and in titrated doses. That pacing matters enormously for a woman used to operating at maximum, who needs an approach that isn’t one more thing to white-knuckle.

For discrete traumatic events, the death that still visits you at 3 a.m., a humiliation on rounds, a procedure that went wrong, EMDR tends to help. It works with the brain’s own reprocessing so those stuck memories stop intruding on the present. It’s structured and efficient, which reassures the part of you that wants a clear protocol, while still reaching the emotional material that pure cognitive work leaves untouched. I watched Farah do this work over months. Six months in, she told me she’d gone a full week without the closet. “I still keep the timer set for four minutes,” she said. “I just haven’t needed it. Most weeks. Not every week.” She laughed, and then she didn’t.

Stephen Porges, PhD, the developmental psychophysiologist behind Polyvagal Theory (PMID: 40735382), describes neuroception as the way your nervous system scans for safety beneath conscious awareness. For women whose early environments delivered attunement inconsistently, that internal detector tends to run on a hair-trigger. The room can be objectively calm while the body insists it isn’t. What stayed with me from his work is that healing was never about overriding the signal. It’s about slowly teaching the body that the rules of the present are different from the rules of the past. Bessel van der Kolk, MD, the psychiatrist and trauma researcher who wrote The Body Keeps the Score, documents the same thing at the level of the brain (PMID: 38198456): the hypervigilant amygdala, the quieted prefrontal cortex that would normally help you contextualize a feeling. None of it is metaphor, and none of it is permanent.

I also want to name the thing that rarely gets said out loud in medicine. You’re allowed to ask whether the career you built still fits the person you’re becoming. That question isn’t failure and it isn’t waste. In my practice I’ve sat with women who found ways to restructure their relationship to the work, different settings, different hours, different roles, and with women who realized they needed to leave clinical practice entirely to save themselves. Both can be the right answer. What matters is that the choice comes from clarity, not from a body that finally hit the floor. You don’t have to keep living in supply closets. It starts with letting one person actually see what’s happening for you, in the proverbial house of life you’ve built, where this wound gets to become a room with a door instead of a locked closet you visit alone.

References

Peer-Reviewed Research (Vancouver)

1. van der Kolk BA, Wang JB, Yehuda R, Bedrosian L, Coker AR, Harrison C, et al. Effects of MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD on self-experience. PLoS One. 2024;19(1):e0295926. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0295926. PMID: 38198456.
2. Payne P, Levine PA, Crane-Godreau MA. Somatic experiencing: using interoception and proprioception as core elements of trauma therapy. Front Psychol. 2015;6:93. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00093. PMID: 25699005.
3. Porges SW. Polyvagal Theory: Current Status, Clinical Applications, and Future Directions. Clin Neuropsychiatry. 2025;22(3):169-184. doi:10.36131/cnfioritieditore20250301. PMID: 40735382.

Books & Cultural Sources (Chicago Author-Date)

• Hochschild, Arlie Russell. 1983. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Levine, Peter A. 1997. Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books.
• Dalton-Smith, Saundra. 2017. Sacred Rest: Recover Your Life, Renew Your Energy, Restore Your Sanity. New York: FaithWords.

Medical Disclaimer