This question tends to arise when I listen to interns, pupils or young lawyers. Often, I am confronted with complaints about how poorly they are treated in their firms. The frequency and widespreadness of this complaint is disturbing. The size of the firm does not matter. Nasty senior lawyers can be found in one man firm’s right up to the big ones in shiny tall buildings.
Such lawyers possess qualities like narcissism, aggression, egotism, impatience and a lack of self-awareness. They can be identified by their disrespect, dismisiveness, arrogance, impatience, tendency to scold, scream or shout at the slightest infraction, closed mindedness and unreasonable expectations and demands. These qualities and their behaviour are what imbues them with a toxic nastiness.
It is important to appreciate that these qualities do not mean these lawyers are incompetent at their work. Some are very good at what they do. There is much to learn from them. There is value in working for them. When I wrote previously about how there is value in bearing and suffering through a miserable experience, this is such a situation that I had in mind. Just not too long. But being perpetually denigrated, miserable and unhappy is too high a price to pay for knowledge, experience or money. It is not mandatory either. Such a impoverished environment eventually causes us harm to our psyche, emotions and well-being. It causes psychological and emotional trauma.
That is what I believe makes some senior lawyer so nasty – the trauma they themselves experienced. If you dig deeper into their professional or personal history, you are going to find some kind of abuse they suffered at the hands of a senior or an authority figure. The abuse may be physical, emotional, psychological, or reputational. But it cut, and it cut deep.
If you get deep enough, you will inevitably hear about how they were denigrated, dismissed and disrespected early in their life or practice. About how they had no choice but to put up with it and suffer through it. Since they could survive it, anyone who cannot put up with the same abuse is unworthy. They spin their tales of abuse into a narrative of hardship and resilience and use that as a narrative as a cover to inflict abuse on others.
What is important to understand is that all those awful qualities I described and narratives of hardship and resilience they weave are defensive mechanisms to help them cope with their trauma. These are like mollusks that create a shell around itself to protect itself. Those qualities and narratives are their shells. These shells, though separate, become integrated with them. The only way to maintain that separation between them and their shells is self-awareness and empathy.
I want to discuss two ways of being a traumatised person is likely to adopt.
The first comes from this idea that trauma begets trauma. I find respite in my trauma by spreading it around. I externalise and visit it upon others. I spread it around in the form of my aggression, dismissiveness, disrespect, etc. to others. This is my attempt at expelling my trauma by transferring it to others. But it gives me only temporary relief. Worse, it does not permenantly relieve me of my trauma, but creates another cyle of trauma in others.
This explains the seeming paradox of people who were formerly victims that adopt the role of oppressor the moment they assume power. We think because they went through such an awful experience, they would try to make it better. Instead once in power, they end up recreating the very same awful experience, if not worse. That’s trauma expressing itself.
The second comes from the idea that self-awareness and empathy neutralises our trauma. Self-awareness is the awareness of how we feel and think whenever we do or think something. Self-awareness is the imaginary person in our head that we use to look at ourselves from the outside in, whilst maintaining a connection to our inside. Empathy is imagining ourselves in the shoes of others and feeling what they are likely to have experienced in those shoes.
These two qualities are important to neutralise trauma because it puts our own trauma, shortcomings or seeming defects into perspective. It impresses an awareness that everyone is dealing with some challenge or difficulty of their own, on their own. It helps us appreciate that there are others like us too. Some who were abused in almost the same way. Our trauma, hurt and pain are not unique but common. And because it is common, we can share, commiserate and grow from it. If we let it, it cultivates an attitude that trauma is better contained when shared and mixed with empathy, love and company. That trauma can be contained instead of spread. But it needs us to be honest and open with ourselves and others.
Trauma is a wound. Wounds heal with sunlight with others, not in a darkened room alone.
I used to look upon nasty senior lawyers as irredeemable assholes and get angry at them. These days, I feel more sorry and pity for them than I do anger and disappointment. It may not look like it to us, but they are suffering. What they don’t realise is that each instance of nastiness shows us how deep, festered and painful their wounds are, how traumatic their experience was.
Each instance of disrespect is an approximation of how they were disrespected. They are reenacting for us what they went through. Each instance of dismissiveness is their avoiding any threat to their sense of self. Each scolding is the scolding they received and seethed through helplessly in their youth. A lot of that nastiness is a reenactment in an attempt to find relief.
So, while I encourage a more expansive and forgiving way of looking at such senior lawyers, that does not mean we are not entitled to think of them as assholes and get angry at them. We should merely think of them as reedemable ones that we should welcome when they meet us half way to get a grip on their traumas. The cost of paying nastiness with nastiness is not worth it.
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