By Reita Pendry
The Lawyer Assistance Program (LAP), through its professional staff and a large network of volunteers, provides free confidential assistance to lawyers, judges, and law students in addressing substance abuse, mental health problems, and other stressors that may impair the ability to practice law effectively. Robynn Moraites, LAP and Its Regulatory Purpose, North Carolina Bar Journal, Winter 2019, p. 12.
I am grateful to be a beneficiary of LAP’s services. I first encountered LAP when I retired from my job as an Assistant Federal Public Defender in Washington, D.C. and returned to North Carolina where I was raised. During the few years preceding the transition from D.C. to Charlotte, I made some bad personal and financial decisions. Struggling to reinvigorate my career in North Carolina, I found myself at a low point where the depression I had denied for years was impacting every aspect of my life.
I was no stranger to depression, but for most of my adult life, I ignored it. In highly stressful times, I hid behind my work. For a long time, I buried myself in work, so I didn’t have time to deal with the effects of the disease. I know now that many attorneys choose diving deeper into the job instead of recognizing and treating their depression. Statistics show that about half of all attorneys will experience depression at some point in their career, and about a quarter of them are currently suffering from the disease. The Prevalence of Substance Abuse and Other Mental Health Concerns Among American Attorneys, Patrick Krill, J.D., LLM, Ryan Johnson, MA, and Linda Albert, MSSW, published in the 2016 American Society of Addiction Medicine. According to the study, one of the main barriers to treatment is that study participants had concerns about privacy or confidentiality and did not want others to find out that they needed help. LAP is the answer to those fears.
As grace would have it, my need for continuing legal education credits took me to a LAP program where I met the program’s then-director. I started attending the LAP support group, and because I had family members who struggled with addiction, I was encouraged to attend Al-Anon meetings as well. Al-Anon is for people who do not have substance abuse issues themselves but who have friends or family members who do. LAP helped me heal from the depression I had not addressed over a very active legal career and helped me put my life back on track.
When I first start attending LAP and Al-Anon meetings, I listened to other participants and thought, “I’ll never tell those personal things about myself to anyone, and certainly not in a group!” For a while, as I listened to others, I very much related to their journeys. At some point, the desire to free myself of guilt, shame, and stigma overrode my natural reluctance to talk about myself and my problems to others. I didn’t feel pressured by the group to do so, but I did want what other people had – relief from the burden of silence.
In reflecting on the transformative power of the LAP, I think the opportunity to tell our stories plays a major role in the healing process. In a close-knit group of lawyers, all of whom experienced mental health issues or substance use disorders, I found a community that listened. Listened to the hows and whys of my situation without judgment or advice on how to fix the things that were wrong in my life. We all took a vow of confidentiality and for me, knowing what I shared would not leave the four walls of the meeting space allowed me to open up. This safe space gave me room to heal. The encouragement of LAP members gave me support to make decisions and to make changes.
LAP support groups allow for open sharing of experience, strength and hope, very much like 12-step meetings. And many of the members are actively working a 12-step program, as I was in Al-Anon. The Fourth Step encourages us to take an honest assessment of our character and our actions. The Fifth Step offers us the opportunity to share the inventory with a trusted person, most often a sponsor. Telling my life story at LAP meetings, and as I worked these steps, was a powerful process.
I don’t know how LAP and the underlying recovery process works to heal. But scientific research validates the power of storytelling. In the book, The Healing Power of Storytelling, by Annie Brewster, M.D., and Rachel Zimmerman, the authors relate how storytelling helps the seriously ill deal with their diagnoses, treatment and recovery. The research is compelling and hopeful.
Telling one’s story – being honest about emotional pain, being vulnerable, experiencing the compassion and empathy of fellow travelers – offers measurable benefits. Certain narrative themes like agency, communion, redemption, coherence and accommodative processing are linked to positive mental health. Id. 46.
Agency is the ability to impact the course of one’s life. Communion is the extent to which the narrator experiences close, supportive, and nurturing relationships. When narrators interpret bad experiences as having positive outcomes, this is redemption. Id. 47. Coherence means that, at their root, our stories make sense. They must provide enough details, psychological context, and relevance to show the overall purpose of the narrative. Id. 47-48. Accommodative processing is making our experiences meaningful. Id. 47. Storytelling increases resilience, the ability to adapt and persevere in the face of a challenge. Id. 47-48.
My experience with LAP mirrors the healing benefits documented in their research. After months of attending meetings, I came to feel that my story had value. I gained a sense of agency – I owned my story. It wasn’t pretty all the time, but it was honest. This agency gave me strength to look my mistakes in the eye and accept them. And in the telling, I made sense of what had happened. I gained a feeling of coherence – the patterns became clearer and their roots slowly emerged.
One of the best outgrowths for me was the sense of community. Telling my story helped me build connection. Each of us created a safe space for the others to bring their stories and lay them open. In doing so, I found a resilience I didn’t know I had. I grew stronger myself, and I grew stronger watching my fellow travelers grow stronger. The small circle of LAP lawyers and judges were first and foremost listeners. Their engagement with my story radiated empathy. The participants not only listened, but they shared their own stories. These exchanges helped me see that I was not alone. I was not the worst of the worst. My mistakes were damaging to me, but others had made equally damaging mistakes. We were all in the process of owning our mistakes and building back from them. The process inspired hope. I could trust that if others like me were able to come back from their own dark places, I could too.
A primary advantage for me was overcoming shame. I was a person who had every advantage – and my view was that I had squandered the blessings I’d been given. Hearing that people I admired, and for whom I had come to care, experienced the same feelings of shame, made me lighten up on myself. Much like a wound that needs air and light to heal. At least that was what it felt like for me.
Accommodative processing – perceiving the positive value of painful experiences – is the reason I became a writer. Today I choose to tell my story through my novels. I base my stories on my own life, as I guess all writers do. Not obviously, I hope, but subtly. Especially in my most recent series, the Cassandra Robbins mysteries, I use my experiences with LAP and Al-Anon to shape the characters and their actions. I hearken back to the days before I came to LAP and Al-Anon and weave depression and its consequences into the stories.
There are people in my life that have struggled and continue to struggle with addiction. I am able to deepen my healing when I incorporate the pain I have witnessed in the fight against addiction in my books and through my characters. When I am able to incorporate aspects of the pain I have witnessed in others fighting their demons in my characters, it heals. My protagonist, Cass, is a recovering alcoholic. In the first book in the series, her law partner is an active alcoholic. Working my experiences with LAP and Al-Anon into the story is one way I can let readers know about the hope found in recovery programs. In the first book, I added the websites for LAP organizations and AA and Al-Anon programs at the end of the book. I didn’t want to sound preachy, but I did want to let readers know that help was available if they or someone they cared about needed help.
Sometimes I write about events that caused me pain. Sometimes I write about events that were painful to people I love. In either case, the act of writing the stories is therapeutic. My perspective shifts by working out in the stories how other people resolve their conflicts. I don’t write stories because the act of writing is healing. I write to engage readers. But a positive by-product is that storytelling heals in a myriad of ways.
Reita Pendry is an author and a retired (inactive) NC and DC lawyer. She has been a LAP volunteer since 2005.