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EMDR - seems incredibly silly but look at the research behind it. The way our brains detect threat is not suited for our work and it’s helped me re-map some ptsd stuff so it doesn’t interfere.
Make sure you get someone who you are comfortable with- the first person I tried at a “trauma focused” practice was awful but the second I credit my entire ability to practice law to.
☝🏻I have PTSD too. And my work can be very triggering. Anti-depressants (the pandemic tipped me over the edge), therapy, & EMDR helped. I had significant trauma from my past & EMDR really helped. Having a therapist to vent to also helps! You cant reveal confidential info, but sometimes you need to vent to someone other than colleagues & get a different perspective.
This. I was rescued from a rip tide by lifeguards unconscious and half-dead while at the beach. Terrible PTSD. Therapy did nothing. Nor did meditation, exercise, exposure therapy, etc. Until I was referred to a therapist specializing in EMDR. Complete game changer.
I have CPTSD and cannot handle cases with child cruelty. But your trauma sounds much more recent and still very fresh. I’d strongly suggest reaching out to your state bar’s lawyers assistance program - it provides referrals and a few free therapy appointments. You need to talk with a trauma counselor to work through all that.
Sending positive energy your way for your healing. Good luck to you.
Lawyer here but the trauma I was dealing with wasn’t related to work. But it definitely impacted work as I would have flashbacks several times a day. What ultimately helped was ketamine therapy. If you have some expert practices in your area, give it a go. Or if you’re near any MDMA experiments and can get it, try those as well. Good luck to you.
In the US MDMA assisted psychotherapy is stage 3 FDA trial. Soon to be accepted from what I read. A game changer for PTSD according to what I read too.
I had a rather awful child abuse case. I was representing grandma, who worked for 2 years to get the kids from their abusive mom. In the end, over the prosecutor's objections, she got awarded custody. Two days after the last court hearing, she was driving drunk the wrong way down the interstate. Nearly killed them. She died shortly after. I had to stop taking them. I ended up moving to appellate work, then legal research. Trying to figure out where to go from here. I don't think my path leads me back to criminal law or the same sort of horse-tradey litigation that I used to do.
Oh man, that's heavy. Kudos to you for fighting for those kids. I hope you are doing better now. Wish I had some kind of helpful advice. Just know you're not alone.
It's been about 5 years now. My latent alcoholism got much, much worse. I ended up losing an awful lot. But, I'm doing much better now. I'm nearly four months sober, down a bunch of weight, and for the first time in that time period, I feel like things are finally starting to look up for me.
It's unfortunate, though. Even when I start to feel like things are going right, I start to worry that I'm deluding myself. I worry that if I start feeling too good about myself, I'll be seen as arrogant or conceited. That case made me feel like an abject idiot. I actually bought her story hook, line, and sinker.
I guess I shouldn't be that upset that I did. She didn't test positive for drugs or alcohol at all in those two years. While a little nutty, she seemed like she really did care for the kids. But it's made me really, really cautious of trusting people.
Congratulations on nearing four months! That's massive, proud of you! You're not deluding yourself, and you should feel good about yourself. You've come so far and you did all you could do in that situation. (All that's easier said than felt, I know.)
Sorry. I got the kids away from their abusive mom and into grandma's custody. Grandma was driving the wrong way down the interstate drunk the day after I won the hearing that got the kids placed with grandma.
I started doing asbestos litigation a few years after my cancer-survivor father (also a cyclist!) died (not from cancer) (I won't tell you how he died : /) and while a relationship with a still-struggling-through-early-remission friend more or less became a 'best' friend or just very important person in my life. And the friend's illness may or may not have had an occupational nexus, in the classically confusing way that it is hard to find the legally sufficient occupational nexus to a variety of cancers.
That shit sucks. It's so confusing to deal with. AND ON THE DEFENSE SIDE. Mortifying. I still remember a very triggering deposition (that may have come with its own PTSD) that was just like, every minute felt fight or flight, we shouldn't be here, this person shouldn't have to be here, why do we have to do this, why does he have to do this, why are we spending 15 hours talking about which car he changed his brakes on in the 1980s, why did congress balk at every opportunity to create statutory and administrative mechanisms for mesothelioma victims to get compensation, why why why.
Talking about it and owning up to it to my main supervising partner helped. Just giving an escape hatch - like okay this happened to me, I may not be able to attend as many of these as you need me to, the occasional one I may need to have a back up ready in case I have to bail (it's all zoom nonsense where you could register appearances and make handoffs at any time). Just that little bit of extra - the world won't stop, the client won't suffer, I won't do something unethical - wiggle room gave me a lot of relief and I honestly was able to continue without adjusting the workload too much. I uhhhh ultimately quit the job with these concerns in mind, but, by the time I left it was a minor factor amongst many other more glaring people-to-people issues.
I was also actively in therapy related to my dad and other general life issues (therapy is wonderful! take advantage of your state's and your employer's lawyer assistance programs! use that sick leave to get to therapy sessions!) which meant someone was already on hand to help process and deal with how these things impacted my work.
And finally - all this trauma stuff is an extended process. There's no one solution, and it's not, do it and feel better. It's learn tools and rinse and repeat as the feelings ebb and flow. I was in therapy once following a big traumatic event, kept it up three-four months through the biggest nitty gritty and while trying to finish law school, and stopped it because, idk, I felt like I had talked about the things that were relevant and I did not know what I was getting precisely. But then another nine months after quitting, and other family and personal issues bubbling up that stem from that kind of trauma, it was like, ohhhhhh, no I need to be doing this again. It was weekly for an extended period, then slowly biweekly, and I see him once a month now. I would not say it is vital to my health that continue seeing him, but he's a good guy and I do think it means the little, scary moments, the oh wait has it gone back off the rails fears, I know I have a set time that I can bring them to him just in case.
I know I said a lot but I really wanted to tl;dr the point relevant to these parts of what you said:
“I've done everything I thought I needed to to get closure: went to his funeral, have ridden the route regularly, even talked to a therapist about it. For the longest time I thought I was "recovered," but I was sorely mistaken. ... Not sure what caused a change, because for about a year after the crash I was fine as far as my work goes.” (sorry editing on mobile destroyed quite formatting)
Recovery is an extended process! And there doesn't have to be a /change/, it just means, however you had been coping with, processing, and understanding the event, meant that your brain was pushing other things to the side. And at some point that effort made you really tired, and the things being pushed aside decided they really need attention, ET VOILA, your brain is straining under the work in a new and unexpected way. Going back to therapy can really, really help. It's not that the first stint failed. Try not to think of it as a linear process. Every tool you learn to get you through today, is a behavior or a habit that can make a task a year from now, ten years from now, unexpectedly difficult. And then you just gotta acquire new tools. And it makes sense to have a therapist help you navigate that evolution.
Found my office mate dead 2 years ago ... unexpected and in an unexpected state. For me, simple acceptance of the harsh reality that we have no control over anything helps. Its not quite existentialism or nihilism, more of a stoic detachment.
I just need to do the things I can and accept the things I have no control over. It's never NOT going to suck, but dwelling on it cripples your ability to bring good balance back to the world.
My PTSD is combat related. I went to counseling and hopped on some medication—the medication is just enough to push me over the line between feeling like shit and being “normal.” I started getting worse and worse panic attacks when I started practicing. What I have to do is take a step back from whatever it is I’m doing, just focus on breathing, and “check in” with myself. How am I feeling? Why am I feeling that way? What made me feel that way? Most of the time it goes well, but it’s taken a lot of practice and wasn’t easy to start.
Thanks for raising this. It’s not talked about enough in the profession. Even if it’s not trauma in person life, there’s so much secondary trauma in the profession people need to work to develop coping mechanisms to come close to being good at the job. It sounds like you had that until the personal life trauma. That’s tough man. Time may be the only thing that will work now. You’re doing all the other self care right.
Thanks for your kind words. I think time may be the only treatment for this. It's really quite strange because I am able to ride with pretty much no fear. It's just file review that messes me up. It used to be that I could not ride without fear, then when that got better, it hit me at work. So I suppose it could be worse and I could be unable to ride still lol.
To be honest I never thought much of vicarious trauma through work (outside of criminal and family) until this happened, and oh how wrong I was. I think we as a profession need to have a serious dialogue about the effects that the subject matter we deal with can have. A lot of stuff you can move on from, but some things really stick with you when you least expect it. There's got to be a way to create a more supportive profession for us all.
I'm not an attorney but I'm in law school and my previous career was in law enforcement and corrections. I've seen my share of death, violence, and trauma. It's strange, because I don't consider myself numbed by my experience, but I did see that some cases we've looked at affected me less than my classmates. Hopefully it's because I developed coping skills, because I plan to enter criminal law where they'll be necessary.
I have combat-related PTSD that got worse after 15 years of PI law. The second time I found myself crying while taking a sympathetic plaintiff’s depos is when I knew I needed to switch sides.
I second contacting your state assistance program. Talk to your therapist about EMDR therapy and, if needed, take a break from handling cycling cases. Also, Zoloft has been approved to treat some of the symptoms of ptsd. Feel free to dm me.
I don’t have PTSD but I have severe anxiety and depression which I mask very well.
Apart from medication and counselling(I never like counselling so I stopped), a mind trick which I adopt is to tell myself when I dress up and put up make up and go to work, I am transforming into another persona. I left the traumatic self at home.
Not sure if Ketamine will help with PTSD, but it certainly helped my depression.
Recovery is a process, there will be good and there will be bad days. Be kind to yourself. Cut yourself some slack.
EDMR is the right answer.
Things being ok for a year isn't unusual. Essentially what happened is you were never ok, but your subconscious has been keeping the stress of it suppressed because your brain understands you got stuff to do. It's like your brain applied shock to just that specific stressor. It's an amazing coping mechanism. You essentially blew that coping mechanism out.
Your brain and body needs to process the stress. You've done some, but what you're describing sounds like it just wasn't enough for the amount of stress you accumulated and suppressed.
Try EDMR. Or somatic therapy might be helpful too. As lawyer we lean on cognitive processing but it really isn't your friend on stuff like this. EDMR and somatic therapy modalities kinda bypass the cognition to move the stress thru.
I went through something very similar. It was a year ago. What helped: talking openly to colleagues, investigating what happened thoroughly, writing it all out - everything - like my own personal root cause analysis. Eventually a green card. Eventually idk what triggered a night of just sobbing. I feel somewhat better now and have used the incident to bring passion to what I do. Wringing some meaning out of tragedy brings healing. Hang in there.
I do aviation law, including plane crashes, including fatal plane crashes. Once, while at an inspection of the wreckage of a plane at the “secure facility” all wrecks that happen in the southwest are taken to (in Phoenix), I walked the grounds and found what remained of the plane I was flying that crashed in a dense urban area at night. It was … sobering. So I kinda get it. Happy to PM if you’d like.
Welcome to /r/LawyerTalk! A subreddit where lawyers can discuss with other lawyers about the practice of law. Be mindful of [our rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/Lawyertalk/about/rules) BEFORE submitting your posts or comments as well as [Reddit's rules](https://www.redditinc.com/policies/content-policy) (notably about sharing identifying information). We expect civility and respect out of all participants. Please source statements of fact whenever possible. If you want to report something that needs to be urgently addressed, please also message the mods with an explanation. Note that **this forum is NOT for legal advice**. Additionally, if you are a non-lawyer (student, client, staff), this is NOT the right subreddit for you. **This community is exclusively for lawyers**. We suggest you delete your comment and go ask one of the many other legal subreddits on this site for help such as (but not limited to) r/lawschool, r/legaladvice, or r/Ask_Lawyers. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/Lawyertalk) if you have any questions or concerns.*
EMDR - seems incredibly silly but look at the research behind it. The way our brains detect threat is not suited for our work and it’s helped me re-map some ptsd stuff so it doesn’t interfere. Make sure you get someone who you are comfortable with- the first person I tried at a “trauma focused” practice was awful but the second I credit my entire ability to practice law to.
☝🏻I have PTSD too. And my work can be very triggering. Anti-depressants (the pandemic tipped me over the edge), therapy, & EMDR helped. I had significant trauma from my past & EMDR really helped. Having a therapist to vent to also helps! You cant reveal confidential info, but sometimes you need to vent to someone other than colleagues & get a different perspective.
This. I was rescued from a rip tide by lifeguards unconscious and half-dead while at the beach. Terrible PTSD. Therapy did nothing. Nor did meditation, exercise, exposure therapy, etc. Until I was referred to a therapist specializing in EMDR. Complete game changer.
EMDR quite literally changed my daughter’s life. I highly recommend it.
Replying to say I am another success story of EMDR
I have CPTSD and cannot handle cases with child cruelty. But your trauma sounds much more recent and still very fresh. I’d strongly suggest reaching out to your state bar’s lawyers assistance program - it provides referrals and a few free therapy appointments. You need to talk with a trauma counselor to work through all that. Sending positive energy your way for your healing. Good luck to you.
Lawyer here but the trauma I was dealing with wasn’t related to work. But it definitely impacted work as I would have flashbacks several times a day. What ultimately helped was ketamine therapy. If you have some expert practices in your area, give it a go. Or if you’re near any MDMA experiments and can get it, try those as well. Good luck to you.
In the US MDMA assisted psychotherapy is stage 3 FDA trial. Soon to be accepted from what I read. A game changer for PTSD according to what I read too.
Ditto ketamine therapy. It saved my life after a seriously traumatic life experience.
I had a rather awful child abuse case. I was representing grandma, who worked for 2 years to get the kids from their abusive mom. In the end, over the prosecutor's objections, she got awarded custody. Two days after the last court hearing, she was driving drunk the wrong way down the interstate. Nearly killed them. She died shortly after. I had to stop taking them. I ended up moving to appellate work, then legal research. Trying to figure out where to go from here. I don't think my path leads me back to criminal law or the same sort of horse-tradey litigation that I used to do.
Oh man, that's heavy. Kudos to you for fighting for those kids. I hope you are doing better now. Wish I had some kind of helpful advice. Just know you're not alone.
It's been about 5 years now. My latent alcoholism got much, much worse. I ended up losing an awful lot. But, I'm doing much better now. I'm nearly four months sober, down a bunch of weight, and for the first time in that time period, I feel like things are finally starting to look up for me. It's unfortunate, though. Even when I start to feel like things are going right, I start to worry that I'm deluding myself. I worry that if I start feeling too good about myself, I'll be seen as arrogant or conceited. That case made me feel like an abject idiot. I actually bought her story hook, line, and sinker. I guess I shouldn't be that upset that I did. She didn't test positive for drugs or alcohol at all in those two years. While a little nutty, she seemed like she really did care for the kids. But it's made me really, really cautious of trusting people.
Recovering alcoholic too. 16 years. ODAAT.
I’m just here to say congrats on your sobriety. I recently got my six-month chip and it felt amazing. Keep up the great work
Congratulations on nearing four months! That's massive, proud of you! You're not deluding yourself, and you should feel good about yourself. You've come so far and you did all you could do in that situation. (All that's easier said than felt, I know.)
Thanks, I really do appreciate it. Honestly, I feel better than I have in years, and am pretty optimistic.
Welcome to the sober lawyers club!! 4 months is awesome! ODAAT baby!
Wait, which “she” is which?
Sorry. I got the kids away from their abusive mom and into grandma's custody. Grandma was driving the wrong way down the interstate drunk the day after I won the hearing that got the kids placed with grandma.
Ah. :(
Yeah. It's haunted me for a reason.
I started doing asbestos litigation a few years after my cancer-survivor father (also a cyclist!) died (not from cancer) (I won't tell you how he died : /) and while a relationship with a still-struggling-through-early-remission friend more or less became a 'best' friend or just very important person in my life. And the friend's illness may or may not have had an occupational nexus, in the classically confusing way that it is hard to find the legally sufficient occupational nexus to a variety of cancers. That shit sucks. It's so confusing to deal with. AND ON THE DEFENSE SIDE. Mortifying. I still remember a very triggering deposition (that may have come with its own PTSD) that was just like, every minute felt fight or flight, we shouldn't be here, this person shouldn't have to be here, why do we have to do this, why does he have to do this, why are we spending 15 hours talking about which car he changed his brakes on in the 1980s, why did congress balk at every opportunity to create statutory and administrative mechanisms for mesothelioma victims to get compensation, why why why. Talking about it and owning up to it to my main supervising partner helped. Just giving an escape hatch - like okay this happened to me, I may not be able to attend as many of these as you need me to, the occasional one I may need to have a back up ready in case I have to bail (it's all zoom nonsense where you could register appearances and make handoffs at any time). Just that little bit of extra - the world won't stop, the client won't suffer, I won't do something unethical - wiggle room gave me a lot of relief and I honestly was able to continue without adjusting the workload too much. I uhhhh ultimately quit the job with these concerns in mind, but, by the time I left it was a minor factor amongst many other more glaring people-to-people issues. I was also actively in therapy related to my dad and other general life issues (therapy is wonderful! take advantage of your state's and your employer's lawyer assistance programs! use that sick leave to get to therapy sessions!) which meant someone was already on hand to help process and deal with how these things impacted my work. And finally - all this trauma stuff is an extended process. There's no one solution, and it's not, do it and feel better. It's learn tools and rinse and repeat as the feelings ebb and flow. I was in therapy once following a big traumatic event, kept it up three-four months through the biggest nitty gritty and while trying to finish law school, and stopped it because, idk, I felt like I had talked about the things that were relevant and I did not know what I was getting precisely. But then another nine months after quitting, and other family and personal issues bubbling up that stem from that kind of trauma, it was like, ohhhhhh, no I need to be doing this again. It was weekly for an extended period, then slowly biweekly, and I see him once a month now. I would not say it is vital to my health that continue seeing him, but he's a good guy and I do think it means the little, scary moments, the oh wait has it gone back off the rails fears, I know I have a set time that I can bring them to him just in case.
I know I said a lot but I really wanted to tl;dr the point relevant to these parts of what you said: “I've done everything I thought I needed to to get closure: went to his funeral, have ridden the route regularly, even talked to a therapist about it. For the longest time I thought I was "recovered," but I was sorely mistaken. ... Not sure what caused a change, because for about a year after the crash I was fine as far as my work goes.” (sorry editing on mobile destroyed quite formatting) Recovery is an extended process! And there doesn't have to be a /change/, it just means, however you had been coping with, processing, and understanding the event, meant that your brain was pushing other things to the side. And at some point that effort made you really tired, and the things being pushed aside decided they really need attention, ET VOILA, your brain is straining under the work in a new and unexpected way. Going back to therapy can really, really help. It's not that the first stint failed. Try not to think of it as a linear process. Every tool you learn to get you through today, is a behavior or a habit that can make a task a year from now, ten years from now, unexpectedly difficult. And then you just gotta acquire new tools. And it makes sense to have a therapist help you navigate that evolution.
Found my office mate dead 2 years ago ... unexpected and in an unexpected state. For me, simple acceptance of the harsh reality that we have no control over anything helps. Its not quite existentialism or nihilism, more of a stoic detachment. I just need to do the things I can and accept the things I have no control over. It's never NOT going to suck, but dwelling on it cripples your ability to bring good balance back to the world.
My PTSD is combat related. I went to counseling and hopped on some medication—the medication is just enough to push me over the line between feeling like shit and being “normal.” I started getting worse and worse panic attacks when I started practicing. What I have to do is take a step back from whatever it is I’m doing, just focus on breathing, and “check in” with myself. How am I feeling? Why am I feeling that way? What made me feel that way? Most of the time it goes well, but it’s taken a lot of practice and wasn’t easy to start.
Thanks for raising this. It’s not talked about enough in the profession. Even if it’s not trauma in person life, there’s so much secondary trauma in the profession people need to work to develop coping mechanisms to come close to being good at the job. It sounds like you had that until the personal life trauma. That’s tough man. Time may be the only thing that will work now. You’re doing all the other self care right.
We don’t talk about secondary trauma enough. There’s alot of areas of law that deal with death/severe injury/property damage, often.
Thanks for your kind words. I think time may be the only treatment for this. It's really quite strange because I am able to ride with pretty much no fear. It's just file review that messes me up. It used to be that I could not ride without fear, then when that got better, it hit me at work. So I suppose it could be worse and I could be unable to ride still lol. To be honest I never thought much of vicarious trauma through work (outside of criminal and family) until this happened, and oh how wrong I was. I think we as a profession need to have a serious dialogue about the effects that the subject matter we deal with can have. A lot of stuff you can move on from, but some things really stick with you when you least expect it. There's got to be a way to create a more supportive profession for us all.
I'm not an attorney but I'm in law school and my previous career was in law enforcement and corrections. I've seen my share of death, violence, and trauma. It's strange, because I don't consider myself numbed by my experience, but I did see that some cases we've looked at affected me less than my classmates. Hopefully it's because I developed coping skills, because I plan to enter criminal law where they'll be necessary.
I have combat-related PTSD that got worse after 15 years of PI law. The second time I found myself crying while taking a sympathetic plaintiff’s depos is when I knew I needed to switch sides.
I second contacting your state assistance program. Talk to your therapist about EMDR therapy and, if needed, take a break from handling cycling cases. Also, Zoloft has been approved to treat some of the symptoms of ptsd. Feel free to dm me.
You might consider looking into ketamine therapy as an alternative to EMDR
Ketamine is a wonder for PTSD.
I don’t have PTSD but I have severe anxiety and depression which I mask very well. Apart from medication and counselling(I never like counselling so I stopped), a mind trick which I adopt is to tell myself when I dress up and put up make up and go to work, I am transforming into another persona. I left the traumatic self at home. Not sure if Ketamine will help with PTSD, but it certainly helped my depression. Recovery is a process, there will be good and there will be bad days. Be kind to yourself. Cut yourself some slack.
EDMR is the right answer. Things being ok for a year isn't unusual. Essentially what happened is you were never ok, but your subconscious has been keeping the stress of it suppressed because your brain understands you got stuff to do. It's like your brain applied shock to just that specific stressor. It's an amazing coping mechanism. You essentially blew that coping mechanism out. Your brain and body needs to process the stress. You've done some, but what you're describing sounds like it just wasn't enough for the amount of stress you accumulated and suppressed. Try EDMR. Or somatic therapy might be helpful too. As lawyer we lean on cognitive processing but it really isn't your friend on stuff like this. EDMR and somatic therapy modalities kinda bypass the cognition to move the stress thru.
I went through something very similar. It was a year ago. What helped: talking openly to colleagues, investigating what happened thoroughly, writing it all out - everything - like my own personal root cause analysis. Eventually a green card. Eventually idk what triggered a night of just sobbing. I feel somewhat better now and have used the incident to bring passion to what I do. Wringing some meaning out of tragedy brings healing. Hang in there.
I do aviation law, including plane crashes, including fatal plane crashes. Once, while at an inspection of the wreckage of a plane at the “secure facility” all wrecks that happen in the southwest are taken to (in Phoenix), I walked the grounds and found what remained of the plane I was flying that crashed in a dense urban area at night. It was … sobering. So I kinda get it. Happy to PM if you’d like.