A lawyer (let’s call him Joe) comes home every day and pours a big drink into a Bobcats cup, goes into his den and closes the door. Because his wife has been complaining about his drinking he has started keeping a bottle in the car, so he had had a couple of long pulls even […]
One of the leading mental health issues facing lawyers, including lawyers suffering from alcohol addiction or depression, is anxiety. Anxiety can be a terrible emotional experience. It is a feeling that something horrible is about to happen, that is not actually happening. A mechanism in our body has been triggered to put us into a […]
Society puts the burden of coming to grips with homicide on lawyers and the justice system. It is a lawyer’s job to prosecute the accused, try the case, and defend the accused. Yet, more people in America die of suicide than from homicide. Unlike the elaborate justice system, with its guaranteed right of appeal for […]
The Stories of fellow alcoholics are the fresh minted coins of survival. You pass yours to the next person in the hope he or she will see a gleam of their own life and find the reassurance of recovery. This is the story of a PALS member offered anonymously in that tradition. As I approach […]
More and more I see that getting help, being healthier, having greater joy begins with giving up an old idea. Some old ideas: That I can seek to regain the pleasure drinking once brought and not have problems with my health, my family, and being depressed. That because alcohol has been the solution most of […]
Denial is a big part of addiction. The step from denial into recovery is a huge one, and for women lawyers it is very large indeed. As a young associate in a private firm, I faced a terrible fear. That fear was about addiction. I had gone straight from college into law school and from […]
It was good to hear that many of you enjoyed the article on time. (Campbell Law Observer, Vol.l9, No.7, September, 1998). Your comments suggested I should try to dig a little deeper into several questions. What is the psychological understanding of disjuncture felt by time experienced as going t0o fast? What similarities, if any, does […]
We all struggle with denial. Denial is part of being human. It affects everything we do, the way we think, what we believe, and how we perceive our world. Denial is our ego’s way of dealing with realities that are painful or unpleasant. Denial shades our memories, prejudices our perception and manipulates our future. We […]
One of the great tragedies of alcoholism is the effect it has on so many others, particularly children. Children growing up in an alcoholic family are apt to suffer from an alcohol induced relationship intensity syndrome. Growing up in alcoholism, the child often develops an exaggerated need for emotional support in a primary relationship. The […]
“Man is nourished by that which is beyond the personal. He dies from preferring their opposites.” These are the concluding two sentences of Jacques Lusseyran’s book Against the Pollution of the I, which I discussed in this column last month. Today, I would like to explore what this means in legal education and how Lusseyran’s sentiment […]
In a healthy individual there are at least three stages one goes through in which service work is important to develop the personality. The first stage is the idealistic stage. It is important that young adults go through this stage. For the development of a healthy value system young people need to feel sufficiently strong […]
“Getting involved sexually with a man at work was like picking up a drink for me. I descended into a fog. When I was sexually acting out, I was oblivious to how my behavior was affecting other people and me. It made me susceptible to all the negativity in the office. I threw away my […]