Law school fails to teach future lawyers how to work with people, especially wounded people who are traumatized by the events of their lives or by the systems we call “justice”. This gap in our legal education results in a disservice to our clients, dehumanizes our profession, and disregards the mental health impacts that lawyers experience due to work-related trauma. In becoming trauma-informed and trauma-responsive, lawyers experience better mental health outcomes, increased confidence and improved client satisfaction. They are able to help their clients regulate their emotions and remain connected in moments of pain and fear, and they can identify the impact their clients’ traumas have on their own individual and collective mental health and well-being.
Dr. Gabor Maté often says that trauma is a wound. Trauma is not about what happened to us (for example: the car accident, the sex assault, the divorce, etc.) but rather what happened inside of us as a result of what happened to us. As neuroscientists often note, the changes that trauma creates inside of us are evidenced in the brain — specifically in how the brain (over)reacts to stress (amygdala), has trouble managing emotions (pre-frontal cortex), and struggles to recall memories, learn and communicate (hippocampus).
Without trauma awareness, lawyers run the risk of helplessly watching their clients crumble, shut down or blow up in a rage in the witness box, deposition or interview. Developing an ability to recognize trauma when it presents as fight (self protection via conflict), flight (self protection from pain via escape), freeze (self preservation via dissociation), and fawn (self preservation and safety seeking via placation) will better equip lawyers to present credible and consistent witnesses who are “in control” of their emotions. For more on trauma responses, see Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: from Surviving to Thriving. Once lawyers can identify these trauma responses in others and themselves, the work of self-regulation and co-regulation begins.
The courageous work of self-regulation necessitates an inquiry into our own personal trauma responses which show up in each of us more often than we realize — including in our interactions with judges, opposing counsel, colleagues and clients who routinely operate from dysregulated states such as fight and flight, as is common across the legal profession.
Without this basic level of self-reflection and self-awareness, lawyers will find themselves triggered and meeting rage with rage, silence with silence, and shut down with shut down. When this experience becomes the norm, work-related relationships will become a source of pain, shame and trauma, and lawyers will inevitably confuse their trauma response for their personality.
Emotional self-regulation (as opposed to emotional suppression) equips lawyers to manage their emotions and responses so they can remain responsive, rational, clear headed, thoughtful and capable of effective communication. A lawyer’s self-regulation practice benefits their clients, colleagues and family members in several ways by creating psychological safety for others while also unconsciously co-regulating those who struggle to regulate their own emotions due to trauma, emotional distress or stress.
Taking up the practice of trauma-informed lawyering requires lawyers to connect to their own humanity and practice with compassion, empathy, psychological safety, humility and respect. The ultimate outcome is a wave of lawyers who will begin to heal their personal traumas while working to avoid doing further harm to others via their approach to legal practice. This transformation is not only individual, but collective, as our justice and legal systems immediately benefit from the heart, healing and humanity lawyers bring forth into the profession.
The critical skills underpinning this approach to practice can be learned over time via training on emotional intelligence, workplace boundaries, cultural humility, self-regulation for hostile work environments, workplace psychological safety and a variety of complex trauma healing modalities. Trauma-informed lawyering will transform your practice by creating authentic, empathetic, compassionate and psychologically safe legal experiences and workplaces. And who doesn’t need that?