This episode is a reproduction of Myrna's closing Keynote for the 16th Annual Family Law Summit sponsored by the Law Society of Ontario and their Continuing Professional Development Department, originally delivered via Zoom on March 29, 2022.
This episode is a reproduction of Myrna's closing Keynote for the 16th Annual Family Law Summit sponsored by the Law Society of Ontario and their Continuing Professional Development Department, originally delivered via Zoom on March 29, 2022.
🎵 AUDIO/MUSIC CUE🎵
>> Myrna McCallum : I'm Myrna McCallum, Metis Cree lawyer and passionate promoter of Trauma informed layering. Welcome back to the Trauma Informed Lawyer Podcast. As you know, I believe that law schools and bar courses are missing a critical competency requirement in their curriculum. Trauma Informed Lawyering. Becoming a Trauma Informed lawyer will, among other things, challenge you to critically reflect on your personal behaviors, beliefs and biases, call on you to positively transform the way you approach advocacy, guide your practice to avoid doing further harm to others, and ask that you commit to remaining open to learn new and old knowledge you didn't know you needed before beginning your career. Your education starts right here, right now. I've got somebody working on those, so just stay tuned. When you go to my hosting site, you should start to see those transcripts being populated there.
>> Myrna McCallum : I'm in the process of putting together a course that is probably going to be delivered over zoom. My working title right now is Re Envisioning Our Roles and Introduction to Trauma Informed Justice. I'm currently looking at delivering that course in July around the 20th, 21st. At this point, I think it's going to be three days. If you're interested, just stay tuned to my social media channels at the Trauma Inform Lawyer, on Instagram, my name at LinkedIn, and then on Twitter @theTIL podcast. So I've been away for the last few weeks because I was pretty ill and I lost my voice for several days, which totally sucked. Still getting better, but just really glad to just be feeling like a human being today. So that means I don't have a conversation to share with you or even a solo episode. So as I was thinking about what might be a really good episode to round out April, I was reflecting on a recent keynote I delivered last month for the Law Society of Ontario at the continuing Professional Development 16th Family Law Summit. even though they hold the copyright to all of the content created for that day, they have generously given me permission to share the keynote I delivered for them with all of you. And I figured because the question that they had put to me was so broad, what is Trauma Informed Lawyering? I figured, I think all my listeners would really love to hear my take on Trauma Informed lawyering. What is it? Why do we need it? Why should we care? How does it benefit us? How. How does it benefit others? And so that's really what I talked about. And that means this, this episode is going to be longer than most, like almost an hour. So you might want to listen while you're running, driving, walking, cooking, whatever it Might be because it, it's a, it's a long one. But I just want to say that I think the content applies to all of us, regardless of whether or not we're lawyers. If we work with people who are going through difficult times, if we've been through difficult times, you know, there's good stuff here for, for you with that.
>> Myrna McCallum : Let's go beginning with trauma informed lawyering. I think a lot of people, aren't very clear on what it is. I just want to give you a bit of a framework before I do a little bit of a deeper dive. so I know that trauma informed care, like that language comes from the health care field. And it usually is framed in the context of trauma informed support, what it means to be a support provider. But, you know, as a lawyer, I recognize that's not my role. In fact, if anyone asked me to do it, I think I'd probably do not such a good job, because I wouldn't know exactly what I'm doing and how to do it well. But what I've come to understand, when you put trauma informed together with lawyering, it really comes down to, adapting our approach as lawyers to how we sit with people who come into our spaces with their own. And when I say this, I don't just mean your clients or a witness that you're working with. I mean anybody, your colleagues, opposing counsel, your judge. Because everybody has some kind of trauma, whether it's trauma related to this pandemic, whether it's something from childhood, whether it's something recently in their lives, whatever it might be. We all show up in these spaces carrying something with us.
Maybe it's something that was passed down from our parents and our grandparents, people who come from indigenous backgrounds, Black people, Jewish people. They know exactly what I mean when I talk about things like intergenerational or historical trauma. So assuming everyone has trauma, let's do that. We need to understand that when they come into certain spaces and they bring those traumas into those spaces, particularly spaces like legal spaces, where they're less familiar with what that process is, what that framework looks like, what's going to happen with their information. There has to be time set aside to go over that, to provide people with information about, what they can expect from you, what they can expect from your process. And it really requires, us adapting our approach, right, to recognize that there could be trauma in this individual that's coming forward, and that along with that trauma, there could be triggers that present the triggers of them, triggers in us, because sometimes we don't respond really in the best way. When people show up, and their trauma response is something like anger, I think we're a lot more comfortable normally. I think as humans, we like it if people show up, if they're going to show us any trauma response, that it's like silence or it's tears, because that's really not threatening. But if people are really angry, then it often causes some kind of response, right? That comes up in us. So we have to prepare for that. What do we do when we're triggered, being triggered as a human response? And so we need to think about that. We need to think about how we adapt our approach to accommodate these needs that these individuals bring into these spaces. And that's all kinds of needs, right? It's not just, a need for legal information. It's all kinds of, indications that maybe they need access to support. So we should be prepared to give them some information about who can support them as they go through really difficult processes. Because we know it can't be us. Right? That's not our role. As we go through, making space and preparing for people's traumas and triggers and, well as our own, it's really important to recognize that as we also adapt our strategy, we have to really be willing to park our ego, have it take a backseat and depersonalize when people show up with a lot of emotion that it's really not about us. And I'm hopefully going to be able to give you some techniques in terms of how I do it. But let me just say, I have not mastered this. I still get triggered, and I still have to find ways to park a lot of that and find a way to, move through that, recognizing it's not about me. Even if there's a lot of anger coming my way, it's just not about me. And so as we adapt our strategy, we have to remember that when people show up in these spaces that we work in, they're often afraid because they don't know. And many of us as human beings fear uncertainty. That's a natural thing to expect. So what can we do to inspire trust? Right. In my experience, it often comes down to transparency, giving people as much information as possible so they could decide whether or not they're going to trust us or the process we represent. Beyond that, I think what's really important, and as I think about all the work that you do, I think it's really critical that we understand and start to reflect on what our relationship is to things like empathy and humility. Why? Because oftentimes we are working with people who either have had a, ah, similar lived experience to us or they've had an experience that we just know nothing about. We just can't relate to. It's never happened. We don't know what can we do when we work with people who are bringing an experience, to our door that we just can't relate to? Lots of things that we could do to position them as experts in their own lived experience. I'm going to hopefully give you some techniques in this brief time that we have together about how we can do that. Then the last piece to this trauma informed lawyering framework is safeguarding your mental health. Because in my experience, if you are not okay, nobody's okay. Like, you need to have a, for lack of a better term, I think you need your own kind of healing plan as you go through this work. I've never been a family lawyer for lots of fair reasons and obvious reasons, I think. Lots of pain, lots of tears, lots of fear, lots of, you know, suffering, lots of hard, there's lots of hard stuff, emotional stuff, in that practice area. Also not that dissimilar, I guess, from criminal law, which is, my background. But it's really important that we understand that if we're going to constantly show up in spaces like that where we're on the front lines of a lot of human suffering, eventually some of that suffering can sort of like ripple out and touch us. And when it does that, we have to be really alive to the fact that it's doing that so that we create some kind of separation. There's all kinds of ways to do that. You could, you know, create like your own healing practice. It could come down to boundaries that comes down to all kinds of things to create that sort of separation, to make sure that the work that you do isn't breaking you down emotionally, mentally, spiritually, and leading either to vicarious trauma or burnout or compassion fatigue. And so it's really important that I think we prioritize as lawyers, we have to prioritize our mental health. And boundaries is a really good way to do that. Because if we don't. What I have found in my world is that it can lead beyond, beyond the, general headings I just gave you. Vicarious trauma, burnout and compassion fatigue. It can lead to some of us showing up in these spaces, dehumanized, like dehumanizing or dissociated or desensitized and Then the effect is that people walk away feeling like they haven't been seen, they haven't been heard, or they've been demeaned or disrespected in some way. It can really inform some experience of inequality, equality and humanity. And we know from media that when people go to complain about lawyers or judges or legal processes usually comes down to that piece. And so when that happens, I think it's important for us to ask, well, did I do everything to ensure that that individual had an opportunity to be seen, to be heard, to have their safety, whatever, however they define personal safety for themselves, prioritized by me? And so within all of this framework, all these components that I've given you about how we can become flexible and adapt, it really, first and foremost begins with knowledge education. We don't know what we don't know. I like to believe that when we know better, we do better. And so until that moment happens, we might be, like, making mistakes that we'd rather not make, or we'd be making mistakes that we don't know is causing harm. But it is. And so as I get into what that means and what that requires of us as lawyers, I want to start this piece with a quote. Now that I've given you this framework. So I've been reading this book slowly but surely, because I don't seem to read fast anymore these days. I have to take in a whole sentence, sometimes for, like, two weeks. So I've been reading this book by Thomas Hubble. Hubel. It's called Healing Collective Trauma. I'm gonna read a little quote to you. He says, whether individual or collective trauma fragments and fractures it disowns and silences, it creates denial and forgetting. To assist in its repair, we must choose to acknowledge, to witness, and to thereby feel together what has actually occurred. Even the most horrific details we'd rather close our eyes to. Because to look away, to dismiss, deny, minimize, or willfully forget, is to uphold the institutions of inequality, of inhumanity that created them. Immediately when I read that, my sort of like, something went off, like the light started to come on first is, I would say, as an indigenous woman who went to residential school, I started to understand a little bit about why I feel really resistant to how reconciliation has been, sometimes imposed upon me, this concept. but I also started to reflect on my experience as a lawyer and how this particular quote really gives us a map to where we go wrong and how we can do better and where, Where our knowledge and education should begin. So, Thomas Huble says he started off saying whether individual or collective. So immediately what he is like alerting us to is that trauma comes in all forms. It's not just individual trauma. It could be collective trauma, it could be interest. There's all kinds, intergenerational trauma, et cetera. But what I invite you to think about is not just the experience of the individual, but the experience of the collective. And in this particular, for the purposes of this presentation, I want you to think of that collective as the legal profession or lawyers who practice family law. Right. How are lawyers and family law collectively traumatized by the work that they do? How does that show up? He goes on to say that trauma fragments and fractures. It disowns and silences. It creates denial and forgetting. I think within that piece of, his framing, he's actually telling us this is how trauma impacts the brain. Like this is what trauma does to the brain. And I thought it was quite powerful because as they start to learn a tiny bit about the brain, keeping in mind I'm just a lawyer. I have no neuroscientist or psychologist, just a lawyer who's read a few articles, read a couple books, okay? So as I looked at that, I started to think about my days when I would examine people or cross examine people, or I would have to test, evidence for credibility and reliability, particularly if I was dealing with children or I was dealing with, historical sexual abuse cases. What I would find is in this fragmenting and fracturing, what he's really saying to us is that trauma can get into the brain. It can start to carve out, create division. Things are not working together as they once did before the trauma. And the trauma can be anything, right? It could be like, there's a whole range. I don't have to list them off. It could be this pandemic. It could be anything. So once we start to understand that there's kind of this fragmenting and fracturing occurring things, there's just starting to disconnect, right? Creates disconnection. It also disowns and silences. When I read that, I started to think about the ways in which I would ask people questions and they would struggle sometimes to answer me because they would either say, I don't know, or they would just be completely silent. And so as I started to understand things like the, amygdala, which is, your fight, flight, freeze and fawn survival response, right? Some of that, especially freeze, can cause you to just become silent, disconnected, dissociate. Just. You just kind of are, Checked out. And so he goes on to also say, it creates denial and forgetting. What I found was really interesting about that, maybe you've had this experience as well, is that some people cannot acknowledge what it is that they experienced. And so even in the face of physical evidence that confirms a certain event has taken place, a traumatic event, you will still have individuals who will deny it. That absolutely did not happen to me. It did not happen to me because their brain is in the state of trying to protect them, right? Survival mode. So, like, they have to just refuse or reject what is true. And it's one of the ways in which the brain takes care of us. Like, they can't remember that, or they don't remember it that way, or it's like an unfinished movie. These events have happened, but then it just ends. And you don't see what else happens next. But sometimes lawyers, police officers have physical evidence that tells us what happened next. And even in the face of that, you will get an individual that say, no, nope, that didn't happen. And so we need to acknowledge that for some people who have had their amygdala, their amygdala is responding to some sort of trauma in their lives, it can result in this denial or this forgetting. Like, I can't remember. I don't recall. Like, people just struggling. And it doesn't mean that their reliability is impacted, doesn't mean that they're not credible. It just means that maybe we need to adapt the way we act. Questions? I know that this doesn't work for everybody, this technique I'm about to provide you with. But in the work that I have done, I have found sometimes that it helps just get out of people's way. Because sometimes I think I'm the problem, I'm the barrier. And when I was starting to learn how to litigate, I was taught sort of unconsciously, that the way you ask questions is, in a very chronological sort of way. You follow a script. Okay, we're going to talk about what you saw at this place at this time on this date. Okay? That's why we're here. We're here to talk about Friday at 8. What time did you arrive there? And then what happened? Then what next? And then what happened? Then what next? Right. And then what? Then what did you see? And then what did you hear? And then what? I have found by doing that people sometimes will struggle. Like, I don't know what happened next. I'm not sure. I don't know what I saw. I don't know what time that was. But I have found if we start to understand and accept that trauma could be impacting somebody's attention, learning and memory that is related to the hippocampus, then maybe what we need to do, if we can, if it's not going to undermine our ability to get good evidence, or not undermine our case, maybe we ask somebody, look, you know, we're here to talk about what you witnessed Friday at 8 or what you experience. Where does that begin for you? And then we just stop talking instead of doing the chronological. And then what? And then what? And then what happened next. Right? Because the benefit of that is you start to hear how people tell stories, how they remember events, how they name certain, certain activities, how they name and identify certain body parts. Because we don't all use the same language, right? And so as we allow people to just sort of meander their way through a story, if we can, we get the bone, like the benefit of all of that. But we might also get the bonus of, hearing how people rely on other senses to drive, the next memory, you know, because we're always so fixated, I think, on what did you hear and what did you say? See, but then if you allow someone to meander their way through a narrative, they might say, you know, and then I could smell like gasoline or I could feel something dripping on my shoulder. And then that drives the next thing and the next thing, right? And so I have found it to be really, really helpful to sometimes just stand back and then come back and fill in the gaps when they are done. Because I learned so much about how people remember, how they tell stories, the words they use, how sometimes allowing them to pause for 60 whole seconds, 90 seconds sometimes, which I know is hard for some lawyers, like silence. You want to be like, let's, put a pin in that. We'll come right back to it. But like, being, get comfortable with just being uncomfortable and just, just let it be. And then people will bring up that information that you need from them. Most times, I find. So understanding that the hippocampus, attention, learning and memory can be impacted, coupled with their fight, flight, fawn and freeze response being impacted. One of the ways in which I think lawyers can really help, help each other, help themselves, help their clients, help their witnesses, is understanding the. How people could show up immediately in some kind of like, state of fear. Right? And so if we know that people are likely to be fearful or anxious when they come to us or come into a conversation, like, if we have to have a difficult conversation, what Are some of the things that we could do to help alleviate those fears. We might say something like, don't worry, it's going to be okay. But I have found don't worry, it's going to be okay. Just makes me worry more. so one of the things that I have learned how to do, and this takes practice, by the way, I am no master. I'm still a work in progress. I'm learning is I will slow down how I talk instead of giving into my own fight or flight response. Like, I just want to get the hell out of here. I will just, like, slow it down, drop my shoulders, and I will say, you know, if I'm meeting with someone, in. In a common space, like, not over zoom. I will say something like, where would you like to sit? I don't even take a seat. You know, I will wait. Where would you like to sit? If they are in their survival brain, more often than not, they want to sit closest to the door, which is fine. If I don't have any safety issues, that's totally fine by me. And then I will say, do you have a preference about where I sit? Because for some people, feeling safe means I need to sit a little further away. But for others, it might mean I have to sit a little bit closer. But giving people an opportunity to have some kind of personal agency over how they show up, I think can really go a long way to building trust and communicating with someone that I actually care about. How you show up in this process, that matters to me. And so tiny little acknowledgments that we can, And little bits of flexibility is required of us in order to prioritize, and communicate safety and empowerment. But I think that we need to understand, that in doing all of this, we could also help to regulate people's emotions because if they're in their survival brain, fight, flight, freeze, or fawn, oftentimes their prefrontal cortex, which does a lot of things that I can't even get into because I don't even know. But what I do know is that that could also be triggered. And that is the part of us that sometimes has a really hard time regulating ourselves, calming our own emotions. You know, this, if you've worked with any people who are in their survival brain, when they lose it, get really angry, they have a hard time sometimes calming themselves down, or if they completely disconnect, dissociate from a conversation, you have a hard time bringing them back. So as soon as you see them start to, like, pull away, then you're. You've kind of lost them, right? You. You have, because they've peaced out in some way. Dr. Caroline Bruce is a psychologist in Scotland. Scotland Law Society has become really invested in having their members become trauma informed. So they hired her. She created a bunch of, like, short little videos. They're on the Law Society of Scotland's website. You could go see them. They're five, six minutes. She talks about trauma and credibility, trauma and reliability. But she also talks about the window of tolerance and how if lawyers understood the window of tolerance, we will have a better understanding of how we can stay in this calm state and how just by doing that, just by being the calm in a storm, we can help people meet us where we are, even if there's certain escalation, escalate. But before I can tell you about this window of tolerance, which you're going to love, by the way, I have to tell you a little bit about trauma and how I've come to understand it. Lots of people have lots of definitions, but trauma, all you got to do is Google what is trauma, and I'm sure many of them are right. but one of the trauma definitions that has really stuck with me is one by Bessel Van Der Kolk. He wrote a book called the Body Keeps the Score, which I'm slowly reading. It's hard, hard time getting through that one. But Body Keeps the Score. One of the things he says is, you know, trauma is the event. Yes. It's the event that happened, that created like, you know, all this, like, fracturing, fragmenting that Thomas Hebel talks about. But he says it's not just the event of, whatever. Whatever that event was. He says it's the current imprint of pain, horror and fear that continues to live inside people. And when I read that, I was like, what, like my mind, all the lights started to come on in my dark little house. And the reason why it became so illuminated was because. I don't know about you, but I kind of grew up in an environment where everybody treated every hurt, everything, every bad event, like, a broken bone. Just give it some time. Give it time. Give time. Give time. Don't go talk to them yet. Just give it some time or just leave them alone. Give it time. And so as I was, like, growing up, I started to think, oh, well, time must be some kind of great healer, right? Wrong. As I was listening to folks like, if you listen to my podcast, you know, I've talked to God. Where, mate? and we have had A couple conversations since then. But time is no great healer. It's not. And we. We know this because I don't know if you've had this experience, but I had, like, the privilege, and the burden and the blessing, I guess, of, working with survivors in the IAP as an adjudicator. And so I would take some of them back, like, 50, 60, 70 years ago to something that happened to them when they were just tiny. And what I discovered. And I used to think early on, naively, I was like, oh, this should be so tough, right? We're talking about, like, lifetime, lifetime ago. As soon as we would get into the event, whatever that event was, I won't name it, because we can all assume as soon as we get into that event, all of a sudden pain, horror, or fear would emerge from this individual. Rage, F bombs, wailing, shaking, vomiting. All kinds of things would happen. It was like I was unearthing some kind of thing that had been buried for a long time. And I'm sure for many of them, that was what it felt like. And so what I came to see and came to understand, especially after I left the iap, which is a of lot, when a lot more of my education came to me, is that if we haven't found a way to heal the events that have happened in our lives or the traumas that we carry from our parents and our grandparents and way back, then we will continue to feel this pain, horror, and fear. Those become places that we live. It becomes our home. And we're constantly in that space. And what we do in order to deal with that, because it's an unsustainable place to live as we try to shove it down, push it down, just suppress it, suppress it, lock it up. You've probably heard people say that. How do you deal with these tough trials? I just lock it up. That only works for a while. Eventually, that thing you're locking up blows right open. Sometimes it blows right open. on a bad day, on a day when you want it to stay contained, sometimes, ah, it blows open because you have to talk about it. And so that was what was happening in these hearings, was a lot of this was blowing open. And I was finding that many of these, survivors were only speaking about what it was that they experienced for the first time. They never talked about it. They'd been pushing it down. And some people push, it down by trying to feel nothing, but go through their lives feeling nothing. And you know those people, right? I've been one of Those people just like I just felt nothing. It was survival, it's survival mechanism. When you come up from a life of childhood violence, you adapt, you survive, right? This is what the, the brain has taught us. This is how it takes care of us. Fight, flight, freeze or fought, right? And so, these individuals who would now just be going into this, because they can't rely on feeling nothing, or for some who ah, cope through a lifetime of addiction, or alcoholism, didn't have that readily available for them to suppress the emotion. It would all just come up and it would just come up like a explosion. And so I wasn't prepared for that. I was shocked, I didn't know what to do. I was uncomfortable. And I'm sure in the early days I didn't handle it very well because I wasn't prepared for it. And over time I began to learn that what people really need in these moments is for us as lawyers to like, we're a witness to their trauma anyway. But in those moments, I think what we can do is kind of just stand back and tell ourselves, remind ourselves this isn't about us, what we're hearing, what we're seeing, the pain, the horror, the fear that is emerging. Bessel Van der Kolk has told us this is where people live, right? They're not rational when they're in these states. They are operating from like life or death. That's how it feels for them. And so anything they say or do isn't really about us. So if we can kind of hold that space, take a breath and stay calm and maybe offer a little bit of acknowledgment or validation to say, of course you're angry, of course you're scared. That sounds terrifying, right? I think just by acknowledging, even if it's just acknowledging the emotion that comes up, I can see that you're angry, I can see that you're afraid. That's totally okay given what we're talking about here today. Let's take five minutes. You could step away to allow someone to come back into this window. Let's talk about what this window is. Dan Siegel, another psychologist, he came up with this window of tolerance, term which is like where you want to have people in order to get like, have good conversations with them where they're clear headed, they're rational. This window, we're all in the window right now, I'm going to say. So how do you push someone out the window? I think some lawyers know how to do that really, really good. that's when you kind of like hammer on someone and taken as and then they go out and so how did they go out? They could go into this fight flight mode, or what they call hyper arousal, where your heart starts pounding, your breathing is quickening, you start to have an emotional response, getting really angry, you're getting ready to run. Or you can go into this kind of, freeze state or hypo arousal, where you're kind of disconnecting. You're there but you're not there. You're completely disengaged. And so when people go out of the window either up or down, we've kind of lost them. According to psychologists, they're no longer rational. They can't offer us good evidence because they're not there. In those moments they might become totally agreeable. You did this, right? Yeah. They just kind of are in I don't give a shit mode, pardon my language. So that might be where they are. And when they're there, they're not going to answer your questions, in a way that's truly connected to them. So what can we do when that happens or what can we do to help keep people in the window? First off, I find it helps just to tell people, this is this window, this is what it does.
>> Myrna McCallum : This is what it looks like when you're leaving it up or down. Let's talk about how you can keep yourself centered, how you can keep yourself calm and grounded. You can signal me, you can keep a little object in your pocket maybe that you hold on to if it gives you comfort. for indigenous people, I think one of the reasons why having an eagle feather in a courtroom or hearing room is so successful, it doesn't just, Eagle feathers don't just represent, you know, our cultures or our customs or our laws. For many of us, there's spiritual significance, that allows us to feel encouraged and feel us help, us to feel like, guided, grounded. And so that is really helpful, to give somebody something to hold on to. I'm. Every time I talk to people, I'm always holding something. Today it's this little pink stone. when I was a litigator, I always had a tiny rock in my pocket. And psychologists have told me since that having distraction aids or little objects can help to keep you in your body, prevent you from dissociating, coming out of your window, keeping you calm and grounded. Self talk. This isn't about me. This isn't about me. This isn't about me. Or this is a natural response when we're dealing with clients and witnesses who are terribly fearful or anxious. This is a common response. Let them know that if you're sitting here, just so you know, like, not to say that you feel anxious, but if you do, a lot of people feel anxious in this space. Ah, at these points, that's totally natural.
Why do people want that reassurance? Because wouldn't you? We don't really like uncertainty as human beings. And when something comes up and we're having an emotional reaction to it, we often think we're alone. In that I'm the only one who feels like this. God, how weird am I? Meanwhile, if somebody would just say, actually, you know what? Most people who are in this state in this particular moment often feel anxious. So if you feel that, that's totally normal. Just giving people that kind of reassurance helps to calm them down. Okay, so I'm not a weirdo. I'm just like most people. Okay, great. So there's all kinds of things that we could do to keep people centered, to keep them calm, to keep them in their window, and to keep us in our window. So back to the whole taking a breath and slowing down. So when trauma shows itself to you as anger and rage and fear, what you can do in those moments, and it's really important that you ensure that you don't meet people's rage with a rage of your own or their fear with your own anxiety. All you need to do is drop your shoulders, take a breath, and just slow down. And if necessary, let's take five minutes and we'll come right back. You don't even need to explain it. You just take it. Five minutes can be your best friend. And if you have an object, great. If you can be mindful about feeling the floor beneath your feet, great. Those things help to keep you calm and centered. But you can also pass these techniques onto your client. This will help to keep you calm and grounded and centered. And so the piece that I have found as a lawyer that is really beneficial about staying calm and centered is I learned that there are these things that we all have in our heads called mirror neurons. And so we are more likely than not to search and mirror the people around us. So think about when your life is wonky or weird and you just want advice or you just want to, like, become, or you want to be centered. Where do you go for that? You probably always go to the same person or the same couple people. And, yeah, maybe they have the greatest advice in the world, maybe they don't. But I'm Gonna bet that what they do offer you is that, like, deep, thoughtful, calm energy. And so that, I'm going to say is largely why when you leave them after seeking advice from them, you feel completely calm and relaxed, because that's what they offered you as they listened to you and as they spoke to you. So it's really important that we as lawyers figure out our own strategies to stay calm, centered, and within our windows of tolerance. So that when we are triggered, because we will be triggered, we'll be triggered by things people say, things people do, the way people look at us, whatever. There was one judge who, you know, after a while, I just didn't even like my name because of the way he said it, right? So, like, there are things that will trigger us, and we need to know that when those things come up, there's. There are techniques available to us, to allow us to just stay in this window. Whether it's mindfulness or deep breathing or. It's not about me. If there's any lesson that I have learned in this past year that is quite profound, and I wish I would have learned it long ago, is that what people say and what people do and particularly what they direct at you, whether it's like arrows or roses, it's not even about you. It's whatever is going on in them. However it is that they're responding to you, but it's not even about you. So once we understand that, I think we become more empowered to, feel like, regardless of how certain meetings go, that it doesn't define who we are or who we're not or how we fail or how we win or whatever it may be. And so that is really important. The other piece I want to talk about is, the role that empathy plays in how we do what we do. Going back to Thomas Huble's, quote, after he tells us how trauma impacts the brain, like attention, learning, memory, behavior, communication, all of those things. He tells us how we can repair our trauma. Now, I know for some lawyers, you may think, is it really our job to repair trauma? Okay, fair enough. Probably not. Probably not. But, you know, there is a group of folks in the world, even long before I came into the world, to toss around this idea that lawyers can be healers and that originally lawyers were healers of community. And I think it's really interesting, it's an interesting exercise we'd all benefit from if we began to think about how we can be healers in the work that we do instead of destroyers or navigators or however we See ourselves. But what would that require if we were to be healers? I think at a bare minimum, it requires empathy. Now, empathy is a big ask, right? Because empathy wants me to be able to feel together what somebody experienced. So in order to feel the humanity in you, I'd have to feel the humanity in me. And for a long time when I was a young woman, that was a big ask. I wasn't willing to feel anything. So, like, you think you want me to feel your pain? Never mind. Nope. I can't even feel my own pain. Sorry, no, not interested. And for a while that got me through, but eventually I just couldn't sustain that anymore. Because when you push down all of the hurt and the pain and sadness in your own stuff, you're also pushing down all the good, the love, the friendliness, the kindness, the laughter, the things that make us, you know, who we are. And so when somebody asks us to bring empathy to our work, I recognize that it's a big ask. But I do think that we can do it in a good way. And it requires boundaries. I know that's a word a lot of lawyers don't know a lot about. Let me just tell you a little bit about boundaries. Boundaries. Healthy boundaries. What is your no go zone? What is it? It's going to be different for different people, right? Like, that's totally fine. You should be able to identify what your no go zone is. You cannot yell at me, you cannot swear at me, or you cannot hit me or, whatever it might be. You have to figure out what. Don't all caps me in your emails. That's not appropriate workplace conduct. I don't know. You have to decide what your no go zone is, right? As soon as you decide what that is, you've identified it, you need to communicate it. Communicate it. Because then how would anyone else know that that's the line for you, that this is what you need to feel safe and respected in the work that you do. And then you need to hold the line. Because humans, you tell them your note goes on, oh, them jump right over it, well, what you gonna do now? Right? You have to hold the line. If you don't hold the line, if you move the line to accommodate the relationship, then that person knows, oh, you've got no boundaries. I find that if we are not applying healthy boundaries in the work that we do, either with our clients or colleagues, whoever opposing counsel, then oftentimes we don't feel safe, we don't feel respected, and we are easily triggered in the spaces that we watch in the spaces that we work, and that is no good. Because what ends up happening, you feel crappy. How do you end the day? With wine, whiskey, don't want to talk. Zone out on TikTok, Netflix, KitKats, whatever. The list is long. Facebook, right? Or work. You just never stop working. I mean, I used to call it high performance. I was a high performer. My children, my adult children are like, you're workaholic. So whatever. Teach their own. But, you know, we cope in all kinds of ways and we need to understand what our negative coping mechanisms are. Because if we're coping in these ways, that's a red flag to us, that we need to look at what's going on and are we communicating or identifying and holding the line of our boundaries? Because if we're not responding thoughtfully to whatever's happening, that's maybe, you know, trying to cross the line, then we're just going to be triggered, reacting. And it's always going to be emotional, irrational responses. Reply all, all caps, whatever it might be, right? We all react in all kinds of ways. It's not good. then there will be no empathy. So empathy, feeling together what's actually occurred, even the most horrific things. So to feel the humanity in you, I'd have to feel the humanity in me. So for me to be able to do it in a good way, I need boundaries. I can hear so much, I could take so much. I can't go down the trauma, you know, rabbit hole with you where you tell me about all of your history of victimhood or why you identify as a victim, or all of these unrelated traumas. I can only do this, and I can only help you with that. And this is what this is going to require, and this is what I can hold space for, and this is what I cannot. And this is my goal, and I can't do any more than that, right? And this is the beginning, the middle and the end. So boundaries, be really clear about it and know that if ever you're feeling like that space that you're holding for people, that you're like, myrna told me to hold space. And now I feel so shitty. Okay, if you feel like that at the end of the day, you need to make sure that you don't now take that home and drop it in the middle of your living room or your dining table, front of your spouse and your kids. That is not boundaries. That's not a good practice. That is becoming, like vicariously traumatized. That's like burnout. That's compassion fatigue. That's all kinds of things. So what you need to do, what I recommend you do, because we don't often do that consciously. It's usually an unconscious practice, is we have to go. Okay, I had a really full day, but let me just take a moment on my drive home or my walk home or whatever it is, what did I deal with today? What did I see, what did I hear? And how did it impact me? Did it trigger something in me? Did it kick up an old emotion of mine or an old memory? Did it sound like a familiar story? Was it kind of hitting close to home? How was I triggered? And then just process it, okay, I'm processing this thing. This is how I felt today. Okay, I'm going to put that down because that's not for me to take home. I'm going to leave it here. It's not mine to carry. So that the next day when I show up to work and I meet with the next person, I have space to hold, for them to hold their story, hold their experience. It's not full because I haven't liked, put down other people's experiences. And I just keep stockpiling, stockpiling, stockpiling. And what happens, you start to feel vicariously traumatized, which I'm going to talk to you about a sec. Why is that important to understand vicarious trauma? Because if we can't identify it, we don't even know that we're impacted. And if we're impacted, we can't be empathetic. We can't hold space for people. We can't prioritize connection. We can't ensure that the folks that we work with feel seen and heard. Why? Because we probably don't even feel seen and heard, right? We can't offer what we do not have. Really important to understand. As I now get into this piece about talking about our mental health as lawyers. So the end of that quote that I offered you, Thomas Hebel, he says, after he asked, he calls us to empathy, right? He says to look away, to dismiss, deny, minimize, or willfully forget, is to uphold institutions of inequality, of inhumanity that created them. Now, when I think about folks who have walked away from me as a lawyer or a process that I was working in, and they felt, inequality or they felt dehumanized, it's usually because at some point or maybe throughout the whole process, they felt that we looked away from them. We dismissed their experience, we denied it wasn't that bad, right? Those kinds of statements, we minimize their experience, or we just outright Ignored what they were telling us, even though they're showing us, like, all of the broken fragments that they're bringing to our door. And we're just motoring through, asking them questions, like in this very transactional way. Right. I'm not here to provide you with empathy. I'm asking questions. You're answering the questions. We're on a need to know basis. I'm not telling you anything until I think you need to know, and you don't need to know. I've seen lawyers operate in this way. When we operate very transactionally, there's no room for connection, relationship safety, empowerment, empathy, humility, because never will we ever be asking ourselves, what don't I know that I should know about how you experienced what you experienced. So I can suspend my assumptions and my ideas about how you should have responded, how you could have responded, how you should have experienced that. Because I think it's not a big deal or whatever it might be. Right. And so we need to, I think once a day, lawyers should ask themselves, what did I learn from this person? What did I learn from this encounter? What did I learn about me? Where do I need to grow? What do I need to reflect on? How did my unconscious biases inform what I think I know about this particular individual or their experience? Experience. And further to that, we should ask ourselves or we should tell someone every day. I don't know. When they ask us a question. I don't know. What do you think? Even if we think we know the answer. Right. Still say, I don't know. Why? Because it's a learning opportunity. I mean, Sean can ask me a question about Saint Empathy. Well, how do you. You think this would apply here? I don't know. Not sure. What do you think? Shot. And then that gives me an opportunity to actually see through his eyes and see through his lens and get a better understanding about who he is and how he interacts with the subject matter. And then in doing so, I learned so much about him, as opposed to imposing my ideas, my assumptions, my knowledge onto him. Right. That's a tough one sometimes for lawyers to go, I don't know. But try it, because it's a great connector to say, I don't know. Anyway, back to mental health of lawyers. if we understand that the work that we do can impact how we show up, how we listen, how we ask questions, our ability to say things like, I don't know in the face of a question, you know, if we don't acknowledge that, then we're going to become Very transactional. A lot of people are going to experience our processes as being inequitable, inhumane. Dr. Melanie Terbillon and Dr. Jamari Garcia are two Black physicians in Los Angeles. They came up with the cultural humility framework. They heavily criticized the, the cultural competence framework for good reason. and they did this after they witnessed the beating of Rodney King on the streets of la. They started to think, well, how can I bring fairness and equity into the healthcare field? cultural humility was the way lifelong process of self reflection, self critique based on authentic and humble engagement with a willingness to learn between two parties. It's a relationship based framework that really mirrors, I would say, trauma informed practice, trauma informed loitering, which is why I love talking about the two of these things together. And so I think that as we start to reflect on, things like inequity and inequality, we have to recognize that when we treat people, and ourselves and our colleagues like they're all the same. Right? We've heard this. I don't see color, I don't see gender. I treat everyone the same, all red flags.
Why? Because there is color and there is gender and we are not all the same. We all start at different places. We all see through our own lens and we all have a different lived experience. So if we can acknowledge in others and ourselves that we bring a very unique lens to what we do, we're going to start to practice things like empathy for others, but also compassion for ourselves for when we mess up, when we make mistakes, when we fall short, when we fail, whatever it might be. And so coming back to safeguarding our mental health, I think it's really important that we understand that the traumas of others can follow us home. If we're not careful, the traumas of others can become our nightmares, can lead to our own anxiety, depression, ah, negative coping mechanisms. So we have to be able to recognize, am I vicariously impacted? I don't think that we can start to even have that conversation until, or, unless there's a commitment within our profession, within our offices, within our teams to start to talk about how is the work we do an occupational, like, how is it, how does it present with like, psychological implications for us? Fritzi Horseman was, I think, the last guest on my podcast. We talked about how sometimes our humanity gets lost in our occupation. I think one of the ways in which that happens is when we don't talk about the fact that we are impacted by our exposure to trauma and we need to talk about it because we're all human beings. We're not impervious to human suffering. And for those of us who are really empathetic or who have a history of personal, maybe unhealed trauma, and we work in isolation, work, we're high performers. We work a lot, and we don't connect a lot with folks. The risk just keeps going up, right? We start to have nightmares. We start to become more transactional. We're more disconnected, dissociating, prone to becoming desensitized, Won't even acknowledge anything. Just motor on through coping. Wine, whiskey, Netflix, TikTok, et cetera. Right? So how can we start to combat against that? We've got to talk about mental health, mental health and wellness stigma. We've got to talk about, ask, questions of ourselves and each other. Like, honest question, honest answer. How are you coping? How are you coping? This is really hard work, and we're doing it in a really tough time. How are you coping? That was an incredibly complicated file with a lot of human emotion. How are you coping? Right, and so let's begin there. Create a debriefing practice that, is well defined, requires consent that everyone can agree to, and you have a common objective. Have a regular ritual. Every day I go hug trees. I, you know, talk to pets, because they don't talk back. They're good listeners. or talk to people, if you prefer. People. but just do something. You've got to put it down. Because if you don't put that down, that space you held for people all day, you're taking it home to your family, and that's not good. You've got to put it down. Create that separation. And you also need to understand and embrace that. As we start to talk about this, it creates opportunities for peer support, for connection within your colleagues, within your profession. And we really, really need that. And I just want to, like, stop on one happy, hopeful, positive topic, which is vicarious resilience. It's a real thing. So just like we are witnesses to, you know, the human suffering of so many people, we are also, we can be witnesses to their resilience. Right? We're there anyway, so why not acknowledge the fact that this person adapted, overcame, had courage to show up, to endure. We can do the same things even in the face of anything that is really difficult, that is in our way. And so as we understand vicarious resilience, we can recognize, that the world isn't always, like, so dark, so bleak, so hopeless, full of conflict and trauma. It's also hopeful and light and positive and as opportunity for healing. And we can be part of that. So back to this whole idea of voyages healers. We can only be that if we embrace healing ourselves. And so if there's anything I want to leave you with, it's that idea. Think about how you could be a healer.
>> Myrna McCallum : Thanks so much for tuning in. If you have any feedback, any thoughts, any anything good to say, you know where to find me on social media. I would ask you, if you haven't already, please leave me a rating and review. If you love the show on Apple podcast as well as Spotify, you can now leave a review there. Until next time. Take care everybody. This episode was recorded on the traditional ancestral and unceded territory of the Squamish Tslail-Waututh and Musqueam.