Bridget Garrood

My training has led me to reflect that I have been in a constantly repeating cycle, as a family lawyer in full time practice in Exeter for the past 25 years because I have engaged in my clients’ traumatic separations, divorces and childcare disputes.

Clients in this state are at their most vulnerable and volatile. As a lawyer I do my best to stay alongside them, trying to make sense of the countless inconsistencies, contradictions and irrational or self-destructive impulses I witness.

Attempting to broker solutions in these circumstances is hugely difficult and wearing, no matter how experienced or skilled I get at it. My professional training as a lawyer in the early 1990’s gave me little or no grounded psychological understanding of what’s going on in my clients, myself, other lawyers and stakeholders, or in between any and all of these. Symptoms such as workaholism, poor sleep and a growing but hidden sense of never being good enough frequently result from this.

I have worn these as noble battle scars, the inevitable price that has to be paid for entering the fray. In fact they are health hazards. They lead to burnout. For some family lawyers, the sense of failure can be so deep that we can’t even recognise it, let alone see what impact it is having on our lives and on all our relationships.

Reflective Family Law Supervision acknowledges that the nature of human relating means we can’t make meaningful contact with others and remain unaffected ourselves. Until I started to train as a Family Law Supervisor in January 2018, I was focussed on my identity as a lawyer, but I have increasingly come to realise that my practice as a solicitor within the family justice system also places me squarely within “the helping professions”.