Lawyers perceive themselves as rational actors and believe their actions are based upon thorough analysis of the pros and cons of different options. While lawyers are more articulate in rationalizing their actions than most other people, they are just as vulnerable as anyone else to falling prey to emotional turmoil. Neuroscience tells us that about 5% of our cognitive machinery is conscious while the other 95% is subconscious. If we are going to increase our self-knowledge and reduce the emotional turmoil we so often feel when faced with events, it will surely help to learn more about the emotions that bubble up from our depths.
Emotions are always triggered by events, but we can learn to incorporate space in our response to events so our response is not automatic. It’s possible to achieve emotional freedom, but not by ignoring or fighting with your emotions. A person who is conscious of his emotions, who understands what they represent and who understands their limits as sources of information for his behavioral choices, can listen to what his emotions are urging him to do, while preserving his freedom to act differently.
Emotions involve a physiologic state, a core thought and an inclination to act which combine to produce behavior. This is true for positive and negative emotions. When you’re in love your body is flooded by endorphins. You experience joy in the presence of your beloved with the core thought of wanting your beloved to feel the same joy. You are inclined to express your love by compliments, affectionate gestures or gifts. When you are angered by what you perceive as offensive conduct, you go into fight-flight. You have a thought along the lines of “how dare he do that to me. I will make him pay for that” combined with an intention to retaliate. You want the other to feel pain.
The bodily sensations which accompany the physiologic changes of emotion and the core thought embedded in the emotion are very powerful. Many of us are so dominated by the bodily sensations and core thought of an emotion that we get drawn along like being swept out to sea by an undertow. This is what Aristotle meant when he called emotions the passions. When the emotion at issue is a negative one like envy, fear, anger, or hate, we can get so stirred up that we say or do things that are not consistent with what we stand for and which we later regret.
Emotions are part of our internal guidance system. They get our attention and let us know when we are being affected by someone or something. Emotions present us with information yet the information is not always correct or complete. Emotions don’t give us the whole perspective on any given situation. The person who is seized with the emotion of love for someone else may fail to notice his love is not returned, and will have to undergo many painful rejections before grasping the truth. A lawyer who flies into a rage over a perceived act of disrespect may learn that the other person acted with good grounds and no ill intent, leaving the lawyer to feel foolish and asking himself “why did I get so upset over nothing?”
We all have emotional buttons that can be pushed. According to Shannon Duncan, author of Present Moment Awareness, these buttons are associated with our struggles to cope with the damage to our self-worth we incurred during childhood. Duncan says most people learned to play a role to get approval from their parents, one that conceals an underlying insecurity, a false belief that that we are flawed in some fundamental way so we had better cover over the flaw.
As adults we do many things unconsciously to hide the flaw, whether it’s workaholism, amassing a fortune, dieting to stay thin, over-exercising, smoking or drinking to excess. We suffer anxiety when our coping mechanisms falter or fail. When someone says or does something that hits home and calls our attention to our self-perceived flaw, we can go ballistic.
Because of our vulnerability we are more easily hurt and irritated than we imagine. Most of us struggle with our emotions to the point where the emotions are far more troublesome than the minor incident that triggered them. How many times you experienced instant emotional turmoil in response to an event? What really pushes your buttons?
How about opposing counsel making a string of objections at a deposition that you consider frivolous and which obstruct your line of inquiry? What about opposing counsel suggesting you have coached your witness? How about opposing counsel refusing to take his motion to impose sanctions off calendar even after you turned over the documents he sought to compel? What about opposing counsel refusing to continue a trial date to let you have a vacation you wanted?
Will having your emotional buttons pushed throw you so far off your path that you can’t recover? The term responsibility refers to our ability to respond according to calm deliberation rather than blindly or automatically. The clue that we are being ruled by our emotions is when we feel taken over by them, and when we respond to a situation immediately, compulsively and unwisely. When you are able to pause, take a breath and step back your vision widens. You are in a position to see yourself, the entire situation and your many options for responding.
Understanding Emotional Reactivity
In Present Moment Awareness, Shannon Duncan says most people do not participate in their own lives because they are day dreaming; complaining about or regretting the past; and worrying about the future. Whether they are sitting at their desks, attending a meeting or driving their car, most people will suddenly wake up and realize they have been someplace else. Frequently their body is tight and in an awkward position. It’s quite sad when you think about all the precious, irretrievable moments that pass people by while they are lost in thought instead of living in the now. The now is the only time we can really connect with ourselves, with our creativity, with other people or with nature.
Duncan argues that to truly be present you must be deeply aware of the sensations in your body, the details of your environment and what is going on around you. Then you are able to be “right here, right now.” When we are truly present, we are alive to this moment and able to live it without distraction by worries or emotional turmoil. If you are mowing the lawn, then stay aware of the tension in your arms, the sweat on your brow, the color and smell of the green grass, the light and warmth of the sun and the vastness and blueness of the sky, rather than losing yourself in worries about paying bills, thinking about driving your kid to the dentist or wondering what’s for dinner.
In the first part of his book Duncan sets forth an exercise designed to help you strengthen your present moment awareness. This requires you to sit in a quiet place, breathe deeply, mentally scan your body for tension and mentally scan the sensory qualities of your immediate environment. You are to approach the exercise in a spirit of gentleness and with complete acceptance of what is, which means no judgments. While it would be wonderful if we could hone this present moment awareness through sitting quietly alone to the point where we could face any real-world situation without emotional turmoil, that’s just wishful thinking.
In the second part of his book Duncan rightly tells us that we will continue to experience emotional upheavals in response to what other people say or do until we do some work with our emotions. Until we can control our emotions we will suffer “emotional reactivity,” which means our emotions overwhelm us and seemingly force us to act in one particular way without affording us choices. Have you been in depositions where all the lawyers were threatening, badmouthing and insulting each other while the witness and the court reporter gaped open mouthed? What was that like? How did it feel? Did you enjoy it or were you terribly disappointed at how far things had slid down the slope of civilization and wishing it could be different?
Why do lawyers, or anyone else for that matter, react so angrily to each other? Duncan’s says that how we perceive the world determines how we react to it. When we perceive the world in a way that creates anxiety it is impossible for us to relax, to enjoy our lives or to do our work without painful tension. Duncan quotes Arthur Somers Roche:
“Anxiety is a thin stream of fear trickling through the mind. If encouraged, it cuts a chancel into which all other thoughts are drained.”
In Happy For No Reason, Marci Shimoff tells us the average human being has about 60,000 thoughts a day of which 45,000 are automatic, repetitive and negative thoughts such as “I’m fat and ugly,” “I’m on a losing streak and things can’t get much worse,” “I need more money,” “I’ll be happy if I win the lottery,” or “I hate this job, I wish the weekend was here.” Anxious, negative thoughts arose during evolution as a means of ensuring the survival of early humans. The ones who sensed a saber toothed tiger around every corner lived on to reproduce, while the mellow relaxed types got eaten.
The problem for humanity is general is that our brains are still wired to generate anxious, negative thoughts in an environment that is much more physically safe. The problem for lawyers is that much of our activity can generate anxious, negative thoughts because it involves conflict, argument, competition, performance and judgment.
In his witty description of the uselessness of anxiety, Mark Twain said that most of the worst things in his life never happened. Emotional freedom comes from recognizing that most of what we perceive a threat really isn’t. How can we neutralize anxiety as a driving force in our lives? Duncan says it’s crucial to distinguish between what we want (like being thin, attractive and mega-rich) and what is essential to our survival (oxygen, food and water).
He uses the example of an IRS audit putting us in a total panic as if having to pay overdue taxes with interest and penalties and making due with less cash in the bank was a life and death situation. Thanks to this confusion we go into and stay in fight-flight and may feel as if we want to crawl out of our own skin. The need to tune down the anxiety is what drives lawyers to drink to excess, use drugs, smoke or compulsively eat, gamble, shop, exercise or engage in sex.
Duncan correctly points out that real life will always have its ups and downs, but when we let the downs become dramas inflated out of proportion to the real threat by anxiety, then we suffer needlessly. If life is a ride wouldn’t you prefer to be present for the ride and enjoy it, rather than crushing the wheel in your grip, having a tight stomach and a head full of worst case scenarios of future events? If you can’t stay present you will miss out on countless wonderful moments – hugs from our kids, the freshness of the air after a cleansing rain, a humming bird visiting your garden or a gorgeous sunset.
What mental movies get played in the theater of our minds are determined by our dominant emotion. If we fear the audit and feel sad because we’re sure the IRS is going to impoverish us, then all the movies we play will be fearful, sad or both. That means all of our perceptions of other people and our encounters with them will be saturated with those negative feelings.
Duncan says getting to emotional freedom means noticing when you get absorbed in fantasies that create or maintain a fearful or bleak mood; identifying the circumstances that trigger these fantasies; and identifying the insecurities that trigger them. It is not the events outside us that create our emotional turmoil, but our beliefs about them. Duncan counsels us to remain present and acknowledge our emotional state without beings swept away into “thoughtless reactivity or useless fantasies.”
Fighting our emotions by telling ourselves to stop being fearful, anxious or angry will just double the strength of these negative emotions. Duncan’s approach to dealing with negative emotions is akin to what alcohol and drug counselors tell their patients to do with cravings. Ride them out. Let your emotional baggage complete its journey. Enduring a craving and letting it travel through our system won’t kill us and the same is true of a negative emotion.
Duncan says the only way out of our emotional pain is to pass through it. Once you have passed through it, you can ponder what was so powerful about the circumstances or people that you were seemingly forced to give up the power to determine how you feel or how to behave.
Getting to the “inner space,” that quiet, contemplative place available to us after the stormy negative emotion has run its course, puts us in an excellent position to figure things out. That’s when we can really see some of our unconscious patterns and increase our emotional freedom still more. Duncan reminds us that our inner space is always there for us when he says, “Just remember that we always have more space available within us than any emotional reaction could ever fill.”
Duncan closes the second part of his book with an exercise to increase emotional awareness. The idea is to learn to observe emotions as they occur in your body and learn how to deal with them so they won’t overwhelm you. The end zone for this work is to buffer emotional reactivity, increase your control over how you react to other people, preserve your inner calm and give yourself access to more options and choices.
Duncan wants us off the “reactivity roller coaster,” He hopes that, “Instead of being consumed with the desire to act based solely on the influence of any one emotion, we take a moment to see the big picture. With this, we see a wealth of new choices, allowing us more freedom and opportunities.”
An Exercise For Letting Go
Neuropsychologist Rick Hanson, Ph.D. has said that positive emotions slip right off like Teflon while negative emotions stick like Velcro. This has to do with our hardwired negativity bias. The good news is that we can teach ourselves to be more positive. Martin Seligman’s book Learned Optimism is one good teaching source and another one is Marci Shimoff’s Happy For No Reason: 7 Steps to Being Happy from the Inside Out.
What makes negative feelings so sticky? Shimoff believes it has to do with our tendency to fight them. When we experience our inner critic telling us for the one millionth time that we are ugly, stupid, lazy or not as good as another sibling, we waste a great deal of time and energy arguing with the statement and trying to find a line of reasoning to extinguish it once and for all. Why not just let these self-defeating feelings go?
Remarkably many people believe their emotions are attached to them and cannot be released. Shimoff says this just isn’t so. It’s possible to release any thought or emotion. She discusses the success people have when they use the Sedona method which bids people to ask themselves three questions about their negative belief: Can I let this feeling go? Would I let it go? When? She mentions one person who had to be confronted with the question whether she would prefer to hold onto her negative belief about herself or be shot in the head? This helped her to see it was quite possible to let go of the belief, and free herself to live in the present and enjoy her life. What will it take for you?
Sometimes people suffer their emotions because they think their emotions represent reality or that their emotions are facts. Shimoff says emotions are neither, and we are under no obligation to believe them. Byron Katie has argued that all suffering is mind created and comes from believing the false ideas we have about ourselves that were formed during childhood. Katie is internationally famous for creating The Work, a series of four questions about the most painful thought you hold about yourself, which are as follows.
(1) Is it true? (2) Can I absolutely know that it’s true? (3) How do I feel when I believe that thought? (4) Who would I be without that thought? Then you do a “turnaround” statement which asserts the opposite of your old, self-denigrating thought, and you find three true examples from your life to support the turnaround. The Work enables you to question the truth of the belief that made you suffer, to feel how good your life would be if let it go and give you the emotional freedom to live without it.
Shimoff has her own exercise for letting go. Hold onto a pen as tightly as you can. The pen represents your negative core belief about yourself, and the hand represents your awareness. Although there is some discomfort at first after a while it feels “normal” to grip the pen so hard, and this is exactly what we do with our negative beliefs. We grip them so tightly we forget we’re doing it. Now roll the pen around in your hand noticing it’s not attached to your hand. This helps you see that you and your feelings are not attached. You are not your feelings. Now drop the pen. That’s what it means to let go. Feel how good and how free your hand feels. Without the emotional turmoil that comes from allowing others to push our button, our conscious awareness will feel like the hand that has released the pen.
Using Techniques for Emotional Freedom in Relation To Other Lawyers
The techniques set forth by Shannon Duncan and Marci Shimoff for freeing ourselves from negative self-beliefs and the emotional reactivity that goes with it are critical to being present and enjoying life. These techniques can be extended to our dealings with other lawyers. The Sedona Method and The Work can both be directed towards feelings we hold towards other lawyers that divide us by making us feel superior to, inferior to or fundamentally different from them. The pen we grip so tightly can equally well represent a biased, irrational judgment that all plaintiff lawyers are crooks, all defense lawyers are heartless or all judges are arbitrary tyrants.
In order to go beyond emotional reactivity we have to stop holding tightly to old ideas about who we are and who the lawyers we face are. Just as we exaggerate our own flaws and then cover them up to make ourselves feel better, we exaggerate the flaws of other lawyers and then expose them for the same reason. This isn’t serving anyone. It’s creating and maintaining a brew of stomach churning emotional turmoil.
If you find yourself going off at the handle and disliking that feeling of loss of control, it’s time you took some time to look into this whole business of attaining greater emotional freedom. The books by Shannon Duncan and Marci Shimoff are an excellent place to start. I would also highly recommend taking a class in meditation
In our professional lives as lawyers and in our personal lives as regular people we tend to see others through the lens of judgment, dividing them into human kinds, some worthy of spending time with and getting to know and others not. Why is that we are so ready to find some strangers promising candidates for inclusion in our social world yet equally ready to disdain, reject and distance ourselves from other strangers?