J. Kim Wright, Helgi Maki, Marjorie Florestal and I share our latest group project with you, a book on trauma-informed law which will be published in the summer of 2021 by the American Bar Association, Law Practice Management Division! We are excited about this project and want to include you. Have a listen, we will provide information on where you can submit your input to add your voice to this subject. This ground-breaking, one-of-a-kind resource will transform for our legal profession. For more information, check out: https://www.traumainformedlaw.org/surveys
CW: our discussion briefly mentions suicide and murder
Episode 19: “Trauma-Informed Law: A Primer for Lawyers in Practice”
Published: January 14, 2021
Episode Summary: J. Kim Wright, Helgi Maki, Marjorie Florestal and I share our latest group project with you, a book on trauma-informed law which will be published in the summer of 2021 by the American Bar Association, Law Practice Management Division! We are excited about this project and want to include you. Have a listen, we will provide information on where you can submit your input to add your voice to this subject. This ground-breaking, one-of-a-kind resource will transform for our legal profession. For more information, check out: https://www.traumainformedlaw.org/surveys
Episode Notes: CW: our discussion briefly mentions suicide and murder.
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 everyone to another episode of the Trauma-informed Lawyer podcast. It's 2021, Happy New Year. I mean, should I say “Happy New Year”? Was it happy? Did you just get through by the skin of your teeth like I did? I need to see the world—this wacky, wacky world we're in—turn a corner to better and brighter days. Thank you all so much for listening to this podcast and for sharing it, and promoting it, and for the Law Societies on the other side of the world acknowledging it, and recognizing it, and giving their lawyers CPD credits for listening to it, and for law schools even outside of Canada requiring their students to listen to this podcast as part of their overall learning. It blows my mind, I'm incredibly grateful. Thank you so much and I hope you continue to listen. I promise I'm going to have awesome content for you in 2021 as I go into season 2 later on in the spring—content that will inspire you, conversations that will resonate with you and hopefully validate some of your experiences.
Today's episode is a really cool one, I mean, they're all really cool right, but this one is really close to my heart. Why? Because I am co-authoring a book. Can you believe it? “Trauma-informed Law: A Primer for Lawyers in Practice”—that's the working title. The book is being published by the American Bar Association Law Practice Division. Some time ago, my friend Helgi Maki invited me into a conversation with Kim Wright and Brooke Goldfarb about this project and asked me if I wanted to lend my voice to this project, and absolutely, I said “yes”. Since then, the group has sort of tightened up and it's Kim, and Helgi, and myself, and Marjorie Florestal. I just looked Marjorie up —I had no idea she is a former Clinton-White-House lawyer. She's never dropped that flex on me yet and we've talked several times, so, wow Marjorie. Anyway. . . I'm not going to do a big intro 'cause as we start this conversation, they're all going to introduce themselves, and then we're going to talk about this book and what it is we hope that this book will deliver, and then there will be an invitation and a bit of a call out about hearing from all of you to reflect some of your experiences, and your feedback, and your ideas in this book because part of this book is collecting stories. Further to that, we're asking folks to fill out a survey, so if you're interested in maybe seeing your story in this publication that's going to be coming out probably in the summertime, go to www.traumainformedlaw.org and as you look at the headers at the top of the page, you're going to see “Surveys”. Click on Surveys and immediately, it's going to take you to the fillable form. And also, for those of you who've been sharing this podcast, and promoting it, and chatting about it, please go to Apple Podcasts—rate it, drop a line, give it a review, let me know what you think. I read those reviews, lots of people read those reviews, I want to know. Alright, so let's get started.
Myrna: Welcome everyone to the Trauma-informed Lawyer podcast. I just feel like we're all so blessed; we get to hear from Kim, and Helgi, and Marjorie, and specifically, we're going to talk today about a project that we're all working on together. Kim and Marjorie are new to this podcast and to our listeners, so let's do a little bit of a round before we get into talking about this book. Tell us a little bit about yourself, Kim.
J. Kim Wright (Kim): So my claim to fame here is that I have already written two books published by the American Bar Association; one is called Lawyers as Peacemakers: Practicing Holistic Problem-Solving Law and the other is Lawyers as Changemakers which is about the global integrative law movement. And so, I come with the experience of having actually published two books and contributing to a bunch of others, but then I'm also a person who has experienced some trauma and I've worked with people who have experienced trauma. So my past includes working in a small town law practice where I did a lot of family law and there was a lot of trauma in that, I was once the director of a domestic violence program, and so there's a lot of trauma there. I've been a crime victim, a restorative justice facilitator, working on murder cases—just a lot of a lot of different opportunities, and then I also raised a blended, multiracial family, and so sort of the systemic piece of our process is of concern to me as well.
Myna: What specifically inspired you to explore trauma-informed practice as a lawyer?
Kim: Well, I think I've always been interested in trauma-informed practice because I'm a human being who has experienced trauma and I've been practicing holistically since the 90s. But this particular project came to me because Brooke Goldfarb, who is a lawyer and in social work school, contacted me and she said, “Who wrote the book about trauma-informed lawyering and where can I find it?”, and so we had a conversation, and we went looking for it, and we couldn't find one and we thought that was a really big issue and we should get in touch with somebody at the ABA, and that's sort of how this ball got rolling.
Myrna: Awesome, well, I'm really glad that you and Brooke asked that question to allow for us to now get together to fill this gap. Let's move on to Marjorie.
Marjorie Florestal: Thanks for having me first of all. I've been binge listening to your podcast and it's been a pure joy, and it's hard to say that about something like trauma but if it's possible, you make it possible to enjoy the discussion. So for me I'd say I'm one of those people who knew that I was going to be a lawyer when I was nine years old, and I said to my father that I wanted to be the international Thurgood Marshall. I went to law school to become a human rights lawyer and I was in law school in the 90s and there was a coup in Haiti—I happen to be Haitian American—and I thought, “This is it, this is my opportunity”, and I volunteered to go down to Florida to interview people seeking asylum who are literally. . . had experienced all kinds of trauma and violence at home, had taken to boats that were little more than tin cans with holes, that had survived all sorts of traumatic events to be in this gymnasium at a high school in Florida, and I did that, I interviewed them every day for two weeks. When I got out of that, I though, “There's no way I can be a human rights lawyer”. I felt overwhelmed, I was crying all the time, I felt powerless, I just felt the sense that I don't have whatever it is that it takes to be able to hear these stories day-in and da-out and survive, and yet ,what else was I going to do at this point, right? So I went on to become a lawyer and luckily, I found international trade law which gave me the sense that I could help people create economic prosperity at a sort of global level that might impact individuals in their everyday lives. I practiced at the Office of the US Trade Representative shortly after NAFTA and the World Trade Organization were launched, I really had the opportunity to participate in the agreements that helped shape our global trading system in the 90s and I also saw the sort of realities of how distant it is to create trade avenues for some countries versus helping people one-on-one in their everyday lives. And so, I ended up moving to the African continent, and what I was doing was teaching and training people on the World Trade Organization and how developing countries could take advantage of some of those benefits. So it was the same idea consistently throughout my life—how do we bring dignity to people so that they are not in circumstances where the only possibility is to flee and to put themselves in bodily harm’s way? I ultimately ended up a law professor and these days I train students in negotiations in international trade and contracts issues, and then at some point along the way I became really impassioned about psychology, and so I left my full-time teaching post to now teach part-time and I pursued a Masters in Union Psychology because I wanted to understand the sort of the archetypal constructs that make up our world, and these days I am completing a PhD exploring trauma and depression among law students and how we can transition to a profession that doesn't eat our young in the way that we do.
Myrna: Thanks for that intro Marjorie, and I'm so glad that you're doing the work that you're doing particularly around how this profession can eat our young because through this podcast and other interactions I've had, I'm definitely seeing a theme that is emerging repeatedly which is young lawyers talking to me about their negative experiences with this profession and seeking some feedback and advice from me about their next career move, and oftentimes, they’re contemplating leaving this profession because they don't see a place for themselves, so I'm really glad you’re doing that work.
I just want to invite Helgi to share a little bit about herself for people who may have missed our interview when she and I spoke about building a sustainable law practice. Helgi Maki is not only a really good friend of mine, but she is incredibly insightful and I would say also a powerful thought leader on trauma-informed law. So Helgi, tell all of us a little bit about yourself and when it was that you began to explore a trauma-informed approaches as a necessary approach to the practice of law.
Helgi Maki: It really felt like I had no other choice but to explore this topic area, but it didn't start out that way in my legal career. So, until a few years ago, I was working at a big law firm and, you know, on the surface there seemed to be success, but to me that success felt empty because I wasn't bringing to it the personal side, which is my own personal experience and family experience with trauma including domestic violence, sexual assault, and many other things that someone in my family was a victim of crime also. And so in 2006, I could no longer ignore these two parts of my life because the police came to my office—I was an associate at one of these large law firms and a police officer came there to tell me that my mother had died by suicide. It was sadly not a surprise, you know, she had been experiencing trauma, and mental health issues, and also access to justice issues in terms of whether or not to report certain things or how, and she wasn't alone in my family—there were other people who were in a similar position, and so when that happened, I knew I needed to do something to honor her experience and also my own. It doesn't make sense to have a harm continue in society, or suffering, without speaking about it. We can't expect to support anything or heal anything if we are silent about it. So when I was thinking about your podcast, Myrna, I wanted to tell you this story. So when I was in high school, I was. . .and I'm one of those annoying people who decided in like grade one I was going to be a lawyer, right. . . but it was because there was something bad that happened and I thought in my little grade one mind, I thought, “I'm going to help. I'm going to find that person and bring them to justice”, or whatever, and so when I was exploring the legal profession when I was in high school, one of the first cases I was sent to observe in a court in the lower mainland in Vancouver was a case about a grandmother who was accused of drug possession and trafficking. And so I was flabbergasted, sitting there as a grade nine student in the courtroom witnessing this story, and to me there seemed to be so much more to the story than the charges and what the judge was clearly taking in. The grandmother talked about how there was poverty, there was someone threatening her, there was domestic violence, and so the charges were really the tip of the iceberg. So that is also. . . you see this over and over again in our society, where what we think of as the legal issue is paired with so many more complex issues.
Myrna: Thanks for sharing that Helgi. I mean, I have so many stories similar to that one and I love how you and Marjorie are talking about, like, being these annoying young girls who knew early on, “I'm going to be a lawyer”. I had the same realization when I was I think 15; I was watching a CBC show called Man Alive that was on back in the day, and I saw a young Indigenous man on the show and he was being interviewed about justice—the issue or the topic of the day was justice, and I had never seen an Indigenous person on television in any meaningful way, and especially not talking about justice. He said, “This is how I understand justice and it's based on my experience”, he says, “I had done a crime when I was a little bit younger”—he was already pretty young, he said, “I remember it was a white man that arrested me, it was a white man who sentenced me to jail, and it was a white man who locked the door, and it was only when I was on the inside that I saw my own people”. That just stuck with me as an impressionable 15 year old and somewhere in my little brain I was like, “I'm going to become a lawyer”, and meanwhile I'm like, I don't know any lawyers—I didn't even know native people could be lawyers because we were so steeped in poverty, and pain, and trauma, etc. right? And so, like, whoever that man is, if you ever listen to this podcast, if he still exists in the world, he changed my life just hearing that story. So I'm so glad that we have all gathered and that the universe did what it does to bring us together to work on this book on trauma-informed law which is the gap in the profession, and gap in the curriculum, and a gap in what lawyers recognize as a critical competency. So maybe let's chat a little bit about why you think that this profession is desperately in need of an education and a resource on trauma-informed law, maybe Kim, let's start with you.
Kim: That's such a big question and I'm going to jump around a little bit because the first thing is, I think it's like the elephant in the room that we haven't been talking about; we go to law school and one of the first things we learn is that our emotions don't matter, that our humanity doesn't matter, like, you know, like, that it's all just the facts, and I often speak in law schools, and in some of the classes, I’ll ask the teacher before I go in, the professor, and say, “What case are you doing now?”, and you know, we all do the same cases no matter where in the world we are, you know, those key cases in common law, at least. And so then I'll say, “Well, what did Mrs. Palsgraf feel about that?”, and there's this nervous twitter that goes through the room, it's like, “What does she feel about it? Like, we're not allowed to talk about that”, and there's this pride in not sleeping, you know, like, giving up our self-care early. You know, ask people, “How many of you got 8 hours of sleep last night?”, and nobody raises their hand, or at least very rarely somebody will raise their hand, and it's like, they're looking around like, “Am I going to win this competition 'cause I only got 3 hours of sleep?”. We’re learning that who we are as people will not matter as a lawyer; we're not supposed to take care of ourselves, we're not supposed to have emotions, we're just like these automatons. So we learn that in law school and then we get out into the world and you can't show any vulnerability because if you are vulnerable—and take “vulnerability” and replace “humanity”—like, if you are bringing your whole vulnerable self, and you're feeling things, and you're connecting with clients, and, you know, if you look in the law, there's a hierarchy of prestige. Like if you're doing criminal and family law—you're actually dealing with people—you're down the ladder, but if mergers and acquisitions (M&A). . .that's the real law we all know, no matter what city it is, you know, like, there in the US it's Wall Street, you know to be a Wall Street lawyer doing M&A—that's when you've actually arrived and everything else is less-than. So we've got this whole culture designed around that “not feeling” and “not being human”, and then we have high rates of depression, high rates of addiction, high rates of suicide, and there are a lot of studies that are showing that this is consistent; it's around the world, it's part of the profession, but I haven't seen a lot of conversation about how trauma impacts that. So one of the things I'm really interested in is like, as we shut ourselves down, we become less human, and then we start, you know, sort of sucking it up like we're supposed to do, we're supposed to suck it up and keep our edge and all that kind of stuff. There's something eating us inside, like our own trauma, the vicarious trauma, you know, the fatigue of dealing with trauma day after day, and even if you are that M&A lawyer, you're dealing with conflict and you're setting yourself apart, and you know, it's everywhere in the profession and we're not we're not addressing it.
Myrna: I think that's a really good start. You identified a lot in that bit and I think we're going to get into it in a bit but I love that you mentioned vulnerability and humanity and “keep our edge, suck it up”, because I do hear a lot of that kind of feedback, particularly from young lawyers and when I spoke to it a few minutes ago, that is largely what they're citing is that communication expectation of them that's causing them to go, “Wait a second, maybe there is no space for me in this profession”. I love that you raised that and maybe before we comment further on that, I want to go Marjorie and ask her that same question about why she thinks this profession is in desperate need of a book and a resource on trauma-informed law.
Marjorie: I really resonated with everything that Kim said and just how much it impacted my own decision-making as a lawyer, so as I said, when I had that experience working directly with refugees and asylum seekers and people who looked like me, who shared my ancestry, I thought to myself, “I am not strong enough to be that lawyer”, right? Because what I had been trained in law school was to be impartial and objective, and I was running into the bathroom and sobbing after each interview, so clearly I did not have what it took to be that kind of a lawyer, I said to myself, and so instead, what I chose was an area of the law that was more distant. I would represent institutions and countries, not individuals, and really hope that by doing my part at that upper level and not meeting anybody's story face-to-face that I might have an impact on the way that their stories played out on the ground. And what I got in Senegal, and Cape Verdeans, everywhere, was that people well understood these rules. What they didn't have was trust for the system, and it started to occur to me that the emotions are embedded in countries just as much as they are in individuals. I recognized that in the same way that I as an individual can feel emotions like suspicion, and anger, and fear, and all of the things that rise up, so too can our nations embody this, and our institutions can embody it, and I actually stumbled on this work by finding a movement in the law called “law and the emotions” that does explore and that does recognize the way in which our laws are impacted by human emotion. And so, an answer to your question Myrna, I think what's really powerful about the work that we're doing is that we are articulating for the people in our profession a) you can't run away from the emotions, you can find M&A, but trust me, when you go into the negotiating room, emotions will be there and you'll have to figure out how to deal with them. If you go into my field—international trade law—same thing, we can't get away from being human beings, right? And we can't get away from our psychological stance, and so the question becomes “How do we deal with these emotions in ways that won't add additional harm?”. So my hope in having this book and particularly the sections I focus on is to explore for my students the ways in which we could recognize the emotions, and trauma, and the experience of being a lawyer in systems that espouse notions of equity and fairness but don't always encourage and enforce it. So if we recognize early on that this is the construct in which we live, how do we work through this system in ways that can bring benefit to ourselves and to others?
Myrna: Thank you for that, Marjorie. So Helgi, I also want to hear from you; what are your thoughts and ideas on why this profession needs a book on trauma-informed law, and maybe before you answer the question, I also want to acknowledge and recognize your share earlier about your mom and the way in which you were informed of her suicide, and I think for a lot of folks who are listening, that is an experience that will resonate for many of them because as we all know, many of us have been touched by suicide and many of us have been touched by, you know, self-harming behaviors, whether it's ourselves, or people we love, or people we work with, and so I just want to acknowledge you sharing that.
Helgi: Thanks, I feel it's my duty. What else can we do with an experience like that except honour it and I am not alone very often when I speak with clients. Lawyer clients who come to me for coaching or consulting, they will often say that they live their lives in two lanes; one lane is the law and the law firm or the legal representation that they are providing, and the other is their lives, their families, where their vacations, or their coffee breaks, or their lunches, you know, they're frantically on the phone helping to figure out care, or they're dealing with domestic violence, or some type of threat or other trauma in the family, or trying to stop those cycles of trauma. And so about your question on why a book like this would help and needs to exist, I feel like there are two intractable problems in the legal profession and the system that really are not mysteries but we delude ourselves into thinking they’re mysteries and one is access to justice, and the other is lawyer wellness. So we often say, “Oh my goodness, I don't know what we're going to do”, there are just so many cases that don't get adequate representation, or even get any representation, or even get to the point of anything being reported about them, and when we look at the nature of those cases, those are often situations that involve something complex, something traumatic, something overwhelming, and our system parses things down into nice, neat little emotionless facts, and so very often the gaping wounds and dumpster fires of situations where people are really suffering and in pain are often the ones that get left out, where there's no room. Even at legal clinics which are overwhelmed, right, we don't have a crisis response lane in our legal systems, or even in our schools, in our training, right? We don't have a course where it says what happens if you're working on a case or a case is so crisis-involved that you don't know the next step, and we don't have a way to impact that, so that's number one, and number two is lawyer wellness. I had worked on the. . . you know, that Kim was talking about. . . the street, right, the Wall Street, and you know I worked on Bay Street and Wall Street, and I worked on large M&A deals, and so very often in those situations, I would notice how often people were coming into my office to seek not legal advice but counseling basically—some type of support—because you are arguing all day. Also, very often you're dealing with clients and others where they're so overwhelmed, they don't know what to do, and so trauma is often a situation of overwhelm, so that's a very different situation than domestic violence. However, some of the same issues and notes are at play. So when we sit back and we wonder, “Oh, I wonder why lawyers are so unwell, and there's high rates of addiction, and suicide, and mental health impact”, this is not a mystery. We are in a profession where we're asked to argue all day, every day we are asked to do more and more with less, we are asked to put aside who we are, we are asked to split ourselves and reserve our self-care, or even any awareness of self, for our vacations. So I really think that this type of book can address both of those mysteries.
Myrna: What I wanted maybe you to speak to and just comment on a little is those folks out there within our profession who pushed back against this piece, about reflecting emotion and acknowledging emotion and stress. I've heard some people refer to that as “soft skilled”—if people need counseling, then they should go to a therapist, that's not what we're here for. What would you say, Helgi, to some of those who are of that view?
Helgi: I would say that our duty as lawyers is to pursue the best interests of the client, period, right? And so that is not win or lose assessment; the client has other interests such as being able to operate and instruct their own counsel with agency. They have other issues that interface with their legal issues, so when we say, “Oh, you know, I'm just working in the best interest of the client”, what really is that best interest? And so very often speaking with clients when they've come away from a particularly complex case or other involvement in legal system, so often I hear clients say two things; they say that had they known, they would not have. . .they would have avoided being involved in the legal system at all, number one, and number two, they often say that the legal system involvement was worse than what originally happened as the harm, and sometimes that harm is domestic violence or something else actually very painful. So I would say that, you know, listen to your client when they say, have their interests been served? If the client says they would rather not have done it or they were more harmed than helped, we have not then served their best interests.
Myrna: So this is not a soft skill at all, this is a critical competency.
Kim: Actually it is a critical competency, and there's been some research done about, “What are the competences to be a successful lawyer?”. The law schools at Boalt and Hastings, actually, did a study a few years ago, and I may get some of the details wrong, but this is how I remember it: they wanted to know how to admit law students, like, sort of what characteristics to look for and how to train them and so forth, and so they interviewed successful lawyers—lawyers who by all the measures were successful—and asked them, “What are the most important skills?”, and it turned out that everything we call “soft skills” are the important skills for being a lawyer. You know, we think being analytical and being able to write and things like that are the tools that we should focus on in law school, and that's what law school focuses on, and how to be, you know, sort of rational and distant and all of that, but in the real world, a successful lawyer—and these are the rain makers, and the—you know, all of the things that we. . .we look on the outside and say, “Oh well, that's a successful lawyer”, they are the people who can communicate, and who can listen, who can actually do what is best for the client using those soft skills. There's a book on soft skills that talks about the difference in how we lawyers think we should be—and how our clients think we should be—that really shows this gap in the skills that are being valued as we are educated and as we practice.
Myrna: What form of hope or types of benefits may trauma-informed practice provide for clients, for lawyers, for the community, because I'm sure each of you have these ideas of how this book is going to be an incredible benefit to those groups.
Marjorie: As I think about this book what I'm really hoping for is that my students will read it because I think about the path that each of us has taken to get to this moment and it was a painful path, right? So many moments, we doubted our very human tendencies to feel with our clients, and as Kim is pointing out, all of the research is demonstrating to us that to be effective at our jobs, to be effective in our lives, to be present to ourselves and to our families, requires this feeling. So separating it in a box and putting it away until you can go on vacation, as Helgi says, creates all sorts of dysfunctions for us. I really, really hope that the next generation doesn't have to come to the point of absolute collapse before recognizing that there's another way and a far less traumatic way to practice. So from my end, the hope that this book presents is that there's no need to kind of deny the impact that some of these traumatic experiences of our clients, of ourselves working in the system, undoubtedly will have on us, and that there are ways of moving forward that don't require us to engage in self harm.
Myrna: Maybe I'll go to you Kim, what form of hope or types of benefits might this book have for clients, for lawyers, for the legal community.
Kim: So not only are we going to talk about the problems, but we're going to bring the tools and the ideas and the stories. . .I think one of the biggest pieces is we’re going to let people know they're not alone. The trauma starts in law school or maybe it starts before in trauma in our lives, and it goes into law practice and then there's this systemic embedding of the system itself being traumatizing on so many different levels, and so as we look at that, we're going to look at well, what can we do? How do we change systems? How do we practice in a way that's healthier and more trauma-informed and less traumatizing? How do we take care of ourselves and our clients, and how can we change legal education? We're going to have sort of the big, the macro suggestions, and then some of the things like, get your sleep. There's some basic things that we know what to do and we are not encouraged to do them in this culture that's so broken.
Myrna: Thanks Kim. How about yourself, Helgi, what form of hope or types of benefits might this book provide for clients, lawyers, and the legal community generally?
Helgi: The hope and benefit is to provide an alternative to the hopeless option that lawyers and clients often talk about which is mass system change. System change doesn't happen all at once right, we can't necessarily create—I would love to though—create trauma-informed courts across the land or trauma-informed training in all law schools and bar associations and CPD. However, we can invest in the integrity and quality of our own practices, and someone I think who speaks about this very well is Bryan Stevenson out of Equal Justice Initiative, the founder of that and author of Just Mercy, and he says that “there's no meaningful justice or improvement in justice without becoming uncomfortable and getting proximity to clients”, and so in this book, we talk about ways to deal with the discomfort of complex situations where there isn't access to justice readily, or where quality representation is something we need to look at, or where legal outcomes could— if we didn't look at it through trauma lens—go very much awry and we could be punishing people for trauma. With this approach of being trauma-informed in legal representation, we help people deal with those discomforts and therefore advance justice, and also have tools to become more proximate to, meaning closer to and more understanding of. . .having more information about without crossing boundaries, their clients, the system, their own situation. That's the hope I see and benefit I see in this, and speaking with other lawyers in other jurisdictions, they do say that there are benefits that they see as well as clients because if they are working with a client who feels—Marjorie was talking about trust and distance—if they're working with the client who feels some trust in them and in the system, and where there are tools to bridge that distance, then the client may not be as triggered, and we therefore will not be as triggered through our mirror neurons ourselves. So that's the hope and benefit I see.
Myrna: As a co-author of this book, I see—as an Indigenous woman and an Indigenous lawyer—I see all of the ways in which Indigenous people are subjected to racism, and a lack of dignity in the courtroom afforded to them, and in some cases, very demoralizing treatment, and I truly believe that my purpose in becoming a lawyer was to help open minds and hearts of individuals who have a lot of influence power and authority over Indigenous and racialized people in courtrooms. There are a lot of people all over the world listening to this podcast and we want to include your experiences in this book. We want to hear from you, and so let's start with what do we want from listeners? How could they lend their experiences, their voices, their ideas to this book?
Kim: This book, I think, is for the people drawn to listening to your podcast here, now, without question, it's for our law students and for our professionals out there, and so I think one of the ways that people could participate is sharing their stories, right, I know that Helgi has really spearheaded this effort to both survey our audience of professionals and gather their storytelling, but I think our stories are powerful, and our stories are healing, and so part of the task is for us to be able to kind of share those stories with one another. I was really moved, Helgi, by your sharing of how you were notified of your mother’s suicide. I could only imagine, and the fact that they went to your workplace is a whole other level of pain. One of the stories I think that sort of guided me to this transition to include a psychological understanding into my law practice was one of my best friends had a shockingly similar story about her father's death and the law firm that we were working at—this big powerful law firm—essentially said to her, you know, “The way to deal with grief is to throw yourself into your work, just basically work harder, and that will change everything”. Those kinds of stories, when we share them with one another, change everything 'cause I know it changed me and I left that job shortly afterwards, right. And so I think I would love to hear your listeners’ stories just as I would love to share mine with them because our stories are transformative.
Myrna: I agree. Through stories comes healing, comes transformation, comes insight, comes innovation.
Marjorie: I want to add something about the stories because we're not going to print every story and we're not going to print any story that people don't want to have printed, but for us it's a learning opportunity to see sort of what lawyers are dealing with. I mean, we have our own stories and we've heard stories from a lot of people, but sometimes I'm surprised at—for example, someone shared a story of a personal injury case and how it impacted her when she was in a similar situation, she said that it was completely invisible to her until we started asking these questions about trauma and then she realized that it had permeated her life, and now she has some power over that and you know, I can see it in my own life. I was involved in a domestic violence murder-suicide as the lawyer for the woman who was killed, and that day, I fell down some stairs and it took me a while to figure out that I became afraid of stairs. Not like. . .there was not a direct connection, but every time I came to a staircase, I went through that. And you know, that was just not normal but—it actually probably is normal—and you know, and so as people share these stories, we get a broader view of the kinds of things that lawyers are dealing with and we can more adequately address those. And then we're also going to be asking for some of the people who are experts on trauma to contribute on some of the factual information so the layout of the book is that we're going to include a story in each section, and maybe several stories, and then we're going to have some information, because we lawyers, we really like information, and then we're going to offer solutions. So if people want to share what they did about that, you know, like they realized they were traumatized and then they did XYZ, then we’re interested in those too, you know, tell us about your coping mechanisms.
Myrna: I was single parent with three kids when I went through law school and prior to that I started to have horrible panic attacks—I passed out one time in a mall—and as a result of that experience I started to avoid malls, and then I started to avoid the public, and then I started to. . . I became agoraphobic, I didn't leave my apartment for six months. I became highly suicidal and then when I went into law school, still like by the skin of my teeth, every day I was in survival mode. I was just trying to get through the day without passing out in class and I was having all of these panic attacks and so that is really what compelled me to get into criminal law because I knew I had to confront my fears, I had to learn how to stand on my feet, allow everyone to look at me and speak loudly and clearly and be able to defend my position even though my heart was racing like 200 beats per minute, I thought I was going to die and for the first several times I was in court, I kept a bucket nearby in case I started puking in court, like that was how anxiety ridden I was. Anyway, I share this experience for those of you who are listening who've had similar experiences, you're not alone, and I think that this book is going to demonstrate that and I'm so glad that we're inviting people to contribute. Helgi, who would we like to hear from?
Helgi: Lawyers have this funny thing where they believe other lawyers more than non-lawyers—I don't even like the word “non-lawyer”, but apparently we use that term in the legal profession—and so with the survey, which I’ve posted at traumainformedlaw.org under “Surveys”, what we would like to hear is stories, and also survey responses—if people don't feel comfortable sharing their story, they can respond to the questions in the survey—of how do they see trauma impacting clients, colleagues, themselves and the legal community at large. And so, because of this lawyers wanting to hear from other lawyers thing, we do want it to be from judges, legal educators, people involved in the system as opposed to clients, but you can also tell a story about a client, and so the question I hold in the survey is: very often, not so different from me, lawyers have someone, or a case, or a client, or something they want to honor. Something that changed them, changed their perception of their own profession, something where justice did not occur or did not unfold as it should have and they wished it did, or seeing a colleague really, terribly affected by wellness concerns—wanting to have done something for that colleague but being somehow unable to—and so those are stories you can share and you can honor. So that's the question I would ask: if you had a story or an experience you would want to honour and support towards improving the legal system, what would that story be?
Marjorie: The deadline for our final draft is March 15th, which is right around the corner, and we have a lot of work to do between now and then, and then it'll take another two or three months probably for the rest of the process—the actual proofreading and cover design—and you know, there are a lot of things that happen after we get in that first draft. We're hoping that pre-orders can start maybe in May.
Myrna: Fantastic. In closing our interview today, is there anything else that folks would like to add and share with our listeners?
Marjorie: I'd love to share something, Myrna, to acknowledge that we are all living through traumatic times right now. Certainly in my lifetime, I have not had the experience of living and working in the midst of a pandemic and turmoil in the sort of American electoral process, and we're also having to show up for clients, for our students, and for everyone else and so I wanted to be sure to kind of encourage others as I encourage myself to acknowledge this moment, as we talk about trauma, to pause in every instance and recognize that we cannot behave as if this was an ordinary moment, and maybe this is the moment we start to implement some of the things we know are necessary for our own sanity and self-healing, including things like self-care, and also thinking about how we show up in the profession for our clients and for one another. Let's acknowledge the reality in which we live, which is the definition of a traumatic time period, and let's behave accordingly.
Myrna: Thank you for that, Marjorie. Kim?
Kim: We haven't said that the book is actually going to be published by the American Bar Association Law Practice Management section so I want to acknowledge that and that I really appreciate the Law Practice Management section being the ones to publish this because it really recognizes the extent of the issue, that it's not something that they're going to put over in, you know, sort of an area that's not given as much important or something like that, that this is about the practice of law, and so I just want to mention that as well.
Helgi: I wanted to acknowledge that just because I'm helping to write this book, it doesn't mean that I personally am a founder of this concept or one of the key people in my country or around the world calling for this. When I speak with lawyers, some of them have never heard of trauma-informed practices, or the word “trauma-informed”, or aren't sure what trauma is, and so one place to read more about it is to read the Calls to Action written by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, or if you're not in Canada, looking to who else is calling for this, and I think that's very important because it's not just for us as lawyers, it's not just for law schools, or individual clients, there are other very important calls for this, so it's part of an important issue that is coming up in the fabric of our society outside the legal system as well—as part of the legal system and in general.
Myrna: Thanks Helgi, for citing the TRC Calls to Action. You’re right, it's important even for people who are not in Canada to take a look at that document. Just in closing, if there's any one experience, or person, or whatever it may be that you want to thank that has brought you to the awareness that you have developed to this point in your practice, let's do a little bit of around as we close, let's start with Helgi, please.
Helgi: Yeah, absolutely. I would like to thank Linda Redgrave who is one of the witnesses—she was witness number one in the Ghomeshi trial—and so she agreed to advocate together with me, she agreed to let me assist with advocating for judicial training—federal judicial training—on trauma-informed lawyering, and I would like to thank the Native Women's Association of Canada, they looked at a paper I wrote, their legal staff, about trauma-informed lawyering for legal community, and then I'd also like to thank Tess Sheldon; she's a law professor working in mental health law, and also my family members who allowed their stories to be told and two shared with me the impact.
Kim: Well the first person that comes to mind has actually passed, but I always want to acknowledge him. His name was Forrest Baird, and early in my career, I decided I was not going to be a lawyer. I did not grow up always wanted to be a lawyer like the others here. I went to law school because I had a very. . .I had a family that got in a lot of legal trouble, and so I went because I wanted to help them, and when I was in law school, I came across a lot of the issues that we've talked about here and some others and decided not to be a lawyer. And a few years after I graduated, I was in a course and this man stood up and he started talking about how he practiced law in a way that granted dignity to everyone, and I remember Marjorie said something about dignity that really caused me to reflect on him because that was the first time I'd ever heard dignity and law spoken about together. He was a divorce lawyer who thought that his client and the ex should be friends at the end, and so he trained himself in a lot of different modalities and became a person who granted dignity to everyone and was a peacemaker. And so Forest Baird is the reason I became a lawyer instead of doing other things with my life, and then since then, I've been gathering lawyers who sort of share the same mindset, and so my other thanks go to the hundreds of integrative lawyers who are being really courageous and not following the dominant culture and are beginning to create a new culture.
Marjorie: For me, first and foremost, I want to thank my law students because I remember—it must have been 15 years ago, my first semester of teaching— I had a student walk into my office and she was clearly overwhelmed, and she was crying, and it was immediately after exams and I had no tools to deal with that, and I can remember saying to her, “Let's talk about contracts law”, because that's where I was at that stage of development in my life. It was enough of a wake-up call for me to go and do some work so that I could be in relationship with strong emotion without having to hide behind the so-called objectivity of the law, and that was one of the first impetus, right, to move me in a different direction because when she left that office, I felt so terrible about myself that I knew that I couldn't continue to behave in that same way. And then I actually want to thank my teachers outside of the law who really trained me in the capacity to feel and to hold strong emotion, and in the modalities that allow us to process and integrate them. We are terrified, right, a lot of us in the legal profession, because we think that we will be overwhelmed by these emotions and that the overwhelm will be forever when in fact, it's the denial and the suppression that lead to greater harm, and so I'm really grateful for. . .I have been trained in a number of healing modalities at this stage, including modalities of healing collective wounds, not just our individual psychology, and for that I'm really grateful for my teachers who've done the work and who passed it on. And then finally, I'm so grateful for you Myrna, and for this group, because as I've been sort of walking through this really traumatic time, the ability to reach out to all of you and to have you help me hold what feels overwhelming has really helped me stay in this moment and not run away. So thank you, all of you.
Myrna: Thank you all for sharing, and I think Kim and Helgi want to say more. Let's start with, Helgi.
Helgi: I really want to acknowledge you, Myrna, and also Marjorie and Kim; there wouldn't be a conversation around this without you, and especially Myrna, I remember when we first met and we kind of connected over a the Internet first and until connecting with you, I felt very much alone in speaking about this topic, at least where I live, and every time I speak with you or work with you, I learn more and I also get more interested in this topic and see the promise of it, and see what can come from it because you have such wonderful insights to bring and a very compelling voice—authentically sharing. So it sounds odd to be excited to work on a topic like trauma but it really is. . .it's such intelligence of humanity that comes through this topic, so I wanted to say that.
Myrna: Thank you, Helgi. Kim?
Kim: I want to acknowledge everyone and echo everything that was said about this team. Sometimes when you're writing a book, things get right in your face that you're writing about, and to have been writing this book about trauma at this time in our history with everything going on, in some way sounds, like, insane and in other ways it's the perfect time because we're looking at. . .for ourselves, how do we actually live what we're writing about, and how do we support each other? And so, I can't imagine a more perfect time or a more perfect group of women to be working with at this particular time, so thank you all.
Myrna: Well of course, you know, I start off thanking all of you, naturally, I'm just. . .I can't tell you just how blown away I am by the openings that this podcast has created in my life, and for so many folks who've entrusted me with their stories, and who’ve said “yes” when I've invited them in for an interview; so to those folks who say “yes” when I give them a call, thank you, and to those of you listening, and subscribing, and sharing this podcast with your loved ones, with their colleagues, with students, and including it as required listening in your courses, thank you. I'm so incredibly profoundly grateful for all of you being so engaged and interested in this subject. I have to also say that I am so incredibly thankful to survivors; they are really the people who taught me about trauma within the context of the practice of law, and more specifically Indigenous survivors. So my hands go up to them and I have to add that I am thankful to my mom who subjected me to profound trauma. If not for that experience, I would not have learned about my own personal ability to overcome all of that which she put before me in my life, and so you know, she's passed on now but my hands go up to her all the time because if not for putting me through all of those tests and all of those trials, I would not be the person I am today having the conversations that I'm having, and so I'm grateful to her. I'm also equally grateful to my mentors Dan Shapiro who was my boss in the Independent Assessment Process where I adjudicated hundreds of Indian residential school claims and sat with peoples’ trauma—he was an incredible mentor and still is, and Catherine Knox and Earl Kalenith who is a provincial court judge in Saskatchewan, all of these folks, really in their own ways, allowed me to feel like I have a place in this profession, I belong here. In fact, it was Dan who—he and I developed this mantra for me, “I belong here”—so every time I'd have to go into a room and I was feeling inadequate and feeling like I didn't belong or really overcome with impostor syndrome, I would just say those three words: I belong here. And so to those folks, I'm incredibly grateful. Finally, my kids and my grandkids and my best friend Shane; if not for all of the love that they have given me, I would not have learned as much as I have now about healing and about possibility. I think that is the flip side of trauma, is healing and possibility. They teach me that every day, and when I forget, they remind me, and so I'm so incredibly grateful to them. And I'm incredibly grateful about all the possibility that 2021 is going to bring and that this book is going to bring—not just for us as this wonderful collective, but for this entire world. We need healing now. I'm really excited about the possibilities that we will create by gifting this book to the world, I truly believe it's a gift and we're all just a vessel to deliver it, so thank you all very much.
Alright folks, that was today's show. Pretty exciting, right, what's to come? I think amazing things are coming for 2021 for us and possibilities. We all need to live in a little possibility, you know what I'm saying? So if you have any feedback about today's episode, ideas, thoughts, whatever it might be, you know you can always find me on LinkedIn you can find me on Instagram @thetraumainformedlawyer and you can also find me now on Twitter because the Trauma-informed Lawyer podcast has its own handle @theTILPodcast. Drop me a line, let me know what you thought...until next time, take care everyone.