Typically, I write this blog for the litigants, but this post is for the litigators.
Being a family law lawyer is a challenging endeavor. The subject matter is by its nature challenging. Unlike a criminal lawyer, who is litigating about a specific moment in time, family law cases are an examination of years or decades. In the course of a single case, you might need to skillfully handle very technical things like tax delinquencies and business valuations and very emotional things like an allegation of child or spousal abuse. These complex tasks are done while managing a client who is going through one of the most difficult times in their lives. To make matters even more complex, you have to run a business while doing all these things.
It is also possible you will have to do things like stay married or raise your own children in the midst of this.
Not small tasks.
The end result of being a family law attorney is a life where you are perpetually in the center of someone else’s crisis. People go through the emotional transformations of losing a partner, changing the relationship with their children, or changing their finances. Whether you intend to or not, you will inevitably come along for the ride.
This is not some touchy-feely statement. If you choose to go down this rabbit hole, you will find a substantial amount of research that shows you that you will physically and mentally change based on exposure to someone else’s stress. This is frequently referred to in the literature as “secondary trauma,” and I can tell you from my own life that it is a very real thing. It will impact you in several ways you see, and even more ways that you do not.
In law school, you might have heard someone say “leave your work at work.” In the abstract, that is good advice. In practice, it is virtually impossible to do. You cannot accompany human beings into this arena of law and simply turn it off when you hang up your jacket and walk out of the office door. Creating a meaningful separation – what you might call enough space to stay healthy and sane – requires a deliberate and skilled effort.
I feel fairly comfortable saying that you cannot do it on your own.
The hard truth of the matter is that most of the family law lawyers I see will defer their own self care because there is always someone else’s crisis around the corner.
This can create less obvious harms, like missing your child’s soccer game or putting off needed home maintenance, but it can also create life ending harms. I have personally lost one friend to what would have been a treatable cancer diagnosis if it had been caught earlier. When we talked about it, she would tell me that she had been symptomatic for a couple of years, but “just could not get away from the office.”
I have also lost several dear friends in the trade to different iterations of mental illness that ended in death, one way or another. I have lost many friends to substance abuse, and more than a few to suicide. In many of those cases, I thought to myself how preventable those losses might have been with some fairly basic self-care.
The process is made more difficult by the pervasive fiction that lawyers, as a profession, are supposed to “have their stuff together.” People by and large buy into the stereotype that a lawyer always has their affairs in order. We do very little to disabuse them (or ourselves) of that notion. Our offices are tidy, our appearances are well-kept, and both in and out of court, almost all of us present very well.
Those stereotypes do not afford us much space to be human beings. Few lawyers I know would be comfortable admitting to their colleagues that they need to get their finances in order or that their marriage is on the rocks. There’s an irrational fear that you might get “found out” for being less than perfect.
The problem with this sense of shame about being human is that it makes you truly alone. You do not reach out to others about your problems, so you do not get their practical help or emotional support. Isolation claims victims in the ways I outlined above.
One of my law partners gave me excellent advice shortly after I started working with her.
“Treat your vacations as seriously and sacredly as you would treat any trial.”
This is great life advice, because as advocates we will typically re-arrange our whole lives to make sure we can effectively show up for a trial. If that same seriousness is applied to keeping time off sacred, you benefit greatly.
In parting, I would perhaps take my partner’s advice a step further:
Treat your humanity with the same seriousness you would show a trial.
Spend time with your family. Do things you love. Go to the doctor. Go to the therapist. Take a mental health day. Allow yourself the grace to be messy and imperfect and admit the same to those around you. Maybe you will make a few bucks less, but you will be better for it, both as a person and an advocate.
Remember that at the end of the day, law is a support system for life and not the other way around.
Good luck.
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