Coming Back

This has been the longest break I have ever taken from this blog. There are several reasons for it, but most importantly, I have not been motivated to write, so I decided not to try to write for no reason. I also felt I was getting away from what this blog was originally designed to be – a way to integrate yoga and a professional life, in my case, a lawyer.

But these past few months have also taken me deeper into my practice than ever before. None of it has been “yoga” in the western definition of asana. It has not even really been a traditional yoga practice as I have described on this blog so many times.

But yoga means “to yoke.” It means union. And that is exactly the path I have been on these past couple of months.

I do not know if you have noticed, but this year has been even quicker than 2013, and it is not looking like it is going to calm down anytime in the near future. Somehow, in the midst of this craziness, we have to find a way to not just hang on for dear life but also to ride the waves doing what we want to do with our lives in a way that does not destroy us.

I have been reading several books about how we can learn from the body’s sensations and the way we move. This work comes in many forms: Feldenkrais, Hanna Somatics, Somatic Experiencing, Trauma Releasing Exercises, Neurogenic Yoga, Core Awareness, and Somatic Intelligence. And these are just the ones I have found. But they all have one thing in common – they are designed to help our bodies release trauma so we can heal.

I am finally seeing information about Vicarious Trauma (or Compassion Fatigue) take root in the legal profession. Other professions have known about this phenomenon a long time. I have a label about it for a reason – it’s important. But so much of what is being taught do not involve understanding the body’s piece of our trauma and stress. These past two months have been the deepest exploration of this phenomenon I have ever done, and I have not even begun to scratch the surface.

And yet, I knew I had to write about it. I knew I had to share it. Because I think this is the piece that is missing from so much of our discussions. Pain is rampant in society, particularly among professionals. There are too many reasons for its existence among professionals for me to go into right now, but we rarely talk about how trauma is stored in the body and what we can do to release it.

The most important step is just noticing. So many of us have trained ourselves not to feel, either our emotions or our bodies. But both of them eventually get to a point where they take over and force us to pay attention. Better to nip it in the bud ahead of time and begin to notice what our bodies are telling us.

And so, as you sit here and read this, notice your body. Just notice. Does it feel tense in one place? Does it feel fluid in another? Does it feel like it wants to move in ways you have not allowed because you’re staring at your computer or your phone? What happens when you take a moment to notice the sensations of your body?

Ask yourself what the sensations feel like. Do they feel hot or cold or neutral? Do they move, or are they static? If they move, do they move in circles or linearly? Is it stabbing? Is it shooting? Is it painful? Is it throbbing? Does it feel open? The body is constantly sending us signals, and we have done a wonderful job learning to tune them out. But tuning out the signals of our bodies rarely serves us.

And so, in this coming back to writing blog, I hope you can just take the time to notice the body. If emotions or thoughts come up with it, just go with them. Our bodies are messengers, and we just have to learn how to interpret. The most important step, however, is the first – awareness. Becoming aware of our bodies opens us up to possibilities we never knew existed. And then, being in our bodies, we can begin to find some grounding and calming as the world continues to move faster and faster.

I would love to hear what you feel and notice. Please share it in the comments.

Namaste!

© Rebecca Stahl 2014, all rights reserved.

The post, Coming Back, first appeared on Is Yoga Legal.

Starting Fresh and Forgiving the Trauma

I think we have all heard the word trauma. It probably means something different to each of us. This week, we marked the 12^th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, and I have been reading an interesting discussion about how people in the United States were traumatized differently if they were actually in New York, D.C., or Pennsylvania vs. the rest of us who “just” watched it on television. This year, we had a similar event, though smaller in numbers, with the Boston Marathon bombing.

But even without these major events on our own soil, if you’re an American reading this, most of us hear the news about what is happening in Syria and the rest of the Middle East. I have not seen the photos (I refuse to watch them because I do not think at this point I can handle them), but I know they are out there. I did watch the video of the woman dying in Egypt during their revolution in 2009. As if we do not have our own individual trauma, we now have a world of shared trauma. In an instant, we can be across the world watching someone die . . . over and over again.

On an individual level, we all have experienced our own personal trauma. Today, I was talking to a yoga therapist, and she asked me if I had trauma as a child. My response was, “don’t we all?” I mean, I looked back at some of the very intense physical issues I had to deal with as a very young child, and I see now how incredibly intertwined they are with my current physical situation. There are many people who believe, and I think rightly so, that birth itself is a trauma. And then, of course, there are the children and adults, who deal with ongoing physical, emotional, or sexual abuse. 

I rarely discuss the work I do on this blog. Part of that is because so much of it is confidential, but also because it is really not the specific point of this blog, and because I frankly think it would be unprofessional to get into anything beyond the most general. Trauma is a really big word in the juvenile court world. These days, the goal is to be a trauma-informed or trauma-responsive system. It is a noble goal, and one I do not think anyone takes lightly. The legal world is, therefore, focusing on this one word a lot. The military, and even the NFL, are talking about responding to traumatic brain injuries and PTSD.

The word trauma seems to be everywhere.

And I sometimes feel like we get lost in the word because we use it so much. Do we get desensitized to it because we talk about it so much? Do we forget sometimes real peoples’ lives are at stake below this word TRAUMA that seems to pepper every discussion we have?

I cannot stress enough how important it is to have these discussions, to help people accept that their trauma is real, and it is okay to experience the repercussions. It is important to have these discussions to find the best ways to work with trauma, and perhaps most importantly, to realize we can heal from trauma. I have written about this before in the context of healing professionals and vicarious trauma. But during this time to focus on forgiveness, I think it is important to look at trauma as something to forgive.

It is very easy to dwell on why things happen to us. It is very easy to dwell on how terrible it is that they happened.  It is very easy to be upset about decisions adults made in our lives when we were children when we think we would have made different ones. But the truth is that life happens. We all make the best decisions we can along the way. And as long as we hold onto the victim stance, our bodies will respond with dis-ease.

There is an entire aspect of yoga focused on trauma and how best to bring very traumatized people into yoga safely, so they can begin the healing journey. But regardless of who we are, yoga is going to force us to see our own trauma, whether we watched the Twin Towers fall, were beaten by a parent, or fell down one too many times as a child. We are going to face whatever good and bad experiences we have had in our lives, whether we want to face them or not. Yoga brings us to the brink of our humanness.

At times it can be very difficult to accept that we are still feeling the effects of what happened to us 5, 10, or even 50 years ago, but the truth is that we are. Some of us get really upset at ourselves for not healing, not getting better fast enough. But as someone said to me once, “what would you say to the child or the person in the moment they experience the trauma and the fear?” That is how we need to treat ourselves regardless of when the reaction to the trauma arises. We must learn to forgive the event, the people who we have told ourselves caused the event, and the fact that we are re-experiencing the event however many years after it occurred.

I have often wondered why the Jewish New Year is before the Day of Atonement. Would it not make more sense to let go of the past, ask for forgiveness, and then celebrate with the New Year? But as I look at it from this lens, I realize it does make sense.  In fact, it makes a lot of sense. The fact that the new year happens first reminds us that the world has already moved on. Now we just have to follow suit. We absolutely can move on and heal. We just have to do the actual work to allowing the healing to happen. And that is forgiveness.

We have to let ourselves forgive ourselves, each other, and the Universe for whatever we believe has caused us dis-ease during the year. And we can do this because we have already opened our hearts and attitudes to the idea that we have moved past it, that we are on a new path. And through forgiveness on so many levels we can begin to heal the trauma each and every one of us experiences, whether it be trauma or Trauma.

How are you forgiving the past? Yourself?

Namaste!

© Rebecca Stahl 2013, all rights reserved.

The post, Starting Fresh and Forgiving Trauma, first appeared on Is Yoga Legal.

Our Duty to One Another

The last several posts have all been focusing on vicarious trauma, and today’s post sticks to that theme, and looks at why our social community is one of the ways to navigate out of vicarious trauma. I was reminded recently that we have an ethical duty to one another as lawyers. We have a duty to tell the State Bar when another lawyer has violated the Rules of Professional Conduct. As far as I know, that duty exists among many professions. That may not appear to be a duty to each other, but that is because it only becomes a duty when the situation has become unethical. What if we had a duty to help each other before we ever get to that point?

One of the reasons I think lawyers are so affected by vicarious trauma, perhaps more than other helping professions, is because being a lawyer is a lonely endeavor. Law school, unlike business school, is a place to be alone. There are no group projects. There is little collaboration. If anything, there is an intense sense of competition among classmates. After all, class rank defines our future, we are told. We are asked, nay required, to hide our emotions and think “rationally.” We have duties of confidentiality that prohibit us from debriefing our difficult situations, as do many other helping professions. Even if we could talk to someone, who has the time? 

Vicarious trauma rears its head when we pull away from our social net and turn inward. Humans are social animals, and we need one another for survival, but when trauma takes over, the pull is away from that safety. Rationally it makes no sense, but the outside world becomes too difficult when we are living in a state of vicarious trauma. So we do the one thing we absolutely should not do – we pull away, deeper into that loneliness.

Should we only look out for one another when the pull away is so strong someone commits malpractice? Part of the reason I wanted to create this blog was to bring people together to have discussions. As of today, that has not happened. I have met some very interesting people, but the discussions among other strangers do not appear to be happening. But there is another way to connect. We can reconnect with those we already know.

Look around at your coworkers. Look around at opposing counsel. Look around at the other people with whom you interact. Who is acting differently? Who is pulling away? Who yelled at you this week for no apparent reason? Who has not returned your calls? Who made a snarky comment as you walked out the door?

That person may not be so terrible. That person may need your help.

What if our Code of Professional Responsibility included a duty to reach out a helping hand? What if our Code included a duty to bring each other back before we become just another statistic about how awful the legal profession is? Would that not serve all of us, and our clients, better than waiting until the conduct becomes so reprehensible that we have to report it to the State Bar?

Vicarious trauma is made worse by the fact that we have to hear traumatic event after traumatic event without ever processing the trauma ourselves. Instead, we have to look at the person talking about their awful experience and try to rationally find a way to deal with it. We cannot react to the trauma. We simply have to listen, express no emotion, and move on. Or worse, we have to be the ones to tell people that it is not as bad as they think. Usually we move on to more trauma.

We need to be able to process it. We need to be able to talk about it. And this is where someone else comes in. This is where our duty to one another becomes so important. We need to debrief. And we need to do it together. And we need to do it before these experiences become true vicarious trauma.

So, look around you again. Imagine your interactions over the past week. Who may need your helping hand? To whom do you owe a duty of reaching out? And are you the one who needs the helping hand? Reach out to a friend. Ask for the support you know you need. Let us take on this duty to each other today rather than make the dreaded phone call to the Bar tomorrow.

Have you ever reached out with a helping hand? Have you ever asked a friend for help when you needed it?

Namaste!

"Our Duty to One Another" is part of the series, "Overcoming Crisis Mode," in which we discuss the second-hand trauma associated with being a lawyer and specific ways to overcome it.

© Rebecca Stahl 2012, all rights reserved.

Navigating Out: Overcoming Vicarious Trauma

The last post was a bit of doom and gloom. I apologize. I wanted to write this post the very next day, so the doom and gloom would not last too long. This post is, therefore, the opposite – tools for overcoming vicarious trauma. Not surprisingly, a few of them, ok a lot of them, have graced these posts before, and many of them are related to yoga in some way.

Once again, vicarious trauma stems from experiencing other peoples’ trauma day-in and day-out, without the ability to come down from the physiological response. That physiological response is the fight-or-flight response caused by increased cortisol and adrenaline with the added benefit of the hyperarousal associated with PTSD. Thus, the ways to overcome vicarious trauma include ways to release those hormones and ways to create boundaries in ourselves to decrease the effect the repeated trauma has on us.

The first step, of course, is the intention to move beyond the stronghold it has on our lives.

The number one way to reduce adrenaline and cortisol in the body is to get oxygen to the brain. As discussed before, one symptom of vicarious trauma and long-term stress is shallow, quick breathing. The opposite is, of course, deep and slow breaths. Therefore, one of the simplest and most effective ways to calm the physiological response is deep breathing - calm and cool breathing. Here is a link to all the posts here that have discussed breath (including this one).  The other way to get oxygen into the brain is through aerobic exercise. We all know how good exercise is for us, but some people still do not know how effective it is for overcoming stress responses and even vicarious trauma. It is great! Take a walk. Go for a run! Go swimming! Just make sure to get the heart rate up and oxygen into the brain.

And while we are on the topic of “what your doctor would tell you to do even if you were not overly stressed and suffering from vicarious trauma,” we can talk about diet. I try to keep discussions about diet off this blog. People who know me in “real life” are tired of me talking about food, but here it is very important. What is the last thing people who live off adrenaline and cortisol need in their diets? Stimulants! What is in every office breakroom? Coffee and sugar – stimulants!

I drink too much coffee. I try not to eat sugar. But when I feel my body getting tired and overrun, the need for both kicks in. I know they will only make the problem worse, but the body craves energy when we refuse it the rest and calm it deserves. But remember that when the body is in fight-or-flight mode, digestion is the first thing to shut down. Even reducing the coffee and sugar intake can help the body relax, especially if you reduce them in the afternoons and evenings. Instead, try for some fresh fruit, vegetables, or nuts. Nuts have fat the brain needs to function, and when we provide the body with complete nutrition, the cravings diminish. They may not go away, but nuts, whole grains, fruit, and vegetables will keep the body moving without the constant need for stimulants.

The next step is balance and boundaries. One of the indicators of someone who will suffer from vicarious trauma is a lack of boundaries. We take work home with us. We take peoples’ problems home with us. Setting up boundaries to give work its time will open up space for our own personal time. And that leads to the rest of the steps.

It is vitally important to have hobbies. I know someone who has been working with children and families for almost 30 years, and guess what she talks about most? Her craft projects. As a mentor, she teaches many of us young lawyers to have a hobby. She calls it therapy. And she is absolutely right! What do you love to do? Is it knitting? Gardening? Running? Going to the movies? Going out to eat? Reading? Playing video games? Going to a religious or spiritual place? Yoga? Whatever it is, follow Nike’s advice – just do it!

And enjoy your activities with a friend. Humans are social creatures. Again, we would not be here as a species if not for our social interactions. We need them. We crave them. And the surest sign that vicarious trauma has overtaken your life is when you start pushing away the people you love. So bring them back. They may be a bit upset about your recent irritability, but let them know you need their help. Let them know you want them around you for something fun. And make a promise – do not talk about the trauma. At least not at the beginning. Just have fun! Do what you love! And do it with someone you love!

There are other steps and stages and ideas. But these are the big ones. Oxygenate the brain, decrease the stimulants in the body, increase boundaries and social interactions, and find something you love to do and do it. But try not to do them all at once. Pick one. Right now. Before you close this page. Are you going to take a 15-minute walk each day with a friend? Are you going to drink one less cup of coffee? Are you going to start doing photography again? Are you going to sit and breathe for five minutes each day?

Do you intend to overcome vicarious trauma? What are you going to do to start the upward spiral?

"Navigating Out: Overcoming Vicarious Trauma" is part of the series, "Overcoming Crisis Mode," in which we discuss the second-hand trauma associated with being a lawyer and specific ways to overcome it.

© Rebecca Stahl 2012, all rights reserved.

Recognition is the First Step

In the last post, we discussed the concepts of Vicarious Trauma and Secondary Shock. At a conference I attended last week, a presenter called it Compassion Fatigue. That is a lot of names for the same issue. But what is it? And what does it have to do with you? Most importantly, how can we know if it is affecting us?

As I mentioned before, I had not heard of this concept until after I graduated from law school. I loved law school (seriously, I did), but I find it unconscionable that I managed to graduate never having heard of this concept. Lawyers are four times as likely to be depressed as the general population. I knew that statistic, but I did not understand why. Of course, part of the problem is the hours, but I think it actually has more to do with Vicarious Trauma and Compassion Fatigue.

This is burnout on an entirely different stage. Burnout is not a lesser form of vicarious trauma, but it is something different. The difference between them is what causes each of them. Burnout comes from overwork or from a lack of support. It comes from stress that never dissipates. Vicarious trauma originates in the repeated interactions with people experiencing trauma. While some of the symptoms may look similar between burnout and vicarious trauma because they are both stress responses, the symptoms of vicarious trauma also include those  associated with PTSD.

I am not, in any way, minimizing the effects of burnout. It is painful and difficult and can be just as awful as vicarious trauma. My point is simply that they are different in kind. It is possible, and common, to suffer from both, but recognizing how each is different helps us recognize how best to overcome them on their own terms. And here we are focusing on vicarious trauma. In many ways, this entire blog is about burnout. In this series, however, I want to stay focused on the issues associated with vicarious traums.

What makes vicarious trauma unique is the trauma. It is the constant, repeated exposure to other peoples’ trauma. The person experiencing vicarious trauma gets there by being empathetic. Too empathetic. Empathy is the ability to put yourself in someone else's shoes, to put yourself in their situation. Too much empathy is wearing those shoes until the soles fall off. One of the first stages of compassion fatigue is an overzealous need to change the world. Sound familiar? That was the last post.

But overzealous leads to something else when we realize we cannot change the world overnight. And that’s the vicarious trauma. The symptoms follow many of the signs of primary trauma, though they are not always as intense . . . at first. Zealous excitement to change the world becomes cynicism, hopelessness and despair at the belief that change is possible. This leads to changes in our underlying belief structures, of ourselves, our family, our friends, and even our spirituality. Instead of believing we can change the world, we start believing we cannot change anything. 

Physiological signs include sleeplessness, irritability, guilt, anger, disgust, and fear. The downward spiral of email is a common side effect. Interestingly, someone with vicarious trauma experiences some PTSD-like symptoms including hyper arousal (at noise or startling events) and increased sensitivity to violence and other kinds of pain in the world. Watching the news becomes not mildly depressing but painful and nearly impossible.

And then this parade of horribles leads to relationship problems, social withdrawal, issues surrounding trust, and the favorite among lawyers – substance abuse! When your entire worldview is shattered by feeling that you cannot change anything, substances can numb the pain (alcohol) or keep you going long enough to keep on working, hoping you can get it back (cocaine and other stimulants). It starts to feel as though you never have time for yourself. You know you have to take care of yourself, but there is simply no time. There are other signs and symptoms, but these are the big ones.

But why? Where does all this originate? Why do these particular symptoms occur?

Cortisol! Once again, we are back to the fight-or-flight response. As I learned while being chased by a sea lion in New Zealand (hey, I had to add a bit of humor to this post), the fight-or-flight response is necessary to survival. We only exist because we respond to trauma with hypervigilance and what feels like superhuman strength. But we are not supposed to live in that state constantly. Cortisol and adrenaline shut down what are non-essential bodily functions. You know, digestion, rational thinking, creative thinking, and immunity. They do not sound too non-essential, do they? In their place, we get an increased heart rate, speedy and shallow breathing, and tensed up muscles. The natural cycle is to come down from that state, but vicarious trauma does not allow that natural cycle to occur. Instead, we live in that state of hyper-vigilance. And on top of the stress response, there is the fear response. Every sound freaks us out, and news reports bring us to tears. 

When our bodies live in that state, and continue to experience vicarious trauma, there is no coming down from it. And then it becomes a downward spiral. The lack of sleep precludes our bodies and minds from releasing the trauma, and then we need more stimulants to get us through each day, and then we retraumatize throughout the day, do not sleep, cannot release the trauma from the day before, and on, and on, and on.

Sound like someone you know? If you are interested, here is a link to a self-test you can take to see where you stand. Maybe you are not as bad off as you think. Maybe you are in a more heightened state of trauma. The key is knowing. Recognition is the first step.

The next post will be less of a downer and will offer some tips for overcoming vicarious trauma. But until then, do you see this in yourself? Do you see it in others?

Namaste!

"Recognition is the First Step" is part of the series, "Overcoming Crisis Mode," in which we discuss the second-hand trauma associated with being a lawyer and specific ways to overcome it.

© Rebecca Stahl 2012, all rights reserved. 

When Crises Leads to Trauma

The word lawyer has a lot of connotations in the non-legal community. Our reputation is created by daytime television ads, television drama, famous trials, and stand-up comedians. There is, however, on aspect of lawyering that seems to have evaded notice by the general populace. The legal profession, as a whole, is unhappy. This is not true of all lawyers, and it is not even necessarily true of the majority of lawyers. But there is something about lawyering that leads to a higher rate of depression and substance abuse than the general populace. 


But why?


I started thinking about this again because a friend of mine posted a really depressing article about lawyer depression on facebook. It is called, “Broken hearted idealists,” and it is written by a Kentucky Supreme Court Justice. It is absolutely worth reading, and here is the link. The article starts with a friend of the author’s committing suicide, the fourth of his friends in “recent years.”

His thesis is simple. Many lawyers go to law school to change the world, but it is not as easy as we had hoped. Instead, lawyers deal with crises, one after another. I have written about this before numerous times, but I think he explains it well.

Lawyers—most of them—are heroic. You go home at night with your problems. They go home with the problems of many. And then they deal with their own personal problems— sick children, an alcoholic spouse, or a parent who is deep in Alzheimer’s—layered over by the demands of clients and judges and other lawyers.

But worst of all for practicing lawyers is the sinking feeling which settles upon them that in all the struggles, in the thick of battle, it all amounts to nothing. The growing suspicion that all that they do makes no difference. . . . But they lose purpose. They lose hope.

The article is full of the statistics about depression and substance abuse in the lawyer population, but unfortunately, the author provides no solutions. This article ends dark and sad for those of us in this profession.

I will admit it; I went to law school to change a system I think is slowly changing for the better but needs to move at a much more rapid pace. I went to law school specifically to give children a voice. A real voice. And after six months, I often go home at night wondering whether I have done anything worthwhile. Nearly all my clients are in some form of acute crisis, or else they would not need a lawyer. 

What most people call burnout from dealing with clients in crisis day after day has another name – Second hand trauma or vicarious trauma. This concept has graced this blog before, but it needs some more discussion. It needs some more depth. Why here? Why in a blog?

Yoga is one of the best ways to overcome trauma, whether first hand or second hand. The universe has been sharing a lot of yoga blogs about trauma with me recently. Here is a link to a series on Trauma Sensitive Yoga, and here is another link to an interview by someone who teaches trauma yoga therapy (with links to other articles on teaching yoga to people with PTSD). In addition, a Tucsonan (I have to give Tucson a shout-out once in awhile) has written a book called, Yoga for Depression and teaches her techniques around the world. This is but the smallest introduction to a topic that is bursting at the seams.

Lying in savasana one night during my yoga teacher training, I was extremely relaxed and thought, “lawyers need this,” and this blog was born. But as it has grown over the past 2.5 years, something has changed. Yoga for lawyers is not just about learning to relax. It is not just about learning to sit at a desk. There is little that is easy about being a lawyer. We interact with people in crisis all day long. And we need an outlet.

Most of the lawyers I know really do want to be doing great work. They really do want to be helping people in crisis. They really do care about the people they serve. But it is difficult to face their crises every day without some balance, and unfortunately for many lawyers that means mind-altering substances. 

But it does not have to mean that. So with that, I am announcing a new series on this blog called, “Overcoming Crisis Mode.” Several older posts probably qualify, but going forward there will be new ideas from around the world of Vicarious Trauma experts and Yogis alike. I am tired of reading articles about the depressed legal profession and the suicides it is causing (the article here is not, by any means, the first I have read). Not all lawyers are depressed. Not all lawyers abuse substances. And most lawyers enjoy the work they do. 

Together, we can learn to give to our clients and take care of ourselves all at the same time.

How do you notice your clients’ crises becoming yours? Do you tend to get pulled into the darker areas of your being? Has yoga helped before?

Namaste!

© Rebecca Stahl 2012, all rights reserved.

When Crisis Leads to Trauma is part of the Series, “Overcoming Crisis Mode,” in which we discuss the second-hand trauma associated with being a lawyer and specific ways to overcome it.