Personal Stories

A Year in the Life of a Lawyer Wife

I am a wife. I am a lawyer. I am the wife of a lawyer. My father is a lawyer. My husband’s father is a lawyer. My first cousin on my mother’s side is a lawyer. If you have ever seen the movie My Cousin Vinny, you know where I am going here. Despite all […]

A Recovery Story: Get Off the Couch  

Mid-November 2000 I was lying on a couch in my office with the lights out, hoping the room would stop spinning. It was around 8:30 am and I found myself in the same situation again: hung over at work and desperate. I was desperate not to have to go to court and act like everything […]

Recovery as a Process

In September 2005 I was driving down I-95 to a Florida treatment center for what I believed would be a 90-day stay in beautiful South Florida. I really did not know much about where I was going or what I was going to do, but Ed Ward of the North Carolina Lawyers Assistance Program had […]

A Recovery Story: Alcoholism is a Family Disease

I am a Double-Winner.   For the uninitiated, that means that I am a member of both Alcoholics Anonymous and Al-Anon.  Al-Anon is for the friends and family of Alcoholics.   The focus of my story will be a little different than the kind of story you typically read.  These articles usually focus on how the disease of alcoholism, and subsequent […]

College and Law School Drinking

I made it through junior high school and high school drinking regularly on weekends.  I could drink a lot.  Miraculously, no one seemed to know how inferior I was and I was somehow elected as president of everything honor society, junior high, freshman, junior, and senior class, key club, and high school fraternity.  My grades were […]

Old Ideas and Stories

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 […]

A Recovery Story: Overcoming Barriers of Culture and Fear

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 […]

Suicide – A Misunderstood Tragedy

These articles are written by the family members of Mississippi lawyers lost to suicide.  But for the Grace of God these stories could be about anyone of us affected with these illnesses.  Rodney, Robert, and Portrait were real people, loving fathers, husbands, and lawyers.  Often our culture focuses on “the suicide.”  With these stories we […]

A Revealing Survey Sheds Light On The Well-being of Lawyers

Close to ten years ago, the members of the Consortium for Professional Recovery Programs began discussing a collaborative project to survey North Carolina professionals. This consortium, comprised of representatives from medicine, law, dentistry, pharmacy, psychology, nursing, and social work, met regularly to discuss methods to improve the behavioral health issues experienced by their professionals. The […]

Depression and Suicide: One Bar’s Story

In the years between 1984 and 1993, the Mecklenburg County Bar Association in Charlotte, NC lost eight members to suicide. Put in the context of my arrival as the bar’s first executive director in 1984, this translates to eight suicides in nine years. Seven men and one woman took their lives in that span of […]

A Recovery Story: Before and After

I didn’t consider alcohol as a remedy for my unhappiness and depression in high school.  I was introverted, although active in school activities, but I never felt like I belonged in social situations.  While my classmates were having fun outside the classroom, I was at home reading a book. I discovered alcohol when I was […]

A Recovery Story: Nothing to Lose, Life to Gain

I am forty-six years old and have been a lawyer since 1976. I practice in a Piedmont city. I concentrate in civil litigation. Martindale Hubbell has give me an “av” rating, which I consider to be almost meaningless but which I mention because it may help you identify with my type, whatever that is. I […]