Are you a lawyer who is totally burnt out? Read this.
How to know if you’re experiencing burnout, vicarious trauma, or PTSD as an attorney.
I have friends, family members, and clients who practice law. One common thread I’ve found through all of them is the stress and burnout related to organizational structure, complex legal cases, violent or disturbing stories heard while preparing cases, and the never-ending stress related to managing and billing your entire work life in 6-minute increments.
As a therapist, I have also dealt with burnout and vicarious trauma and experienced its effects on my life as a practice owner, mother, partner, and therapist.
Before we dive in, I want to share a little bit about my own experience to give you some context. In my early 20s, I worked at an emergency shelter for children from homes that were abusive or neglectful.
As you can imagine, the conditions and atmospheres of the homes these children came from were not only less than nurturing, but they were also dangerous and some of them disgusting. After about a year of this work, I woke up one day and couldn’t stop crying. I realized the vicarious trauma I was witnessing day after day had over time, impacted my brain and body in a way that suddenly poured out in uncontrollable sadness.
I’m thankful for this experience because it helped me learn to set internal and external boundaries (we’ll discuss this more later), engage in self-care, and develop habits that serve me well today in the work I do. As a business owner, I have struggled with burnout and had to learn to set boundaries around when and for how long I work, attend weekly therapy, and collaborate with other people who can support me in my goals.
If you’re wondering if you’re experiencing burnout or vicarious trauma, let’s take a deeper look:
Burnout results from a discrepancy between expectations and outcomes. For example toxic work culture, a lack of resources to get the job done, or unrealistic timelines.
Vicarious Trauma, on the other hand, results from hearing traumatic stories over and over again.
First, let’s review burnout in more depth.
Research has shown that burnout in the legal profession stems from a combination of factors that include:
Toxic organizational structures
The exclusion of collaboration and emphasis on self-reliance in the legal field
Lack of multidisciplinary work models
The effects of working with disenfranchised and traumatized populations
Immutable requirement for confidentiality.
These patterns start in law school with a highly competitive culture where grades, class ranking, and approval of instructors drive an intense rivalry that places the autonomic nervous system into overdrive.
This model of stress-based learning can be an enduring pattern that stays with a lawyer throughout their career creates that eventually will induce burnout. The fierceness of this competition destroys social support and connection, and as humans, we are pack animals wired for connection.
Lawyering can become a dopamine-driven activity focused on extreme workloads without the social support and collaboration necessary for team-oriented work, empathy, and social and emotional competence.
Burnout creates huge problems at work, especially in the legal field. Lawyers who are burned out feel overextended and depleted and have a callous and diminished connection to various aspects of their work, including their clients, coworkers, or the work itself. Furthermore, burnout leads to a depleted sense of self and accomplishments and is tied to reduced performance, and is predictive of subpar performance. To summarize, lawyers who are burned out are exhausted, dissatisfied with their job, and don’t feel like the work they do is important or worthy of effort, and in the end, the lawyer’s health, their clients, and families suffer.
Now, let’s switch gears and talk about Vicarious Trauma. Vicarious trauma is a result of hearing traumatogenic material from highly emotional clients day after day after day.
Lawyers are the backbone of our legal system. You can’t become a judge unless you’ve worked as a lawyer. We can’t try cases if we don’t have lawyers. Businesses would be in trouble without legal direction. Lawyers are woven into every thread of our work/government system and are important figures in our world.
Unfortunately, your clients are rarely happy to see you, they share their intense emotions of anger, disgust, disappointment, and fear (to name just a few), and when you close their case there is rarely a therapeutic goodbye. Rather, your firm refunds any money left in the retainer to the client and the client might say thanks, depending on the outcome of their case, might curse you out, but certainly say, “I hope I never see you again.”
This, of course, isn’t personal, these people are relieved to be finished with lengthy and costly legal proceedings. Depending on the type of legal work you do, you might hear traumatic stories from your clients and spend hours poring over the traumatic details of the case. You might feel like your client is asking you to be your therapist, marriage counselor, social worker, priest, friend, confidante, and innumerable other roles for which you are not trained or qualified to fill.
The repeated dribble of traumatogenic material accompanied by heightened levels of emotions and distress from clients changes a lawyer’s inner schema about their views of the world and their safety in it. To illustrate this, I want to share an example from my own life.
As a therapist, I hear many stories of abuse that in turn have made me worried about sending my daughter to a sleepover at a friend’s house. This is not because I had a bad experience at a sleepover as a child. It is a direct result of hearing story after story of abuse that occurred while at a friend’s house. You can see how the material I’m exposed to at work shifted my internal schema and sense of safety for my child in this world.
As an attorney, your clients’ experiences may be bleeding into other areas of your life and negatively impacting your mental health. You might be so used to feeling depleted that you’ve forgotten what it’s like to get up and be excited to go to work. If you’re feeling this, you’re far from alone.
What happens next?
Are you reading this and thinking “okay, it’s clear that I’m experiencing some form of burnout, vicarious trauma, or PTSD? But what the heck do I do now?”
The good news is that there are very effective therapeutic interventions that can be immensely helpful. Each of our therapists at Ray Family Therapy is trained in EMDR, the Safe and Sound Protocol, and anxiety. We are here to help you thrive as a legal professional and as a human being. You don’t need to go through this alone.