Volume 40 Number 1 | February 2026
Summary

The article highlights how clinical laboratory professionals have suffered from shrinking staff, lost autonomy, and emotional exhaustion. It emphasizes the need for visibility, acknowledging their grief, sacrifices, and unmet needs. By validating their sadness, the author argues, workers can begin to adapt, heal, and reclaim their humanity within an overburdened system.

Reclaiming Humanity in the Clinical Laboratory

Julie Freidhoff, MS, MLS(ASCP), ASCLS Today Volunteer Contributor

Julie FreidhoffOver the past two decades, the clinical laboratory has been rigorously reshaped by forces that were rarely chosen by those who work within it—shrinking staffing models, institutional restructuring, relentless productivity demands, and a shift toward efficiency at the cost of human connection. These changes have accumulated into a kind of collective, unspoken wound. And so, I want to begin here:

I see you.

I see the supervisor, specialist, lead, technologist, technician, and support staff member who once felt protected by institutional leadership but now feels exposed. I see the worker who once believed that “the patient comes first” including you, too—that your well-being mattered, that your limits mattered, that your body and heart were not disposable inputs in a system hungry for more.

Over the years, many laboratory professionals have experienced a painful dual erosion:

  1. The loss of care and concern from administration/leadership: the sense that the institution and work unit “has your back.”
  2. The loss of autonomy and agency to care for yourself: as rigid policies, chronic understaffing, and cultural expectations strip away your ability to meet your own needs.

When both forms of care disappear, the care given to you and the agency to care for yourself, the nervous system reads this as danger. And it is no wonder that burnout, exhaustion, and emotional numbing have become widespread. These are not personal failures. They are adaptive responses to unrelenting conditions.

“You deserve to have your humanity recognized—not as an obstacle to productivity but as the foundation of the healing you bring to the world every single day.”

Visibility in a Culture that Rewards Self-Sacrifice

Somewhere along the way, many laboratories shifted from valuing professional judgment, healthy boundaries, and relational teamwork to rewarding the abandonment of those very things. Certificates of appreciation are handed to those who abandon or betray themselves by routinely skipping breaks, coming in on their day(s) off, or remaining reachable 24/7, without on-call pay or formal designation. These are not celebrations of excellence. They are signs of a system that has forgotten what healthy, sustainable work looks like.

  • I see you missing doctor’s appointments because you were mandated for a double shift.
  • I see you skipping lunch because “workflow” doesn’t permit it anymore.
  • I see you being labeled “not a team player” for declining to give up your day of rest.
  • I see you receiving HR write-ups for choosing to have healthy boundaries, basic human limits.

And perhaps most importantly: I see your heartbreak over what the profession used to be, and what it has become.

There is deep grief in that. And grief, when unacknowledged, turns into frustration, anger, numbness, or a sense of futility that simply never moves.

This is where the neuroscience of sadness becomes profoundly relevant.

The Singular Work of Sadness: A Pathway Back to Ourselves

Developmental Theorist Gordon Neufeld describes sadness as the emotional engine of human adaptation. Not the sadness of despair, but the sadness of futility, the moment the heart recognizes what cannot be changed and finally lets go of the struggle against it.

Sadness is often misunderstood as weakness, negativity, or something to get over quickly. But neuroscience shows that sadness is the only emotion capable of initiating a five-step adaptive cascade: 

Relief → Reset → Recovery → Realization → Resilience

And only true, felt sadness can tip the first domino.

When sadness rises, the nervous system shifts from sympathetic activation—the energy of pushing, striving, fighting—to parasympathetic restoration. This is the moment where frustration softens, alarm quiets, and the body recognizes: We can’t get through this particular way. It is not a cognitive insight. It is a physiological and emotional one.

This is the emotional mechanism that allows us to:

  • Release stuck emotion
  • Lay down futile efforts
  • Stop doing the same thing over and over that never worked
  • Regain capacity
  • Restore perspective
  • And ultimately recover resilience

We often say, “I’ll feel better when the problem is solved.” But much of the time, we feel better when we feel the sadness of the problem not being solvable, when the heart finally catches up to what reality has already revealed.

In today’s laboratories, many professionals are carrying enormous amounts of unfelt futility:

  • Futility about staffing levels
  • Futility about broken systems
  • Futility about not being able to do the work the way it should be done
  • Futility about being unseen by leadership
  • Futility about not being able to protect their own health
  • Futility about the profession’s trajectory

Feeling this is not weakness. It is the beginning of adaptation.

Sadness as a Form of Visibility

At the core of professional visibility is not just recognition of what you do—but recognition of what you have carried. Your labor, your sacrifices, your emotional burden, and your care for patients who will never know your name.

To say “I see you” is also to say:

  • I see what you hoped for, that didn’t materialize.
  • I see what you fought for, that didn’t change.
  • I see the boundaries you wanted to hold and weren’t allowed to.
  • I see the human needs you were asked to silence.
  • I see the years of holding things together that were never yours to hold alone.

This is sadness. And this sadness is not a pit; it is a passage.

When we allow ourselves to feel the futility of what we could not control, the emotional system begins the quiet work of adaptation: relief from stuck emotion, reset of the nervous system, recovery of energy, realization of potential, and the deep resilience that forms only after the tears fall. 

A New Kind of Visibility for the Laboratory Profession

What if visibility in the laboratory meant more than recognition of technical excellence? What if it also meant recognition of wounds, losses, and the resilience that has been required simply to stay?

To see laboratory professionals clearly is to acknowledge the emotional landscape of the past two decades, not just the workload, but the cost.

And so, I offer this:

I see you.

I see your expertise and your exhaustion.
Your dedication and your depletion.
Your boundaries and the consequences you’ve endured for holding them.
Your loyalty to patients, even when the system has been less loyal to you.
Your grief for a profession you still love.
Your quiet, powerful sadness—the sadness that, if allowed, can guide you toward adaptation, rest, recovery, and resilience.

You deserve to be seen.
You deserve to be cared for.
You deserve to have your humanity recognized—not as an obstacle to productivity but as the foundation of the healing you bring to the world every single day.

Julie Freidhoff is a Coach and Consultant at SafeSpace Coaching and Consulting in Rochester, Minnesota.