This solo episode explores concepts of healing, humility, humanity and collective trauma put forward by Thomas Hubl, Sherri Mitchell, CJ Robert Bauman, US Supreme Court Justice Warren Burger and Nelson Mandela.
This solo episode explores concepts of healing, humility, humanity and collective trauma put forward by Thomas Hubl, Sherri Mitchell, CJ Robert Bauman, US Supreme Court Justice Warren Burger and Nelson Mandela.
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>> Myrna McCallum : I'm Myrna McCallum, Metis, Cree lawyer and passionate promoter of Trauma Informed Lawyering. Welcome back to the Trauma Informed Lawyer podcast, folks. Season two. 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. Huge gratitude to the BC Law foundation for covering the costs for transcripts for season two of the Trauma Informed Lawyer podcast. Thank you so much, BC Law Foundation.
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Happy 2022.
Welcome back to another episode of the Trauma Informed Lawyer podcast. I hope that 2022 makes all your dreams come true. We all need it, right? We need it. We need it. It's been a while since I've done a solo episode, so I thought, why not? I think I've been a little bit afraid and maybe in some ways I've been hiding a little bit behind my interviews with people so I don't have to really put myself out there. But the fact that you're listening to this now, wherever in the world you are, is like, I just think it's part of my purpose and it just is what it is, regardless of whether or not makes me anxious. what I want to talk about today is really just, you know, just bear with me. I'm. I'm going to just share with you a collection of quotes that I've been talking about with clients in various keynotes and training sessions and what those quotes mean to me and what they're inspiring me to think about and I just want to share them with you. I mean, I don't have all the answers. Contrary to some folks opinion, I'm no expert. I mean I'm an expert in my own life. That's it. I don't think I'm an expert in much else. I'm always learning. I don't always ask the right questions. I don't always have the right answers. And you know, and I'm glad that I don't because if I thought I knew it all or I thought I had it down, well, then there's nothing left to learn. And so I'm a learner, just like you. This episode is really going to be maybe 20 minutes of me just sharing these ideas of mine with you. And these questions, that I don't have answers to. But I hope sharing this content with you inspires you to also think about these questions or think about these quotes. And if you have the answers, you can find me on LinkedIn, you can find me on Instagram, the Trauma Informed Lawyer, you can find me on Twitter. Tell me your answer because I'd love to hear it and I'm sure so would so many others. Okay, so today I want to sort of, in the theme of humility and humanity, which has been really heavy on my mind this last month for all kinds of reasons, I'm just going to share some stuff with you and hopefully, yeah, you keep it close to you and, and allow these great thinkers and great minds to, to guide you.
So for a number of months now, I've been quoting Thomas Hubble. And he wrote a book called Healing Collective Trauma Process for Integrating Our Intergenerational and Cultural Wounds. I've been quoting him pretty consistently in a number of, training sessions. And just yesterday I was talking to a whole group of folks and I grounded my keynote in his words. And so here's his quote. 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 would 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. Now just take that in for a second, right? Individual or collective trauma. He describes how trauma, fragments and fractures. I would say right now we're all living in, in trauma. This pandemic has created trauma for many of us. Some severe, some mild, but trauma nonetheless. It has shifted our relationships and it has transformed our lives. some for the better, some for the worst. And it's been a very hard time for a lot of people. I know this understanding Thomas's words that, ah, trauma can fragment and fracture. It could do that in all kinds of relationships, personal and professional. It disowns and silences. Makes total sense, right? Especially the silence piece. Why? Because some people who've been through tremendous trauma or what they've experienced is tremendous trauma. They have a hard time speaking the words, speaking their experience, speaking their truth. It creates denial and forgetting, right? We know this a little bit, right? Like, I'm no expert in how the brain is impacted by trauma, but I do know that it is impacted by trauma. That trauma can impact folks ability to recall memories and to recall memories, especially in a very specific order. And that's how it creates forgetting. Thomas Hubble talks about how we can assist in the repair of trauma. He says we must choose to acknowledge, to witness, and to thereby feel together what's occurred, even the most horrific details, right? Because by witnessing, by choosing to acknowledge, by feeling together, right, the call to empathy, we're actually being present with people. We're investing in connection. We are not looking away from the wounds the folks are showing us. That takes tremendous courage. It takes tremendous presence. It also takes tremendous self awareness, you know, so for folks who are out in the world who say, oh, that's like soft skills, we don't need that. I don't think, courage and self awareness, presence is a soft skill at all for somebody who has operated for so many years, being completely shut down, desensitized, withdrawn, detached, devoid of humanity. I was terrified, terrified to feel anything. That's what trauma does, right? And so the call to courage, the call to presence, the call to empathy, are significant calls that take tremendous, tremendous intention. It's not an easy thing. So for those who like to call these things soft skills, like, stop that, it's not soft skills. Thomas Hubble says to look away, to dismiss, deny, minimize, or willfully forget, is to uphold the institutions of inequality, of inhumanity that created them. And I think about those words in the context of my life. When I was, a criminal lawyer, when I was a, prosecutor and, and then when I was adjudicating residential school claims and hearing about acts of torture and extraordinary abuse and neglect, I was starting to connect the dots about how so many legal systems operate in such a way where we, whether we're conscious of it or not, we have a practice of looking away, dismissing, denying, minimizing, forgetting what some people have gone through, what they have told us, and then in doing that, we uphold the institutions of inequality and inhumanity. Now, am I saying the justice system, the criminal justice system is inhumane? Not all the time, not to everybody, but from an indigenous perspective, I could say, hell yeah, a lot of the time and for too long. For sexual violence, sexual abuse victims, survivors of the world, I'm sure they have felt that for a long time. They're terrified of the system, and of course they would be. So let me share with you something that I found really disturbing. This was like sometime before, you know, Christmas or the holidays or whatever, there was a lawyer who posted something on Twitter and this is, this is what he posted he said, tomorrow morning I'm going to cross examine a 14 year old boy who claims to be the victim of a sexual assault. There's a good chance he'll never forget me or what I do to him tomorrow. I have to honor and respect that. In the chorus of my relentless defense of my client's innocence. Damn right. Like when I read that, I had all kinds of feelings, I had all kinds of reactions. I mean, I was like, what is this who we are as a profession? Is this who we've become? Is this what we uphold? First thing, I was like, we're talking about a 14 year old child. 14, you're still a child. A lawyer, a grown ass man is talking about essentially destroying. That's how I interpreted this tweet. Destroying this child. There's a good chance he'll never forget me or what I do to him tomorrow. Who would, who, who puts that out in the world? Who, who goes into their work with that sort of mindset that I'm here to be a destroyer. I am a destroyer. I don't care if you're a child, I will destroy you. I'm not even going to acknowledge the fact that you are a child. Doesn't matter, don't give a. I'm gonna destroy you. That's what I'm hearing in all of that language. I found it so incredibly dist. So disturbing. And I thought, why has our adversarial system been interpreted or come to mean, like, approval or permission or the right to be abusive? Like that's abuse. That's an abuse of somebody's power. It's terrifying. I read that if I had a child who'd been through sexual abuse or who wanted to report it, I'd be like, nope. Go to a courtroom. Nope. I would not want to put my child in front of a man like that. And so lawyers like that will be like, yep, check. Well then I've now done my job, I've done my duty in the, relentless defense of my client's innocence. Done. Check. Collect your payment. I just think there has to be a better way. There has to be a better way because who wants to, who, who would want to go into a system like that? if you're a victim or if you're alleging, if you're alleging sexual harassment or sexual abuse or whatever. I just found this man's language to be more of a violence problem. And I just thought, what kind of system allows an adult to victimize, threaten, and ultimately traumatize the child in the name of justice, or as this guy calls it, relentless defense. Like, who allows that? What is the duty on us as lawyers to do better? What is the duty on judges to nip that in the bud as soon as it starts to emerge in the courtroom? And are we all upholding our duties? We're talking about a child. I just found it incredibly disturbing, incredibly disturbing. And I thought, this child will be forever harmed by his experience in the courtroom. And maybe that trauma and maybe that harm that he experiences in that space is going to outweigh whatever the. The thing was that brought him to that place.
And as lawyers and judges, is that something we want to be a part of? Like, is that something we can feel good about? Is that something we want to collect a paycheck on? As I started to think about how, you know, folks take this whole, well, we're an adversarial system. You need to expect conflict. Well, yeah, okay, I think. I think that we could be adversarial in a respectful way. I think that we could be adversarial in a way where our treatment, our behavior, our language doesn't become abusive. Because there's a line. And I'm not just talking now about lawyers cross examining witnesses. I'm also talking about the way judges talk to council. There's a line. We should all know what it is, and we should never cross it. So in 1984, U.S. supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Berger said these words. The entire legal profession, lawyers, judges, law teachers, has become so mesmerized with the stimulation of the courtroom contest that we tend to forget that we ought to be healers, healers of conflicts. Doctors, in spite of astronomical medical costs, still retain a high degree of public confidence because they are perceived as healers. And he goes on to ask, should lawyers not be healers? Healers not warriors, healers not procures, healers not hired guns? Shouldn't we be healers? Like, that's a damn good question. Food for thought, I guess, right? I think that at the end of the day, we all want to be good people for the most part. We want to do good things. We want to contribute to something greater than ourselves and feel good about it. The way this particular lawyer operates, based on that single tweet that I read, I just felt. I just felt like I'm. I. I don't know that if I worked in the criminal justice system anymore that I could feel good about that. I know that that's just one man, one lawyer. I know that there are lots of lawyers out there doing really good work and trying to change the system and looking at things like trauma, informed courtrooms and really trying to understand trauma and do better in the ways in which they examine and cross examine people. And I know there are good judges who are really prioritizing their gatekeeping functions to make sure that lawyers don't come into the room and cross the line being adversarial or relentless. They're calling their case that it crosses line and becomes abusive and traumatizing. I know this. I just want to see more of it. We'd be better for it. We'd have more credibility in the justice system. There would actually be justice and not just these legal systems and the young folks and the, old folks and all the folks who are currently being harmed or have been harmed and feel like they have no recourse because they don't want to subject themselves to a man like the fellow I just quoted from. You know, they just might be inspired and feeling confident to come into that space with the hope that they will be treated with empathy and respect and that their own humanity would. That it would be reflected and respected in the courtroom. We need that. We need humanity in the courtroom. We need humanity in our processes. We need to inject humanity into how we do what we do. There's a better way. there was an article that came out in the Canadian, Lawyer magazine back November 18, 2021. There was a quote in there from Chief Justice Robert Bauman of the BC Court of Appeal and Court of Appeal of the Yukon. He said, in embracing an approach of reconciliation with Indigenous people, including legal reconciliation, Bowman said, our assumptions about law and equity must be supplemented and maybe in some circumstances be supplanted. He noted that the Supreme Court of Canada recognized self determination as a right of Indigenous peoples to pursue their political, economic, social and cultural goals. He he added, we must hold space for hard conversations and be willing to be wrong. If there's anything that the last 200 years of Canadian Indigenous relations has taught us is that our jealous need for control is destructive. Now is the time to do what we should have done when we arrived here as guests, as uninvited guests, and demonstrate that we care enough to discover and learn and to act responsibly within the matrix of Indigenous customs, traditions and protocols. He says, now is the time for humility. Right now is the time for humility. What kind of legal processes would we have? What would that look like in this country? If humility was a principle that guided, that guided those processes, what would that look like? I Don't know, but, man, I like to daydream about it. I don't know, but I like to daydream about it, for sure. I don't want to keep you listening to me rant and rave about, you know, the inhumanity of it all. So I want to just leave you with one final quote. So, Sherry Mitchell, she's a Native American lawyer. She wrote a book called Sacred Instructions, Indigenous Wisdom for Living Spirit Based Change. She said group trauma is passed along in ways that impact the entire group. Group trauma can lead to distorted thinking, which often manifests as internalized oppression as people try to maintain some sense of misplaced control over the circumstances of their oppression. In addition, trauma from long standing oppression can leave the group huddled together in a form of stagnated solidarity. When anyone tries to move beyond the place of suffering that the group has occupied, they are attacked by the group and brought back down. Some within the group may feel a sense of loyalty to the suffering that the group has endured, and they hold on to it as an act of allegiance. Others attach their identity to the suffering and no longer who they are beyond its boundaries. In instances like this, the group has become a placeholder for the pain, a living memorial to the trauma that the group has experienced. When the trauma becomes a badge of identity or a living shrine, it's very difficult for the people to consider a new path forward. I share that one with you because within it I see its direct application to the legal profession. How we have somehow become these warriors, these destroyers. And a lot of us have bought into it. We've accepted it, we've upheld it, we've maintained it, we've protected it, we've invested in it, and we've resisted being anything else. But that's not a sustainable approach to justice. It is not. Destroying people is not justice. Being a destroyer, being a warrior in the name of justice, that's not an identity that I want to assume. I don't think any of us should. Trauma informed lawyering is that new path forward. We could still be as effective in defending our clients without the violence, without the abuse, without the threats. We're all smart people. We can figure out a way to get creative with the ways in which we ask questions, ways that we test evidence. Embrace your humanity, employ humility, choose to become a healer and abandon all of these myths about how we need to be destroyers in order to be effective.
Nelson Mandela says that you cannot make an impact on society if you have not changed yourself. So think about what kind of impact you want to make. On society, Is it as a destroyer or is it as a healer? He goes on to say that humility is one of the most important qualities you can have. Because if you are humble, if you make people recognize that you are no threat to them, then people will embrace you. If we as lawyers want to draw the confidence of the people that we serve, if we want society to embrace us and the systems that we uphold, we would be well served to practice and reflect humility. Something to think about, folks all. Ah, right. Thank you for joining me. Listening to me kind of like put stuff out there, having no answers, lots of, like, inspiration. There's a lot of inspirational people in the world. I'm, incredibly grateful that you are here, that you're listening. I'm at 52,000 downloads, folks.
I hope to reach a hundred thousand by January 1, 2023. Please help me get there. Share this podcast with your friends, your family, anyone who cares about humanity, humility, empathy, vulnerability, all that good stuff. Thanks for listening. Until next time, take care of yourselves. This episode was recorded on the traditional ancestral and unceded territories of the Squamish Tsleil Waututh and Musqueam.