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© Copyright 2024 North Carolina Lawyer Assistance Program
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Welcome to Sidebar, brought to you by North Carolina’s Lawyer Assistance Program, where lawyers help lawyers by sharing their experience, strength, and hope as they delve into their personal journeys of recovery.
We’ll initiate and guide the conversation with lawyers and judges, who will share stories, insights, lessons, and tools discovered along the way with the intention of relieving the stress and stigma of talking about how life, mental health, and the practice of law have affected them, both personally and professionally.
We encourage you to listen to a few episodes, subscribe to our newsletter, and peruse the resources at www.nclap.org. And, if you know a lawyer who could use a hand, please share this podcast with them today. Remember, at Sidebar…you are not alone, in fact, you are in quite good company.
Tune in for the conversations, community, and camaraderie. Stay for the shared hope and humanity you discover.
We’ll initiate and guide the conversation with lawyers and judges, who will share stories, insights, lessons, and tools discovered along the way with the intention of relieving the stress and stigma of talking about how life, mental health, and the practice of law have affected them, both personally and professionally.
We encourage you to listen to a few episodes, subscribe to our newsletter, and peruse the resources at www.nclap.org. And, if you know a lawyer who could use a hand, please share this podcast with them today. Remember, at Sidebar…you are not alone, in fact, you are in quite good company.
Tune in for the conversations, community, and camaraderie. Stay for the shared hope and humanity you discover.
38 Episodes
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"Window of tolerance (WOT)" is a concept that is extremely useful when teaching attorneys and judges stress reduction and emotional regulation tools. It helps conceptualize a zone in which we have the bandwidth to tolerate the stressors and emotions inherent in the legal field. It also helps us identify alternate zones into which we get pulled when we are outside of this bandwidth. Read the full article.
What began as a quick Practice Perspective about the perils of having an attorney as a legal client evolved into a thoughtful reflection on this lawyer’s childhood trauma and resolution.Read the full article.
Are subconscious beliefs informing your decisions in the legal field? Read full article here.
This lawyer knew about LAP for years, but she hesitated to reach out because she thought she didn’t have “the bona fides.” She suspected her perfectionism and catastrophic thinking might be an issue, but those issues had been plaguing her since her childhood - long before she ever became a lawyer. Read the full article.Research study mentioned in this episode related to gender specific findings: Stress, drink, leave: An examination of gender-specific risk factors for mental health problems and attrition among licensed attorneys.
In this podcast episode, we interview Nora Rivas, co-author of the 50 Lessons book series. The lessons in the book provide a jumping off point for deeper study and each is aligned with our well-being mission at NC LAP. Ms. Rivas is a consultant in the well-being space. She offers coaching, CLE, and law firm consulting.
Grabbing an anchor is a simple yet effective tool to release us from our reactive survival strategies and return us to feeling and acting like our best selves. Read the full article.
Have you ever caught yourself thinking something negative over and over again and thought, “Why am I saying that to myself?” What if you could take that same unconscious, unhelpful looping pattern and turn it into a conscious, positive, self-help habit? Welcome to the world of mantra! Read full article here.
Little David, with his pitiful slingshot, vs. the mighty Goliath. In a nutshell, that's how it felt to me for much of my career as a public defender. Now, with years of recovery in Al-Anon, I realize that so much of my perception of my role as a defender was tied up in my codependency, my need to rescue, and my need to prove myself worthy. Not all defenders feel as I did and not all defenders choose that line of work for the reasons I did. But for those who have, I hope my story can shed some light on the unconscious motivations some of us experience. I have come to learn that, while the job of defender is unquestionably very stressful and tough emotionally, it was my unconscious motivations that were the deep root of my depression and prolonged suffering. Read the full article here.Surrender, a Cass Robbins Mystery.Amends, a Cass Robbins Mystery.
Alison practices real estate law during the day, goes to graduate school at night, and raises young twins around the clock. At times she gets so overwhelmed with the many directions in which she’s pulled that she gets stuck deciding what to do first. In those moments, she finds herself procrastinating. Instead of doing something, she ends up doing nothing of value, like scrolling on her phone or worrying about missing a detail. Read the full article.
This lawyer skated through life and always managed to get out of trouble. Faced with some real legal consequences, this lawyer worked with LAP to “look good” when the reckoning came but instead wound up with an amazing life. Read full article here.
Grounding is a practice that moves your attention out of your thinking mind and into the sensations in your body. Grounding interrupts rumination and is helpful because it dissipates feelings of anxiousness. Read full article here.
After his father left, this lawyer substituted Hip-Hop artists for father figures. After an arrest in his 1L year, he was referred to LAP. Through spoken word, an open letter to his pops, and a podcast interview, he opens up with profound insight and vulnerability about his inner transformation. Read the full article here.
Robynn and attorney Derek Dittmar explore the limitations of language for words like “disabled” and “impaired” and what it means to work in a profession not designed for you, as Derek shares his experiences as a blind attorney. Read full transcript here.
Where self-criticism erodes self-esteem and impairs our ability to think clearly, befriending ourselves does the opposite while also building self-confidence. Read full article here.
I’m ten years old and just won enough money performing in a group at a talent show to buy the toy I’d had my eye on for months. This is how the story of my first regret begins. Read full article here.
Thanks for joining us. Tune in next season.
“Inspiration” is an odd word to see written in the same sentence as “suicide.” Nevertheless, I was inspired to write this paper by a speaker at a recent webinar on well-being in law. Asked for her proudest accomplishment since joining a big law firm as its wellness officer, the speaker pointed unequivocally to the normalization of words such as “depression,” “anxiety,” and even “suicide.” She felt strongly that if we are ever to move past the pernicious stigma attached to mental health and substance use issues, we have to be able to say the words attached to such challenges out loud, without judgment, without that little pause to check internally whether we are at risk of dropping a hot potato into the conversation. Read full article here.
Think everybody else has figured out a special something that you have yet to discover? They haven’t. Worried secretly that you are, at best, deficient, at worst, a fraud that has no business practicing law, sitting on the bench, or holding your current position? You aren’t. And you are not alone. In fact, if I had to identify the most consistent complaint or issue that attorneys and judges struggle with, it is imposter syndrome. Read full article here.
Join us for an interview with Warren Savage, senior claims attorney at Lawyers Mutual, as he reflects on what he has seen with lawyer mental health over the years. In this episode Robynn and Warren reference 2013 FEO 8.
Humility is not a word commonly associated with lawyers, but it is something I learned in recovery, and found essential in the study and practice of law. When I got sober, the “old timers” taught me that humility was the process of being teachable. One old timer said “humility is not thinking less of yourself, but thinking of yourself less.” Read full article here.
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