Lawyers Helping Lawyers
| Publication year | 2023 |
| Citation | Vol. 35 No. 1 Pg. 11 |
| Pages | 11 |
Navigating Life and Work in the Age of Overwhelm
By Beth Padgett
While researching a topic for a CLE, I picked a book off my shelf, "The Age of Overwhelm, Strategies for the Long Haul" by Laura van Dernoot Lipsky, the founder of the Trauma Stewardship Institute (https://traumastewardship. com). She has worked more than three decades in trauma exposure, meaning she is involved with healing people in professions whose members are regularly faced with trauma or, like lawyers, work closely with clients who have been traumatized by various experiences; and due to that close relationship, lawyers themselves are traumatized. There are also elements of the practice of law that are traumatizing in themselves such as high conflict, long hours separated from family and little time for selfcare, making it difficult for many lawyers to avoid regular traumatization. It is not surprising that you might feel as if you are living in the Age of Overwhelm.
I sign and date my books. I saw that I purchased and read this book in July 2018 and since that time, it seems that our lives, our world and the profession of law have not made it out of the Age of Overwhelm. If anything, we may be more entrenched in it. The overwhelm I see in the legal profession is deeper, wider and more densely tangled.
Do you remember the moment that the onset of COVID-19 brought us to a halt? Many people, lawyers included, got a chance to see and feel themselves for the first time in years. There were moments of rest and reconnection with our family members and those in our bubbles. For many, the return to the office was so brutal that the benefits of the rest and reconnection were very short-lived. The lawyer identity jumped back in high gear. Lipsky writes about our attachments to our identities. Are we too attached to the identity of our overwhelmed selves and to our stories of "can't stop/can't slow down" to consider doing things differently? Are we too attached to our identity as a lawyer to have space for other people, places and things in our lives? What if five minutes of a new behavior a day changed your entire experience of life and work? What might you be missing by not trying?
Lipsky cautions that without metabolizing and transforming the traumas that arise in us on a regular basis it is difficult to stick to two necessary intentions of work in the service of others. Those...
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