Roots and Branches: Reflections on community, continuity, and the future of LAPBC

Change has a funny way of making us look backward.

This past year has been one of transition for LAPBC. Milestones like that have a way of prompting reflection - not only on where we've been, but on what we hope to carry forward.

It has also prompted me to think about what gives a community its identity, and what allows it to grow without losing itself.

My connection to LAPBC started 17 years ago when I was a first-year associate looking for help with the person (me) behind the legal professional. Over those 17 years, I have been a client, a volunteer, and now a lawyer counsellor with LAP. It has been two years since I started at LAP in a counsellor role, and I am taking this opportunity to contemplate what kind of a community LAP has helped cultivate and the potential for how that community may grow in the future.  

My contemplations led me to imagine the beginning of LAP, a time when I was still a high school student, and what was inspiring the ones who started the organization. I imagined those origins as being located in a time when the dominant social narrative of lawyers was that they were hard-working, hard-drinking, high-billing, and self-centered.

I imagine people who decided there were other ways to be lawyers - and other ways to show up for one another.

They had begun to experience the draining, debilitating, and dispiriting effects of trying to conform to those narratives.  They came together to find a new, more meaningful way to be people who were still dedicated legal professionals.

The meaningful work that they found was rooted in spiritual traditions, especially those linked with Alcoholics Anonymous. As LAPBC grew beyond alcohol and substance use issues, its programs and services remained planted in the rich soil of the organization’s spiritual roots. Legal professionals from diverse backgrounds came together with a shared intention: to help themselves and other legal professionals not just survive demanding legal careers, but to thrive in all areas of their lives, including the professional area. We have worked and continue to work on not seeing our personal lives as separate from our professional ones, but to see our lives as an integrated whole.  

Over those seventeen years, I've watched both the organization and the community around it change. Some of my longest-lasting relationships were formed through volunteering and working with LAPBC. Those years have taught me something about what has changed - and what hasn't.

What has endured is the culture the founders began to cultivate. I didn't recognize it at the time, but that culture is what kept drawing me back. Seeing that lawyers could be and relate with each other in a different way was revelatory. I saw and felt how the LAPBC combined meetings, volunteer retreats, healthy intentions, and relating with other people with a shared vision. I observed how those activities helped to grow a community that collectively supports different ways of being and relating, rather than some of the more toxic ways that the dominant legal culture can foster. Those ways of being and relating are based on authenticity, vulnerability, care, and mutual support. It occurs to me how brave it is to commit to this authenticity, care, vulnerability, and support for people who are legal professionals. Such a commitment means pushing back on the new dominant social narrative which, while somewhat less alcohol-dependent, still promotes the idea that lawyers are supposed to be overly stressed, unhappy, uncaring, distant, and unsupportive towards each other. The LAPBC community has grown to spread the message that this dominant social narrative is not an inevitable outcome: it is possible for us, together, to choose and develop other, better, ways to be people who are legal professionals.

Every community eventually reaches a point where those who planted it begin to step back, trusting others to tend what they helped grow. The longer I've been part of LAPBC, the less I think its identity is found in any one person, program, or tradition. I think it's found in the way people choose to show up for one another. That's what has endured, and that's what gives me hope for the future.

As I reflect on where LAPBC has been and where it is growing, I see an image. I see a beautiful tree growing in new directions, where the wisdom, strength, dedication, and not-giving-up-edness of LAP's founders provide the fertilizer that nourishes new generations of brave legal professionals, allowing them to continue the life work of living well together. It is now our turn to be brave - to keep choosing other ways to be lawyers, other ways to show up for one another, and to keep tending the tree that those before us planted, so that it continues to grow for those who come after us.

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