This solo episode focuses on the stories we tell ourselves, a concept I borrowed from a Harold Johnson talk, and how these stories coupled with a lack of self-awareness can cause harm to ourselves and those we work with.
It is time to courageously reflect on how you show up, how you impact others, how others impact you and why we all need to make space for psychological safety and boundaries in our workplaces.
Episode 16: “Courageous Conversations & The Stories We Tell Ourselves”
Published: November 29, 2020
Episode Summary:
This solo episode focuses on the stories we tell ourselves, a concept I borrowed from a Harold Johnson talk, and how these stories coupled with a lack of self-awareness can cause harm to ourselves and those we work with.
Episode Notes:
It is time to courageously reflect on how you show up, how you impact others, how others impact you and why we all need to make space for psychological safety and boundaries in our workplaces.
Myrna: I’m Myrna McCallum, Métis-Cree lawyer and passionate promoter of trauma-informed lawyering. Welcome to my new podcast, The Trauma-Informed Lawyer, brought to you in partnership with the Canadian Bar Association.
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 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. This podcast comes to you from the traditional, unceded territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh [Squamish], səl̓ilwətaɁɬ [Tsleil-Waututh], and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm [Musqueam] people.
Welcome back to another episode of the Trauma Informed Lawyer podcast. Something has shifted in the world this week. I don't know what it is, but my social media has been blowing up. I have heard that my podcast is now assigned listening in a law class at UCLA Law School, and the same can be said for at least one course in refugee and immigration law at the University of Ottawa Law School, and I also heard that that's also the same for a course I think in family law, I heard, at UVic Law School. I feel so incredibly inspired, and humbled, and just—I don't even know what to—“whoa” is all I can say. I don't know what that feeling is, but it's amazing. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Now I also have to give a huge shout out to Brittany Scott, Melissa Faulkner, Ellen Campbell, and Melissa Erickson. These four law students (and in the case of Ellen, recently graduated law student) really stepped up when I put a call out there saying, “I need to transcribe the episodes for this podcast”. They've stepped up one by one by one, and little by little, each episode is getting transcribed. So if you know someone who has hearing impairments or are deaf and might want access to this content, go over to Simplecast where my podcast is hosted and there is a link. It's very clear, easy to access, says “transcript”, click on it. I expect that by the time Christmas rolls around, all these episodes will have been transcribed. Amazing, law students, for transcribing season one of this podcast, my hands go up to you.
I want to remind folks that the BC Law Foundation generously funded a grant that Golden Eagle Rising Society and I applied for to create a trauma-informed legal practice toolkit. This document is beautiful, and amazing, and wonderful, and it really is, like, the product of so many minds. So many law students, and lawyers, and subject-matter experts contributed to it to make it what it is and what is it? It's, like, a beautiful, one-of-a-kind work and honestly, I don't I think anything like it exists anywhere. If you haven't seen it yet, you can request a print copy from suzy@spiritworks.ca and if you can't wait for a print copy, you can find me and I will send you a PDF version.
Okay, so today I want to talk about what I would call, maybe, some courageous conversations but maybe, maybe I want to begin with talking about the stories we tell ourselves. So this isn't something I came up with, this like. . . this language around stories. A couple weeks ago or so, I was walking in the forest (as one does here in North Vancouver) and I was listening to Harold Johnson, and if you haven't heard Harold Johnson speak yet, you really should stop what you're doing, stop this episode, go back and listen to the interview that I did with Harold back in the summer time. We talked about his book Peace and Good Order: The Case for Indigenous Justice in Canada. He's a remarkable human being, and I just think his story is so compelling—from like, Cree trapper in northern Saskatchewan to Harvard Law School, like, there's nobody like him. Anyway, I was listening to a podcast, which, a part of it was a recording of a talk that he gave and he was talking about the stories we tell ourselves, and how those stories, like, we can tend to embody the stories we tell ourselves, and those stories can harm us or they can heal us. It really got me thinking about the stories I've told myself over the years, and then, of course, it got me thinking about the stories lawyers tell themselves, and then the stories we tell each other. Let's begin with like, the stories we tell ourselves. As lawyers, as, I mean, I know there are more teachers listening to this podcast, my hands go up to you, also more police officers, my hands go up to you, and a lot of non-lawyers, and my hands go up to you because this content—yes, although it was inspired by lawyers, it's for everybody, and so I'm really happy that you're all listening. However, I can only speak from my lived experience as an Indigenous woman and as a lawyer, and so a lot of, maybe, what I share will definitely be targeting lawyers and judges, but I think you're going to hear and understand that there is a broad application to what you do, wherever you do it.
So what are some of the stories we tell ourselves as lawyers, or cops, or teachers, or politicians, or judges—"I'm a big deal, I'm really important, I have all the knowledge, I'm here to help you”— like, who knows, right? I know those were some of the stories that I used to tell myself. I also know that those are some of the stories that I was kind of learning or absorbing in law school. It's just so wack because all of that is what gets us into trouble—our egos get us into trouble—whether it's ego that stems from me being really puffed out because I think I really am a big deal, or whether it's ego because I'm so bloody insecure, maybe everyone will see that I don't belong here so I really have to bring 150%, be super aggressive, and super loud, and super authoritative, whatever it might be. And so, I think it's important that we all take some time and reflect—courageously reflect—on the stories that we tell ourselves about who we are, and who we are especially in relation to the “other”—to our clients, to our witnesses, to our co-counsel, to our staff, to the court. I often will say to law students, “Think about this, like, who do you want to be when you're sitting here with me? How do you want to be seen? How do you want to leave me in that space? What's the impression you want to give off? Do people feel safe in our company, do they feel empowered when they leave the room?”. If one or more of those answers is “nope”, then you've got a problem, and I'm going to talk a little bit about what that problem could be. But I think after we've done some critical, courageous self-reflection about who we are and really, honestly examined and put some investment in self-awareness, then we need to think about who exists outside of ourselves. Like, if we can even see the “other” anymore. And if we're at a place right now where we can't even see outside of ourselves to anyone else, even if that person is sitting across the room from us, or across the table, or right next to us, then we have a problem. If you cannot see beyond yourself, then you're going to need way more help than this podcast. But if you can, and I would expect most of you can, who are the people that we’re dealing with? Who are the people we’re serving, who are the people we’re working with, and what do we say about who they are? Am I making assumptions about who they are to reinforce who I think I am, or who I want to be, or how I want to be perceived? I mean, I can't tell you how many times I've seen lawyers show up and comment on their clients as “these people”—I'm here to help “these people”, and it almost suggests to me that folks who think like that are experiencing a bit of a savior complex and that's a problem because as soon as you see others as othered, then you're no longer on the same playing field. Now there's a power imbalance in play, and now there's some weird bullshit hierarchy about, like, you’re down here and I'm up here and I mean, we see that in the court room all the time, right?
I think after a while, drinking the Kool-Aid, we start to believe all the bullshit that we tell ourselves about who we are and about who the other is, and I think that when we do that, we leave, like, a cloud of trauma in the room. I'm going to talk about that effect, like, who it is that we're impacting, who it is we're affecting. But before I do that, I want to talk about like the big traumas and the little traumas that we all experience—we all experience these things.
I don't care if you're a judge, or a doctor, or a lawyer, or a chief foreign educator, or the Prime Minister—we all have trauma. We've all had big events happen to us—most of us. More often than not, we've had little events happen to us, like, the little traumas of life where a pet dies, or a spouse leaves, or we've had a sickness and recovered, or we've had a minor accident, or we’re being bullied or harassed in the workplace—those can all give way to small traumas. The big traumas, of course, are like the deaths, and the serious illness, and a serious motor vehicle accident, or an assault, or a sexual assault, or a long-term abuse, or even short-term abuse. Whatever, right, like, we all experience trauma so some really big traumas and some really little traumas, but at the end of the day, I think what is really important for us to understand is that we shouldn't make assumptions about how people respond to trauma in their lives because we don't all respond the same way, and we really need to let go of this idea of what an appropriate response is. Some people may lose a pet and that will hit them harder than if their mother had died. Somebody can be sexually harassed at work and they could be significantly impacted, almost, like, debilitating anxiety can come over them and impact their ability to work, to play, to function. And then someone else could have experienced a serious assault that has landed them in a hospital where they've barely survived, and they bounce right back. A month or two later, they're back at work and everything is, like, similar to what it was before the event.
I think that when we make assumptions about how people should respond to big-T and little-T traumas, we can end up creating more trauma for them because now we're imposing these ideas upon them, and when we do that, then we just create space where people don't feel seen, they don't feel heard, they don't feel cared about, and those things are the root, I think, of what creates a lot of trauma in courtrooms where people walk out and they’re going, “Oh my God, I will never, ever report X to a cop again, I will never ever come back into a court, I will never, like, I will avoid lawyers like the plague”, whatever it is that people say. So it's really important that we check our assumptions about others, and we don't impose what we believe to be an appropriate response on other people, whether we are judges looking down at people as they are in the witness box, whether we're lawyers meeting with our client asking them to rehash a traumatic story for us. I think after we've asked the questions, “Who am I? How do I show up?”, we need to ask the question, “What do you need from me?”. Whether we are the lawyer, or we are the judge, or we are the police officer, we should be asking the question “what do you need from me?”. We can ask this of our client, of our co-worker, of a colleague, of a subordinate—what do you need from me ? In inviting that conversation, we can allow others, and ourselves included, to adjust our expectations. We can have an honest conversation, we can provide space for people to tell us what their boundaries are. If they are at full capacity for hearing more traumatic information, or looking at traumatizing and disturbing graphic evidence, then they can say that, like, “I need to not go into court this day. I need to not transcribe anymore of these types of cases. I need to swap out with someone today, I can't be there for that. Or, I need us to find a different way to file this evidence that doesn't spill trauma onto the floor, so it overflows and touches everyone in the room”. It's so important to ask the question, “what do you need from me?”. It then changes the relationship between all of us whether—regardless of hierarchy, regardless of roles, regardless of “importance”—it allows for collaborative engagement, it allows for courageous conversations, “This is what I need, I can't take any more of this. I have to do this, but I need to be able to do it differently than how we've been doing it. I need to be able to take a day off after a graphic trial or after a really heavy day “. We also need to ask the question, “how am I impacting you?”, and then “how am I impacted by you, and who else is impacted, and what can we do?”, and “why should we act to prevent traumatizing others?”. Like, there's a ripple effect—we all contribute to it—sometimes the ripples are really little, and they end after a few, but sometimes the ripples are widespread and they go on and on for days and days.
We need to develop self-awareness. We need to speak up for those who don't feel like they have a voice to say anything, and for many victims of crime, that's almost all of them, but I'm also thinking about the people that we work with—our assistants, our secretaries, our clerks, our court reporters—they should have a say in whether or not they are going to be subjected to traumatic evidence, to traumatic information. They should have a say as to whether or not they have the capacity to be present as trauma unfolds for a client, or for a witness, or even for counsel, or even for a judge. We need to think about how we impact others, and we need to think about how we are impacted by others.
At the beginning of this episode, I talked about how we all have trauma. We all do—we all have big traumas, or little traumas, or even if our life has been pretty sweet so far, we may be carrying the traumas of our parents and our grandparents, so intergenerational trauma. The longer we disregard or suppress our own trauma, the more disconnected we become, and then we become someone nobody wants to be around, right? The deep sigh when we see who our judge is going to be for a trial, the deep sigh when we see who counsel of record is, the deep sigh when we learn who opposing counsel is, the deep sigh before having to consult with the managing partner, or a huge breath of relief when we've walked out of these courtrooms and out of these offices as though we just survived another day, another trial, another encounter.
When did lawyering and judicial practice become about survival? When did we decide that being subjected to trauma and feeling, like, pangs in our stomachs and aches in our heads were all part of the job? When did we decide that? It's time we move away from this practice of engaging with other people with zero self-awareness and really not giving a damn about how we're impacting others and how we are being impacted. We should be able to decide whether we have the capacity and willingness to be subject to psychological hazards. So we have to have those conversations, like, this is what this job means, are you up for that? And we need to allow people to say, “no, no, actually, no, I am not up for looking at autopsy photos. I am not up for photo copying—I don't know. I could I could list all the range of graphic imagery. I will not, but people should be given a choice, and then once they say “no”, then we accommodate them— “Okay, well, we'll see what we can do”, and “Let me find a different way forward so I don't have to have you make 10 copies of this, so you don't have to come into the courtroom on a day when we're hearing this, so I don't assign you files that deal with this”. I mean, some might say, “Well, that's the game, if you want to play, that's what you've got to do”. I say: nope. Maybe that was the game, I think the game is changing and it needs to change, and it all begins with having courageous conversations, “This is what I can take, and this is what I cannot”. I believe that it's really important for us to have the space and the safety in those spaces to say what we need, and to say “no” when we know that if we say “yes”, it's going to hurt us. It's going to do real damage.
So what's some way of maybe addressing that? We need to have conversations about resilience strategies. What is that, what does that mean? Well, resilience, it's not growing a thick skin, or pulling up your bootstraps, or all that stuff I used to hear—just, you know, suck it up, get on with it. No, I think that resilience is learning how to adapt in the face of trauma, or adversity, or significant life events. How do we adapt, how do we overcome, how do we make space for adapting? How do we invite in conversations about how we are impacted by the work we do? We don't want to become that person nobody wants to be around. We don't want to become that person no one feels safe around, and we all know those people, whether they are judges, or lawyers, or cops, or someone else, and I often think when we see those people, they're so disconnected from themselves that they don't see how deep they are in their own traumas and the traumas of others. And so, I think that we need to find opportunities to support each other by having conversations but what does resilience mean? How do we build a resilience strategy within our organization, within our office, within our team? How can we support each other? How can we create a safe, and empowering, and collaborative space?
You know, when you're so deep in your own suffering in your own traumas and the traumas of others, you literally cannot see outside of yourself, so we cannot leave it to our friends and our colleagues to know when they need to get help because they won't know. How can you know if you're, like, neck-deep in wine every night? How can you know if you are hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt because you can't stop gambling? How can you know if you need to get high everyday just to get through the day? Self-destruction looks different for different people and when we work with people who are hurting and experiencing harm, we have an obligation to check in with them, to raise the awareness that they can't even see for themselves. And there's ways that we can do that that isn't so invasive, and it could be as simple as asking someone, “How are you coping?”. We don't need to be the therapist and have the answer, but by asking the question we're saying, “Hey, I see you, and I want to know how you are.”.
Little by little, as we make space for these courageous conversations, our profession is going to become transformed. It is going to become trauma-informed. We get into trouble when we don't talk about the importance of psychological safety in the workplace, when we start to tell ourselves stories, like, “This doesn't bother me, this isn't affecting me, this isn't a big deal,” or, “I'm just going to compartmentalize, and push it out of my mind, and put my head down, just get through it and then it'll be over.”. When we tell ourselves those things, then the harm flows in, and the harm flows out to those who work around us and those who work under us.
So today I'm going to leave you with all of these questions. I'm sorry I don't have all the answers, I'm just one little Cree in this big, bad profession, so I leave it to you to think about everything that I have put forward. I really hope that you feel that you can engage in these courageous conversations with your colleagues, your supervisors, with your clients, and more importantly, with yourself because it begins here with me and with you, and with the stories we tell ourselves.
Well, that's today's episode. Thanks for listening to me. I know I get way too serious sometimes, so I appreciate you hanging in. It might be hard to tell but I'm hilarious and I like to laugh a lot, so maybe when I come back next time, you’ll hear some laughter. Lots of it. We need it, right? You can always find me on Twitter—the Trauma Informed Lawyer podcast is on Twitter now @theTILPodcast, Instagram and of course LinkedIn. Please rate, review, and subscribe to this podcast. Until next time, take care everybody.