An interview with: Morgan Weibel, director of the Tahirih Justice Center

Mallika Kaur: We are talking about lawyering and trauma during the COVID shutdown. Do you think the current unpredictability, the various responses and varying comfort with uncertainty, are themselves providing new insights regarding trauma-centeredness?

Morgan Weibel: Yes, this is a chance to experience that everything, and every single one of our experiences, is relative. And it's also a time for developing for ourselves the same tools that we know are important to use with clients dealing with trauma. Being forgiving of yourself, understanding you might not be able to meet goals you had created. And I think it's the perfect moment to release ourselves from trying to follow logic and just meeting people exactly where they're at. People's reactions and responses aren't fully understood even by themselves, right now. Like under any trauma, the brain may give only a piece of the story, or it may move to a certain part of the story, or, you know, it may only be focusing narrowly on only one thing.

MK: Your office in general strikes me as philosophically and practically ahead of the curve when it comes to recognizing trauma. What would you say to the dichotomy that is often posed: trauma-centeredness versus efficiency in responding to case load demands?

MW: I do think it is a philosophical approach because as soon as you said that I thought, there is no efficiency without being trauma-informed. You may think you can save time by moving quickly. But if you're not addressing it from a truly trauma-informed perspective, I promise you, you will end up spending three-four times as much time on the case for not having worked at the pace that the client and you are capable of.

I've done that myself before, early on in my career. A client had canceled on me three times, and her case had an impending deadline. I kept calling her. That she needs to come in. Then, she showed up with her daughter, who had literally just gone through chemotherapy and sat in the chair looking like she was about to pass out. I stopped the interview and I was like, I'm sorry. And then the client broke down and explained to me everything that had happened. I thought, oh wow so I nagged her to feeling compelled to bring her sick child into the office.

I'm sure I had asked, 'Why weren't you available?' She maybe gave one excuse or another, and definitely didn't reveal all that was going on with her daughter. It was a protective mechanism, not to share it all.

But how would I approach it now from a trauma-informed perspective from the start? Ask, 'Hey, it seems like maybe some other things are coming up, what's going on? Are there things we might build in that make it easier or safer for you to get here?' I would have likely learnt that in two weeks her daughter would be in a better healed space and she could come in and talk to me and we could expedite work on her case then. But by pressuring her, I had lost all the trust.

MK: As a supervisor, how do you respond to attorney's needs for certain accommodations, for whatever might be going on with them?

MW: Obviously the size of the team dictates a lot of what you have in your toolbox. Like, if it's a team of one or two attorneys, then you're going to be more limited in what you're able to do, but the larger the team gets, the easier it tends to be to try to identify and sort out what does not work for which attorney. If there are trigger points for one, then that case can go to A or C or D, you know. You can do that sort of matchup, if you know. In my experience, it tends to be very personalized and based on history and background, which isn't, and shouldn't be, universal on a team, if you're also hiring for diversity of experiences.

MK: Your team of attorneys comes from various backgrounds: private, big law; public law; nonprofit. How do you train them to be attentive to trauma-responses?

MW: As we start onboarding there are training videos we've put together over the years on vicarious trauma. We also have teach-in Mondays when we usually tackle different topics, and a frequent topic is vicarious trauma or secondary trauma as well as vicarious resiliency. Then there's also a therapy consultant we have come in once a month. And we've succeeded in creating a culture of sharing about impacts of trauma. And it's also really important that those of us that have been doing the work for longer openly share that we're still affected so that nobody harbors the misconception that you learn it and then you're done, and you're good to go! No in fact it's just going to be part of what you experience doing this work.

MK: Tell us more about the 'vicarious resiliency' that you mentioned.

MW: At its core this concept is about recognizing that just as we all vicariously take on some of each other's traumas, the same is also true of good things around us. So for example, we've incorporated this into an organizational practice, which I think is one of the reasons why Tahirih does so well with retention. See the frontline staff that work with the clients get to witness where the client winds up, and get to feel that...But our accounting team doesn't. And our operations team doesn't. Even our office administrator who answers calls when clients are in crisis, doesn't. So we always share wins through internal emails, without personally identifying information. Last week, our Houston office got 10 green cards and as this was shared on a meeting, I saw across the screen how people's faces lit up.

MK: Would you be comfortable sharing any experience earlier on in your career that highlighted the importance of attentiveness to the emotions of lawyering?

MW: Yes, one in particular was an ah-ha moment for me. Early on in my career as a paralegal I was working with a client who was attacked and traumatized in a bathroom at a school. Later, I noticed in law school that I was having a physiological reaction every time I entered one certain restroom at school. It was strange. My heart would race. My palms would sweat. I thought about it for a while and realized that this one bathroom was very similar to the bathroom that I had envisioned in my mind's eye, as I had written the declaration with the client. My body was reacting to that space. Even though it was not my trauma. But when you write declarations in the first person, and you're incorporating all the sensory details that somebody else's experienced in order to give it those layers of credibility, it has an impact on you.

MK: How do you respond to the danger of lawyers co-opting someone else's trauma, even diverting from the client's trauma?

MW: It's totally true that our client's trauma is theirs alone. It is also true that exposure to different people's stories, both positive and negative, will influence or impact you, if not on a conscious level then on a subconscious level. It is I think our duty to recognize Okay this exposure that I had was secondary. And it's real. Otherwise, we also could walk through the world giving out second and third experiences. For example, I could have described the graphic details of what happened to my client in the bathroom and then someone hearing this could go home and have a nightmare about it as well. Such is the powerful impact of violence and trauma. Being cognizant of that allows attorneys to prevent further traumatizing impacts, whenever we can.