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< | Vicarious Trauma in Public Interest Lawyering: | >
> | Preparing my Practice for Working with Clients: | | |
-- By IlanaDutton - 15 Feb 2023
Introduction | |
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< | Someone once told me that I was "empathic to a fault". They qualified the statement, explaining that while being empathetic is what makes me a great friend, it also means I take on other people's issues and problems as my own, even if my cup was already full of my own problems. Until I began working in public interest law, I had no idea how big of a toll that would have on my mental and physical well-being. | >
> | Someone once told me that I was "empathic to a fault". They qualified the statement, explaining that while being empathetic is what makes me a great friend, it also means I take on other people's issues and problems as my own, even if my cup was already full of my own problems. Until I began working in public interest law, I had no idea how big of a toll that would have on my mental and physical well-being. As I look towards my future of being a practicing lawyer, I need to figure out how to build a practice that is sustainable, knowing I am someone who holds the weight of clients' problems. | | | | |
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< | In my junior year of college, as an intern with Northwest Immigrants’ Rights Project, I took every case home with me. I'm not referring to the physical case file, but instead to the emotional baggage that each case inevitably came with. It quickly started impacting every aspect of my life, including my relationships with the people around me. People in the office would talk about "self-care" but those felt like empty words to me, since going on walks, exercising, and making time for friends, which are my versions of self-care, didn’t do anything. By the time I finished my internship in May of my senior year, I was feeling detached from the work I was doing, since it was the only way, I could protect myself, but it also made me worse at my job. I was putting in less effort and it was clear in my work, but I did not have the tools to handle the situation any other way. | >
> | In my junior year of college, as an intern with Northwest Immigrants’ Rights Project, I took every case home with me. I'm not referring to the physical case file, but instead to the emotional baggage that each case inevitably came with. It quickly started impacting every aspect of my life, including my relationships with the people around me. People in the office would talk about "self-care" but those felt like empty words to me, since going on walks, exercising, and making time for friends, which are my versions of self-care, didn't do anything. By the time I finished my internship in May of my senior year, I was feeling detached from the work I was doing, since it was the only way, I could protect myself, but it also made me worse at my job. I was putting in less effort and it was clear in my work, but I did not have the tools to handle the situation any other way. | | | I did not have the language to understand what I was experiencing until I began working as a legal assistant at Her Justice in New York City after graduating college. During my second week at the organization, our on-staff social worker did a training with me on "vicarious trauma", which was a term I had never heard before. As she was explaining the concept to me, which I hope to do for all of you in the next section, pieces started falling into place and the last two years began to make more sense.
| | | It is impossible to predict exactly how vicarious trauma will impact an individual, but research shows there can be impacts on the physical and mental well-being of attorneys. Mentally, long-term exposure to indirect trauma can impact our ability to regulate emotions, leading to increased anxiety, depression, or aggression. Physically, vicarious trauma can impact appetite, sleep, and the immune system. | |
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< | Vicarious trauma is by no means a new concept, but in the past, it has been considered an anticipated part of the profession for many public interest lawyers, leading to a culture of avoidance and acceptance, instead of a culture of support. In the past, there was an attitude of either dealing with it or finding a new career, because it meant you couldn’t keep up with the job. While that attitude appears to have changed in a lot of workplaces, it has been internalized, which can make it difficult for people to seek help when they need it. | | | | |
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< | Without naming and working to address vicarious trauma, lawyers who began their careers with tremendous compassion for their clients can feel that they are losing that compassion. In reality, they are not losing compassion, but instead, the stress of feeling deep compassion for people who have experienced extreme trauma begins to take a toll on the well-being of the attorney, causing them to distance themselves, which can manifest as being less compassionate. | >
> | Considering Vicarious Trauma in my Practice
Unfortunately, just learning the term "vicarious trauma" did not solve all of my problems. It gave me the language to understand what I was experiencing and that I was not alone in it, but I still struggled in balancing empathy, which is one of the things that made me good at my job, and maintaining healthy boundaries that would make the type of work I want to do sustainable. It led me to the key question: What would it look like to build a practice where lawyers continue to engage with trauma in order to do their job in a way that is not damaging to their own well-being?
The answer to this question has to be more nuanced than "go outside more" or "find creative expressions". While all of those sound "right" as coping mechanisms, they never seemed to fully solve the problem. So I've been working to look beyond the easy fixes to come up with a list of things that I want to see in my practice to support myself and other lawyers who interact with trauma every day:
1. Encourage open dialogue about secondhand trauma and how it impacts people in the workplace -- These conversations cannot just be about the existence of secondhand trauma. Instead, it needs to address the symptoms of secondhand trauma, even the ones that are hard to hear, like a perceived lack of empathy due to burnout.
2. Support people in building coping skills early on in their career -- This is important because it gives people time to build important coping skills before they are in the early phases of burnout, which makes it easier to build those skills | | | | |
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> | 3. Build an environment where boundaries are encouraged and respected -- By encouraging a separation between people's work and home lives, it gives employees the chance to truly recharge at home. This can be difficult in many types of public interest law because emergencies do exist. My practice will need to take into account the existence of emergencies and build mechanisms to ensure those are adequately addressed while also protecting the boundaries of our attorneys. | | | | |
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< | Moving Forward | >
> | 4. Provide generous PTO, encourage people to take it, and make sure that they can truly do NO work on their vacation -- Rest is essential to people's well being and needs to be supported. | | | | |
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< | Unfortunately, just learning the term "vicarious trauma" did not solve all of my problems. It gave me the language to understand what I was experiencing and that I was not alone in it, but I still struggled in balancing empathy, which is one of the things that made me good at my job and maintaining healthy boundaries that would make the type of work I want to do sustainable. By the time I left Her Justice, I was experiencing the mental and physical symptoms of vicarious trauma. | >
> | 5. Ensure that people are paid sufficiently so that they do not have to work about financial insecurity and have the resources to cover the mental health care that they need -- Therapy is expensive, even with health insurance, but it is also an essential tool in protecting people from burnout. Making sure that people do not have to worry about making ends meet on their salary and can afford the care they need is a crucial part of building a sustainable workplace. | | | | |
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< | It took me a while to recover, and I still feel the impacts at times, but despite that, I am diving back into public interest law this summer at Kids in Need of Defense. I know this is the career that I want to pursue, so I am going into this summer with a plan to protect my well-being while also bringing compassion to the work. I’m going to speak with my supervisor early, to learn about how they cope with exposure to second-hand trauma. I’m going to maintain a routine, which includes healthy eating and exercise, both of which have been shown to mitigate the impacts of vicarious trauma. Finally, I’m going to try different types of boundaries, to see what works for me. I hope that this summer I can begin building a practice in public interest law that is sustainable. | | | | |
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> | Vicarious trauma is by no means a new concept, but in the past, it has been considered an anticipated part of the profession for many public interest lawyers. Building a practice that truly supports lawyers means undoing this ingrained mentality that asking for help means you're not cut out for this kind of work. While that won't be easy, it's something that I know I need to do to ensure that I am building a practice that is sustainable for me and the lawyers I will work it. | | |
An excellent start. It accomplishes very well one of the most important functions of a first draft: to clear away the brush and show the question around which the next draft can grow. | |
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< | We can leave for another moment the question whether the science bears out the hypothesis of vicarious trauma. After we've read Frank Putnam in a couple of weeks it would perhaps make sense to return to this question in a revision. The essay's central idea doesn't depend on any particular theoretical formulation for its overwhelming force. We could also say that lawyering for individual clients not only means forming a personal relationship, but also one directly fraught with the client's vulnerability and the lawyer's responsibility. However we formulate the nature of the resulting psychic cost to the lawyer, it can't just be dissociated, as you say. But on that point Larry Joseph's "Something Split" in Lawyerland, which we are also about to read, is succinct and disturbing. | >
> | We can leave for another moment the question of whether the science bears out the hypothesis of vicarious trauma. After we've read Frank Putnam in a couple of weeks it would perhaps make sense to return to this question in a revision. The essay's central idea doesn't depend on any particular theoretical formulation for its overwhelming force. We could also say that lawyering for individual clients not only means forming a personal relationship, but also one directly fraught with the client's vulnerability and the lawyer's responsibility. However we formulate the nature of the resulting psychic cost to the lawyer, it can't just be dissociated, as you say. But on that point Larry Joseph's "Something Split" in Lawyerland, which we are also about to read, is succinct and disturbing. | | | So how should practice involving individual clients, like other types of practice—by social workers, psychotherapists, school counselors—that involve similar "empathy costs" be organized to be psychically fulfilling, or at least not damaging, to the lawyer? The best route to improvement, I think, is to put that question at the center of the next draft.
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