By Mark Baumann, Copyright 2023
Wellness and secondary trauma are two related and challenging issues for legal professionals. The practice of law almost always exposes practitioners to other people’s traumas. Lawyers (and judges) doing interpersonal law, such as family, domestic violence, probate and criminal law are especially exposed to client’s traumas. Frameworks for thinking about wellness and trauma can help us think deeper and survive better. The eight dimensions of wellness framework and trauma informed care are two useful frameworks. Adding components from developmental science, or attachment theory, helps these frameworks become more effective by better defining safety, trauma and danger, concepts which are surprisingly difficult to define.
Wellness
Wellness is generally described as a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of illness. It generally includes taking steps to address physical health, sleep, diet and environmental conditions, and to reduce unhealthy activities, situations and stress. A combination of techniques can improve wellness.
The US Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) provides a framework identifying eight dimensions of wellness.`
- Physical
- Emotional
- Spiritual
- Environmental
- Social
- Financial
- Intellectual
- Occupational
For lawyers, the last four offer unique opportunities and challenges to wellness and trauma exposure. For example, where the intellectual and occupational domains meet, law practice offers stimulating mental challenges together with sometimes frustrating restrictions from laws, clients, opposing lawyers, and judges untrained in the nature of interpersonal conflict.
The social-occupational domains are often challenging for lawyers where daily interactions are typically centered around aggressive advocacy often in relative isolation. Lawyering can offer financial reward and some measure of freedom, but sometimes at the cost of overworking. Money, managed well, can reduce financial stress and provide the opportunity for comfortable rest, but can it buy wellness? Money can provide some protection from financial danger, but can it provide protection from the danger of a failed personal relationship? A useful question may be: at what cost cash?
Trauma
Trauma is best defined broadly, to include anything which causes harm. It could be from physical harm such as a car accident, social harm such as racism and microaggressions, and pharmacological harm such as drug addiction. It can also be from relational harm, such as the loss of a relationship, or a dramatic reduction in social status.
Trauma-Informed Care (TIC), or Trauma- and violence-Informed Care (TVIC), provides a framework to guide helping professionals to help clients overcome, reduce and manage past and current trauma, and potentially to avoid future trauma. TIC principles offer the hope of helping clients turn their current situation into a healing experience. These principles are not only helpful guidance for professionals, they are also relevant for self-care. Common elements in TIC frameworks include:
- Understanding the problem
- Providing safety
- Utilizing a client-centered approach.
Harm from microaggressions offers one example for applying these elements. It’s necessary for the professional to understand what microaggressions are for a particular client, and provide safety by not unintentionally repeating the microaggression or dismissing the client’s experiences and feelings about these, and, with a client-centered approach, demonstrate nonjudgmental acceptance and unconditional positive regard for the client.
Client-centered approaches involve a number of skills, including enhanced listening and empathy. Research shows that application of these types of professional skills, the skilled use of the professional-client relationship, can provide a client a feeling of safety and is in fact the single most important factor for effective psychotherapy. Neurobiological research also shows that when people gain a sense of safety, their mind and body relax and move into a state where they can begin to consider and process new information, and in more optimal ways.
When we turn such concepts around, we can get a sense of what we need for self-care. We need one or more persons who can approach us with a Trauma Informed Care approach. It might help to assess the people in your life. Are they judgmental? Do they truly listen to you? Do they engage in a reciprocal conversation where they sensitively respond to what you say, or do they listen just enough to know which of their own feelings and experiences they can add next to the conversation (thereby leaving your feelings and experiences behind)? Finding friends, colleagues, mentors, coaches, and therapists with good quality communication skills is a dynamic way to manage the trauma of participating in other people’s traumas.
Developmental science: patterns of subjective relational danger
Advanced models of attachment science and theory, from developmental science in particular, add a rich layer to biopsychosocial models describing wellness. (Biopscyhosocial (BPS) means a model that looks at how biology-body, psychology-mind, and social-relationships all interact. TIC is a BPS model.)
Attachment describes a human survival system. It’s similar but more complex than the fight-flight-freeze survival system, because it describes patterns of perception, behavior, thinking, memory function, and communication. Attachment looks at safety as a function of adapting to and surviving danger and obtaining comfort, particularly in the context of relational danger.
Attachment science defines relational danger and the self-protective strategies people utilize to gain protection and comfort, arguably much more finely than any other science-based model of human functioning. It identifies three broad patterns of how humans respond to danger. (The patterns are also parsed into sub-patterns when more detail is needed.) The patterns are often described with the simple letters A, B and C . (Avoidant/dismissing are a common words for the A pattern and resistant/ambivalent are common for the C pattern. B is a balanced or blended A-C pattern.) The A and C patterns are usually easily visible in legal cases, especially those involving divorce, domestic violence, and probate where danger is the most extreme.
Dangers in the A-patterns
A prime danger for people who utilize A-pattern survival strategies is negative affect: the experience, display and/or recall of negative feelings and memories. Associated with that is the danger of expressing a desire for comfort, acknowledging one’s own feelings, acknowledging vulnerability, taking ones own perspective, and having conflict with attachment figures. Hence the term avoidant. Issues like those are minimized, avoided, or sometimes replaced with an over-focus on positive things and feelings. (This sometimes takes the form of false positive affect, expressing positive affect when one is actually under distress.)
Instinctively safe self-protective strategies include over-tolerance of being dismissed. When one’s own feelings and needs are dismissed by others, people surviving life with A-strategies might not even notice it. While this tolerance may function well to help survive one’s own dismissive parents, it can be unhealthy as an overall wellness strategy.
Dangers in this pattern also include criticism, doing the wrong thing, being seen, meeting one’s own-needs, and not compromising.
(As a child, the person may have developed A-strategies in the context of a parent who was consistently dismissive of the child’s expressed feelings and needs. The child learns over time that it’s better not to make a fuss and that they may get more attention by giving attention to or pleasing their parent.)
Dangers in the C-patterns
Oppositely, a prime danger for people who utilize C-pattern survival strategies is not expressing negative affect. Closely related to that is not expressing a desire for comfort and not receiving it. Other dangers in the C-pattern including being vulnerable and/or not-invulnerable, and not fully meeting one’s own needs. Being critical and aggressive are often comfortable and preferred states of being.
Instinctively safe self-protective strategies include coercive conduct, alternating aggressive behavior with disarming behavior. Because there is a focus on one’s own needs and feelings, and because other people may not know what those needs and feelings are, there is pressure to coerce other’s to do what makes oneself feel safe. This in turn leads to a general sense of feeling comfortable with conflict.
Peace and calmness, and a lack of intense expression of emotions, thus may be a little or quite uncomfortable. Further, in the context of any form of danger, compromise is dangerous, often felt as a deadly danger.
That last statement is a truly astonishing finding from attachment science. For one large group of people, in the context of any danger, compromise is itself a danger, and it can be frightening or even terrifying to consider it. Asking such a person “Can’t you just compromise” might trigger the use of intense defensive strategies for self-protection.
(As a child, the person may have developed C-strategies in the context of a parent who was inconsistent and deceitful. When the child agreed to be good in order to get an ice cream cone, but never got the ice cream, the child learned very early on not to trust, not to delay gratification, and to use coercion, such as excessive complaining or crying, to get the ice cream.)
Wellness and attachment
Whether you learned to survive the family dynamics in your childhood with A or C self-protective strategies, recognizing them is a key to finding overall wellness. While you might gain some success in re-wiring your brain, neural networks laid down early and firmly may always lead to an impulse for those instinctive responses to perceived danger. Yet, with practiced observation, it’s often easy to learn to notice your urge to apply an A or C attachment strategy to any given situation, and with practice it can be possible to choose to respond differently.
For example, if you feel an urge to ignore your own needs and put someone else’s needs first, it’s possible to recognize that and choose a different action. If you feel an urge to let anger flow in order to pressure someone to meet your in-the-moment feeling, it’s possible to recognize that and choose a different action.
Attachment trauma
Trauma can also be defined more finely by advanced attachment science. Trauma is not just a harm, it is the experience of a perceived negative consequences after exposure to danger.
For people who survive life with A-patterned self-protective strategies, being asked about their feelings or having them publicly displayed can lead to a negative experience as a result of being exposed to the danger of acknowledging feelings.
For people who survive life with C-patterned self-protective strategies, not being allowed to display their feelings, especially feelings of anger or desire for comfort, can lead to a negative experience as a result of being exposed to the danger of being denied their feelings. Or more specifically, the danger is from being denied access to the information provided by their feelings.
Compassionate Socratic questions to help balance needs
CSI’s Integrative Client Counseling Model (ICCM) identifies compassionate Socratic questions as one technique to help people address the dangers they probably don’t even know are affecting them.
“I understand that you don’t want to fight in court and that it is much easier to just give in, and you can do that. Perhaps the question is: Is it more important to avoid the fight, or to protect your children and your financial situation?”
“I understand, the principal of the thing is important. Your feelings are intense, and they are real. Perhaps the question is: is it more important that they validate your feelings, or that you protect your children and your financial situation?”
Perhaps, alone or with help, the person using either strategy can make a pros and cons list and then decide rather than letting themselves be driven by the trauma-feeling/experience.
Mindfulness practice can help with this. At it’s core, mindfulness is about observing and noticing, and then choosing to act or not. Here is the difference between those two words in two examples.
A police officer spent the afternoon at the train station, observing people. After a while, the officer noticed a drug transaction, and then weighed the safety of the action options.
A respondent engaged in coercive conduct right in front of the judge. The judge, who had no training or experience with coercive conduct, didn’t even notice it. (If the judge survives life with C-strategies, the judge could actually be quite comfortable with the coercive conduct.)
To able to notice, it’s necessary to have a framework. Without training in what drug transactions look like, the officer may not have noticed. Frameworks like Trauma-Informed Care and attachment help us know what to notice.
Please note, that for many people, it’s not as simple as just asking those questions. It usually takes a good bit of time and support for people to come to a point where it is safe to tolerate such questions.
Summary
So yes, wellness, safety, trauma and danger are all much more complicated than what meets the eye. These are complex topics and why it has taken society a long time to understand them and begin to put research and thought to addressing them. And it is why having some frameworks and good definitions are helpful to begin to examine our own exposure to other’s trauma, and the secondary (or direct) trauma that often goes along with that.
For your own wellness, it might be possible to go beyond the basics in the eight dimensions of wellness. It might be possible to identify what is uniquely dangerous to you, and have an honest conversation with yourself, or with a mentor or therapist. If you can realize you are prioritizing other people’s needs over your own and that you are over-tolerating being dismissed, or that you are indulging your feelings over the needs of others and that you are over-tolerating coercive conduct, that can be the start of addressing dangers that might be causing you harm which you are not aware of.
Authorities
This article is based primarily on the tenets of the Dynamic-Maturational Model of Attachment and Adaptation (DMM).
It is also based on elements of other biopsychosocial models such as Interpersonal Neurobiology and the work of Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, particularly his book The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma.
Stoewen DL. Dimensions of wellness: Change your habits, change your life. Can Vet J. (2017), Aug;58(8):861-862. PMID: 28761196; PMCID: PMC5508938. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5508938/.