What we don’t talk about when we talk about law
When I wrote publicly about my misgivings about SGI, its adjudication of personal injury benefits, and the SGI appeal process, a few people reached out to me and said what I had done was brave. And even though I did believe that my job was potentially on the line if I reached out to the Star Phoenix, the move didn’t feel that risky to me. The Neil Gaiman quote from Coraline, a creepy movie my brave children love is: “Being brave doesn’t mean you aren’t scared. Being brave means you are scared, really scared, badly scared, and you do the right thing anyway.” At my job, I had come to the point where it just would not work anymore for me to sit at my job every day without taking some kind of action. When I wrote my articles, I was energized by the idea of speaking out and I felt nervous about what would happen next, but my actual fear wasn’t that high and what I was doing didn’t call for bravery.
What feels a lot riskier, personally and professionally, is to say this: that even though I may have seemed like I was ready to take up the mantle for victims everywhere, I think the solution to most instances of conflict resolution looks a lot more like counselling than it does litigation.
It’s not because I think people are mentally unwell, psychologically disturbed, or wrong in any way to feel what they feel. It’s that, very often, people are coming to the law and the legal process as a way to skip over the messiness and feelings that they are really feeling. In the case of motor vehicle accident claims, these are feelings like anger about their accident when they are not at fault, frustration at dealing with a complicated insurance claim process, grief from the way their lives have been altered, and sometimes guilt for the effect of their injuries on their loved ones.
What I wrote about SGI’s treatment of concussion claims wasn’t spurred by feelings of frustration or anger in the moment. It felt, genuinely, deeply, like the next logical thing to do to respond to the situation that I was in. That’s why, with so much of the struggle in our lives, my hope is that we can attend to our feelings first, and then approach what is left of the conflict from a place of being centred, grounded, and confident. So this is where I start looking more like a heretic, because I believe:
It’s not just SGI. The traditional approach of the legal process (and lawyers working within it) is to attempt to control and manipulate situations in a way that causes those in those situations increased stress. It’s about repressing feelings or allowing only certain ones (looking at you, anger) to run the show. It’s a system that very easily leads to unhappiness for everybody involved.
Internally fighting with the way that things are usually only increases your suffering. As we’re told so often, you can’t change the past and you can’t control other people. Whatever you have been through, it is important to stop and to allow the feelings of what you have been through to come up without trying to change anything.
The negative thoughts that you have about your accident (your injuries/your divorce/ your job/ your neighbour) can help you grow and learn in astonishing ways.
This isn’t how lawyers are supposed to talk. We don’t talk about feelings, we don’t acknowledge the role that feelings play in our own decision-making, and we don’t challenge someone’s perspective or thinking about their experience. We still believe, fundamentally, that when someone has been wronged, the law can still be used to serve a moral purpose of making things right.
And yet.
What feels right (though scary) to say now is that what we are doing is not working. We look to law and to lawyers to make things feel better when we are hurt or sad or angry, and this overstretched, imbalanced, bureaucratic system is not able to respond to the tasks we’re setting for it. And so the first step of all of these conflicts is internal: to pause, to investigate our feelings and our thoughts, to feel the grief of the legitimate setbacks we have faced, to explore our feelings and show compassion for them, to have our own back first and foremost.
I’m not saying there is no place for the law or legal remedies in conflict, and that all people need is a good cry and then to shake it off and keep going. But I do say, hopefully: we can do both. We can honour ourselves, be in alignment and integrity in our words and actions, and do the right thing anyway.
If we took action from this place, how brave could we all be then?
