Can emotions be professional? A decolonial reframing of professional identity formation

Medical professionalism has long been associated with rationality, emotional detachment, and self-control. Although often presented as universal standards of professional conduct, these norms are historically shaped by Western and individualistic epistemologies that frame emotions as threats to objectivity and ethical judgment. Such expectations shape Professional Identity Formation (PIF), often generating tensions between learners' lived experiences and institutional norms. We argue that emotions are essential resources that qualify decision-making by helping us understand ourselves, the other, and the context, and anticipate the consequences of our decisions, thereby being essential for learning and professional identity formation. We draw on three decolonial perspectives. First, research on queer identities shows how trainees act as care weavers, transforming their own experience of marginalization into a relational capacity for empathy and clinical insight. Second, the South African philosophy of Ubuntu positions compassion and humanness not as soft skills but as constitutive markers of professional conduct grounded in communal interdependence. Third, rooted in Freire's critical pedagogy, the Pedagogy of Connection defines professionalism through presence-an openness to patients' suffering that qualifies clinical reasoning and positions the physician as an agent of social justice. Drawing on transformative learning theory, we suggest that emotionally challenging experiences can prompt reflection and shifts in perspective that are central to professional identity formation. Building on these perspectives, we propose reconnecting professionalism with emotions. We argue that emotional engagement is constitutive of professional identity formation, while its expressions and legitimate forms are shaped by the contexts in which physicians learn and practice.