Best Practices for Legal Education

In my new position as executive director of a non-profit dedicated to eliminating domestic violence, I have learned a lot about trauma.  Trauma causes three main automatic reactions in the brain:  Fight, flight or freeze.  Trauma also makes us more sensitive to triggering events that can recall the trauma in our brains.  A smell, the slamming of a door, a sharp noise, even a tone of voice can trigger a reexperice of the traumatic event.  And, service providers, including lawyers, experience vicarious trauma by listening to the stories of traumatic events experience by others.  Knowing that this is happening is the first step in learning how to address the effects of truama.  At Enlace Comunitario, we try to have polcies that don’t retraumatize our clients.  We try to have a warm and welcoming waiting room and we don’t have harsh policies such as cancelling an appointment for someone who comes…