By Adam Carvalho, Psychotherapist and Executive Coach, TCC
Lawyers, have you ever had a client who seems to ignore or forget your discussions or your instructions?
Acts in an unpredictable, often self-defeating way?
If this resonates, it may be that it’s not just down to them being ‘difficult’.
As an ex-lawyer and, now, psychotherapist and coach with a specialism in neurodiversity, I’m fascinated by the ways that we can understand some of the common issues which lawyers raise about their everyday work.
One of the most challenging aspects of legal practice is dealing with the clients who are in stressful situations.
More of this may be due to either neurodivergence, or could be understood as trauma responses, than you may think.
It can be useful to think about the links between conditions like ADHD, autism and dissociation and to understand the way that this could be impacting the interactions.
What is dissociation?
In dissociation, our experience becomes fragmented. This may result in feeling detached or a state of deep absorption. Your body may feel far away, or the world seem dreamlike; your attention may become completely absorbed in a piece of work or a book or game, or you might get memory gaps for parts of the day where you were not present.
Everyone dissociates a bit. For example, you walk to a tube station and realise, as you find a seat, that you have been a million miles away. Or you scroll on your phone and suddenly half an hour has passed by. Most people will also have at least one experience in their life where everything seems dreamlike or unreal. In some cases, more serious/chronic conditions can emerge (such as dissociative identity disorder).
Dissociation at the “milder” end of the spectrum is not unhealthy or problematic. It can be the result of enjoyment and absorption. Or it can be a way of protecting yourself from experiences which feel too threatening, too overwhelming, too unsafe – we zone out and go elsewhere to maintain some stability. Many of our clients will experience dissociation at one time or another in response to stressful legal processes.
Neurodiversity
I provide psychotherapy and coaching to both adults and children / young people with a range of neurodivergences. One of the aspects which I think is so underappreciated – and which really becomes clear when you’re working with children – is that neurodiversity isn’t really about thoughts or, even, the mind. It is equally about your body, your senses and how you experience the world.
We all have the usual five senses (sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch). The lesser known aspect is that there are three other senses: interoception (an awareness of our internal state), proprioception (an awareness of our body in space) and vestibular (a sense of balance). For some people, it’s relatively straightforward to balance these senses. Many neurodivergent people, however, have significantly heightened or lowered senses. I might see, for example, a client with a particularly sensitive sense of smell but a lowered sense of interoception. They would be able to hear sounds, and subtleties in music, which most people can’t but may, for example, struggle to pick up signals that they are hungry and thirsty. And they may become very overwhelmed by a level of noise that most people would find completely normal (or even fun) like a packed classroom.
People with sensory issues are constantly trying to achieve a balance (“homeostasis”). Too much sensory input will put huge stress on their bodies and lead either to “meltdown” (and either a fight or flight response) or “shutdown” (where the speech goes wonky, bodily movements may become less coordinated and everything goes blurry). Think of a computer with way too many open tabs.
Why do lawyers need to know about this?
At TCC, we support you, the lawyers. We combine a deep understanding of the actual practice of law with a knowledge of the therapeutic issues that arise in personal relationships. One of the crucial areas that has emerged is helping lawyers to understand the different types of clients they deal with. For example, it will be very difficult, perhaps impossible, to have a “rational” interaction with someone who is masking a meltdown or shutdown situation.
We’ve all had clients who seem to take difficult situations in their stride and appear relatively unaffected. And we’ve also all had clients who are the opposite. They ignore advice, they reopen old discussions, they do things you’ve discussed avoiding, they act erratically and swing between different positions. They agree one thing one day and flip 180 degrees the next.
Looking at such people through a “neuro-affirming” lens means understanding that, in these very stressful and, potentially, overwhelming situations, the body may shutdown or dissociate. You may be speaking with a person who is experiencing a foggy and dreamlike world, or a sense of unreality, or even a person who seems to be present but may remember little of the conversation.
We’re not suggesting for a moment that lawyers should need to be able to diagnose these conditions. Rather, the way that we have these conversations and interact with clients may need to become increasingly informed by the way that we know certain nervous systems will react to, and protect itself from, overwhelming, threatening and frightening experiences.
If you’d like more information about how to work with clients in a neuroaffirming and psychologically-informed way, whether through coaching, reflective practice or training, get in touch today! support@carvalhotherapy.com
