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Why Peer Support?
Why would lawyers need, or want, a peer support program?
The short answer is hope. As in “hope is the starting point from which a journey of recovery must begin.” If you don’t have hope, you don’t work toward recovery, and if you don’t work toward recovery, you don’t get better. Hope is essential for our survival in a complex world where both good things and bad things happen.
We don’t talk about hope much in the legal practice, other than to say that “hope isn’t a strategy.” We tend to have a pessimistic thinking style which predisposes us to see negative potential outcomes as being permanent and unmoveable. Seeing potential negative outcomes is a core skill for being a lawyer. It isn’t my natural thinking style, but it can be learned, and if we are lucky, we can learn to use it at work but let another explanatory style operate in our non-law lives based in optimism and hope.
When we—as humans, which includes lawyers-- encounter a difficulty, we need hope in order to overcome it which is linked to the belief that a negative situation is temporary and moveable (associated with the optimistic explanatory style). If we lose hope, we lose an important component in our recovery, the belief that it is possible for someone, like us, to get through a situation and to land safely on the other side. You also have to believe, or have hope, that there is another side.
So, what do you do when you face a challenge that you are not sure you can cope with on your own? Many people choose to meet with a counsellor who can help you break the issue into manageable chunks (bite-sized pieces of the elephant, so to speak.) But knowing another lawyer who has gone through the experience and survived, or even thrived, can be really helpful and build hope. Both life, and our mental health, are journeys rather than destinations. Peer support is about walking with someone on their journey rather than telling them where their destination is.
This is what peer support is about—connecting people with someone else who has walked that path, embodying hope.
A recent publication by the Mental Health Commission of Canada describes peer support as a “supportive relationship between people who have a lived experience in common.” One person, referred to as a peer, encounters an issue and seeks assistance from a volunteer who has experience with or insight into that experience (e.g., from having a family member who has dealt with that issue), and the volunteer provides emotional and social support based on their experience.
In Assist’s case, our peers are Alberta lawyers, articling students and law students. And our volunteers are primarily lawyers, trained in Assist’s peer support program and confidentiality. Articling students are welcome to train, but they soon become lawyers, so our roster of articling student peer support volunteers tends to be quite small! |
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