Chronic Exposure
Many practice areas are saturated with trauma, putting everyone (judges, lawyers, support staff) at risk for compassion fatigue, burnout, and vicarious or secondary trauma regardless of personal history. The symptoms of prolonged stress disorder and secondary trauma mirror those of PTSD, whereby practitioners who have no history of personal trauma begin to display similar symptoms to trauma survivors. Symptoms can include anxiety, hypervigilance, dysregulated emotional states, over-reacting, isolation, intrusive thoughts/flashbacks to cases, and feelings of dread or imminent harm.
Prolonged Fight/Flight/Freeze/Fawn Response
The fight/flight/freeze/fawn response in our body is an immediate survival response to a known or perceived threat. Think of a lion chasing a zebra. The hormones and neurotransmitters secreted in the blood of the zebra allow it to harness and produce an incredible amount of energy. The zebra is literally running for its life. Well, that same chemical response is happening in our bodies and brains, too, day in and day out as a chronic condition. The problem is that this acute stress response is not meant to be a prolonged response in our bodies or brains. We aren’t designed for that. If we are not aware of what’s happening and do not employ strategies specifically targeted to dispel this energy and restore ourselves to a normal baseline, we can begin to slide into empathy strain, compassion fatigue, vicarious or secondary trauma, and burnout.
Neurological Dysregulation and Toxic Stress Response
Once we start crossing the line into empathy strain, compassion fatigue, or vicarious or secondary trauma, we begin to display PTSD symptoms like hypervigilance and a hyperadrenalized response to daily stressors. We overreact. We lash out. We may begin to have flashbacks to distressing cases we worked on years ago that have no seeming connection to the present moment. We may have intrusive thoughts, anything from free-floating concern and fear that some unspecified bad thing is going to happen to us or someone we love, to more specific fears. Typically, we begin to withdraw and exhibit symptoms of depression because our brain and our nervous system are overloaded.
Toxic Stress Response Stems from Lack of Support
Toxic stress results in prolonged activation of the fight/flight/freeze/fawn stress response, with a failure of the body to recover fully. Research has shown that insufficient social or emotional support prevents the buffering of the stress response or the return of the body to a normal baseline. LAP involvement provides both the needed social and emotional support in that it is a recovery-based community of lawyers-as-friends, supporting each other in practicing and positively reinforcing recovery tools and resilience skills.
