Attorney Wellness
| Citation | Vol. 28 No. 1 Pg. 0064 |
| Pages | 0064 |
| Publication year | 2022 |
Self-Talk: How Hard Can It Be?
BY R. JAVOYNE HICKS AND LYNN GARSON
Read on for an explanation of self-talk and learn how it's done.
The co-authors of this article talk frequently about the need to drill down to make the well-being resources that the State Bar offers relatable. For example, both the Attorney Wellness Committee and the Lawyer Assistance Program, which Hicks and Garson respectively chair, promote #useyour6, (i.e., the six prepaid counseling sessions made available through the Bar to each Georgia lawyer in good standing), but until the Attorney Wellness Committee members came up with the idea of "demystifying" the process, no one gave any thought to the fact that it can be intimidating to call a helpline or go to a counselor, particularly if you've never done it before. From Hicks' efforts, we now have multiple resources "demystifying" what happens when an attorney calls the Lawyer Assistance Program hotline. [1]
Both authors agree that when speaking about mental health, they often mention self-talk. It is one tool that everybody in the wellness space throws out at one time or another. Usually, no one pays attention to whether self-talk is easy, hard, learned, needs to be taught or any of the foregoing. It was only in considering the topic of this article that we ourselves began to understand the need to explain what is meant by "self-talk" and to show how it is done.
Lynn Garson's Story
I didn't become a devotee of self-talk until I was inpatient in a mental health facility in 2008. The therapists there threw a lot of the mud at the wall, and one such was a technique called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), an offshoot of DBT for those who are familiar with it. The concept, as explained to me, is to catch a troubling thought in the moment and decide whether it serves me. Perhaps it had in the past but no longer did, or perhaps it never had. If I conclude that that particular thought does not serve me, the teaching of ACT is to shift my thinking and let go of the thought—not once but every time it comes into my mind. A more tangible way to think about it is that I am taking a loop that is making deeper and deeper grooves in my brain the longer it loops around and rerouting it in a completely different (and more benign) direction.
An example of such a process in action is readily apparent in my struggle with being overly...
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