3.3 Professional Identity Pains: Role Identity & Role Strain
Gemma Smyth and Sarah Botros
Professional Identity Pains
In a clinic or externship, students begin to step into the role of a lawyer – indeed, they will be viewed and treated as a lawyer by many clients and colleagues. Law students are given access to the role status of a lawyer but perhaps without the confidence, knowledge, or skill that might feel more comfortable. As such, many students experience “professional identity pains” of many varieties. Some are canvased below, along with a model to help frame role stress at work.
The “Disorienting Moment”
Fran Quigley wrote about the “disorienting moment” in clinical legal education – specifically when students encounter moments of discomfort, shock, or alienation when presented with “real life” social justice issues. For some, the socio-professional context of law is new and sometimes shocking. For some students, externships or clinics are the first time they realize that the practice of law does not suit them, or that the way they are exposed to it in a certain context is not workable. Quigley treats these and other moments as both challenging and a moment for learning and growth. In fact, these are the moments with the greatest potential for transformation. Quigley writes:
“Adult learning theory maintains that when a learner begins describing an experience with the phrase, “I just couldn’t believe it when I saw…”, an opportunity for significant learning has been opened. This phenomenon is called the ‘disorienting moment,’ when the learner confronts an experience that is disorienting or even disturbing because the experience cannot be easily explained by reference to the learner’s prior understanding – referred to in learning theory as ‘meaning schemes’ – of how the world works. The process that begins with the disorienting moment has been described as follows:
If an experience is unsettling or puzzling or somewhat incongruous with our present meaning structure, it captures our attention. If the gap is too great between how we understand the world and ourselves in it and the experience, we may choose to ignore it or reject it. If however we choose to grapple with it, learning results. Some of this learning affects us more than others. Powerful learning experiences may even transform how we think and act…
[Jack] Mezirow and others describe this learning pattern as possessing at least three stages: First, the ‘disorienting experience,’ second, the ‘exploration and reflection,’ and finally, ‘reorientation’. Upon reorientation, the learner’s perspective is transformed in such a way that the previously disorienting experience is explained” (at 51-52).
Zones of Wellbeing
While “disorienting moments” might be impactful, they can also be unsettling to a point that is unhealthy or unhelpful. The diagram below (Smyth, Johnstone, Cormier) sets out “zone of wellbeing” that are helpful in defining when experiences are within or beyond a student’s window of tolerance. Learning experiences inherently require some discomfort and uncertainty. This uncertainty can either be too much or too little. If the workplace experience is highly predictable, boring, extremely repetitive, or requires the student to constantly conduct tasks that are of no interest, there is risk of “hypoarousal” (basically, not enough stimulation) and “bore out” (discussed later in the Wellness chapter). There is also risk of far too much stimulation, uncertainty, and requirements consistently far beyond the student’s capacity. A good learning experience might dip into these zones from time-to-time; however, staying in one or the other zone is likely not sustainable.
Whether a student remains in their window of tolerance is also deeply impacted by the support they receive at work and at the law school. If a student receives good support and supervision in a very complicated matter outside their window of tolerance, they might nonetheless have a great learning experience. If a student is thrust into a difficult matter with no support (especially repeatedly), it can lead to an unhealthy work environment.
A Disorienting Moment – With Supervisor Support
“The most difficult situation I found myself in during my placement was during an intake shift that I had. To this day, I still remember how I felt reading the response that a client sent me after I thought I helped them. The client’s reply email simply stated, “Are you not going to help me either? I have asked for help from everyone are you kidding me ??? are you actually kidding me???” Clearly, this client did not find my assistance helpful! The time I spent finding what I believed to be helpful resources did not have the expected outcome. The moment I received this email, I was shocked and definitely uncomfortable by the situation. Her response left me feeling ashamed and confused. I reflected on my response, and, in all honesty, I realized that rather than just referring her to another resource, I could have answered her concerns if I had dedicated more time to finding the answer to her question. I shared the client’s frustrated response with my supervisor and after some hours of research, we found the answer to her original concern, something I had tried to do before, however, was unsuccessful – likely due to a lack of effort on my end.
While this situation did not discourage me the legal profession as a whole, it made me realize that thorough analyses and issue spotting are an important part of my role and I can also reassess my approach to problem-solving and client service. Moving forward, I became more vigilant in analyzing each case individually. In the practice of law, challenges and misunderstandings are inevitable. As I experienced my first uncomfortable situation, I realized that I handle it as many other uncomfortable situations in my life: I speak with someone with more experience in the situation who is able to guide me, and I often learn from these situations.”
Responses to the “Disorienting Moment”: Witnessing
Professor Sarah Buhler writes about the moments in clinical legal education in which the depth of inequality, racism, and poverty – often created or reinforced by legal systems – comes into stark relief (“Painful Injustices: Encountering Social Suffering in Clinical Legal Education” (Spring 2013) 19 Clinical L Rev 405).
These moments can be catalyzing, depressing, shocking, numbing, among other responses. Buhler writes that “in [her] experience, students respond [to encountering suffering in a clinical law context] by entering into a critical self-analysis, admonishing themselves to focus on separating “legal issues” from “non-legal” issues in their interactions with clients, to better shore up “boundaries” between themselves and their clients, and to focus on the law rather than emotion.”
But what if it is exactly this emotion that is required to meaningfully engage in the role of lawyer in social justice contexts? In considering this, Buhler sets out a critical pedagogy of suffering:
“A critical pedagogy of suffering would entail a deliberate challenge to the tendency to suppress or divert emotional responses within the clinical classroom, and to encourage students to understand their own sadness or distress about their clients’ stories as resources for thinking about larger questions of justice and injustice in society….[A] pedagogy of suffering would seek to show that suffering, lawyers’ readings of suffering, and legal practice in response to suffering, are profoundly political and deeply related to questions about law and legal practice. Ahmed has discussed the importance of bringing “pain into politics,” which, she writes, would entail a commitment to showing how past injustices manifest in the “very wounds that remain open in the present.” So too would the use in legal clinics of a critical pedagogy of suffering bring “pain into lawyering,” and into clinical law classrooms, and develop understanding of how various responses to the suffering of individual clients can be an important aspect of lawyering for social justice.”
Others have written about moments of “witnessing” when encountering events. Haudensaunee scholar Darren Thomas writes:
Witnessing is another method to use to come to form knowledge. This concept is difficult to explain, it has to do with being a witness to learning that comes from beyond human family. With the Hodinohsonih worldview, we understand our ways of knowing goes beyond our comprehension as human beings. There are events in our lives where we witness something more powerful, something spiritual. There are teachings or messages of ‘divine inspiration’ so to speak that help guide you, support you, and strengthen you; and incredible profound ‘aha’ moment that sheds light into your very being. Observing is a more passive way of discovering knowledge. It involves learning from how others experience their lives; this is a process of attaining knowledge through mentorship. When viewing the image of Ogwehowehneh, consider it a dynamic three-dimensional image. The spider web is constructed throughout, connects all of the elements, and can be used to create understanding in any areas of Hodinohso:nih knowledge”
Darren Thomas, OGWEHOWENEHA: A Hodinohso:nih research methodology (MA Thesis, Wilfred Laurier University, 2012) [Unpublished, on file with author] at 53-54.
In a placement context, this act of witnessing is essential both in the solicitor-client relationship as well as in the other associated lawyering contexts (such as participating in community meetings). In this way, witnessing is political, embodied and, for some, spiritual.
Professional Identity & “Unbelonging”
Most students enter a placement with some feeling of “unbelonging” – meaning, feeling like an outsider, or someone who does not “fit in”. Unbelonging might include not understanding customs, rituals, behaviours, or dress of a profession or workplace. However, unbelonging is not experienced equally by all new lawyers. Communities who have been excluded from the legal profession might be treated in ways that cause further unbelonging. This can be through subtle acts (such as not being given the same quality or quantity of work, or not being invited to a work function), or through overt acts of discrimination and harm. Discrimination in the legal profession is discussed in greater depth in a later Chapter.
For women of colour and other underrepresented persons, there are specific professional identity formation challenges. Dean Kim Brooks has also used Goffman’s, and then Yoshino’s (Professor Kenji Yoshino of NYU Law School), work in her qualitative empirical work documenting the coping strategies marginalised lawyers (in practice for five or more years) employ in legal employment including: covering, compensating, mythologizing, passing, and exiting. Brooks quotes Yoshino, writing that, “‘[e]veryone covers”… but that marginalized workers do so at much higher rates.” (Kim Brooks, “The Daily Work of Fitting in as a Marginalized Lawyer” (2019) 45:1, Queen’s LJ 157)
One important way for new lawyers to understanding their professional identity is through mentorship and role models. As the later Chapter on Race and the Profession notes, women of colour continue to be underrepresented in law, especially in upper management and partnership positions. As noted above, professional identity is partially formed through relationships. If these relationships have no resemblance to one’s own lived experience, it is difficult to form a fully realized professional identity. Even if there is no such person in the workplace, it can be helpful to find mentors or role models to support the process of professional identity formation.
Professional Role Distancing & Cognitive Dissonance
Hopefully, students in a clinic or externship program feel aligned in their values and commitment professionally and personally. This is not always the case. For many reasons, law students and young lawyers can feel like they are playing an uncomfortable role at work. Sometimes, lawyers develop a professional identity which they may perceive as separate or distant from their “out of work” identity. This duality was observed by John Bliss from the University of Denver. He examined the experiences of professional role distancing among law students and early-career lawyers. The analysis focused on government/public interest (GPI) minded law students, corporate, and drifting or undecided. Unsurprisingly, distancing can vary according to a students’ job- path decisions during law school and early on in their career. Among students from the study, GPI-path respondents tended to report a relatively stable, central, and clustered conception of professional identity, integrating political, racial, religious, and gender roles. Corporate-path respondents tended to report an increasingly distant relationship to professional identity. Drifting-path respondents tended to experience similar distancing with respect to professional identity, while struggling with concerns about fraudulence as they conceived of their enactment of the corporate lawyer role as a temporary and morally suspect performance.
A Story of Cognitive Dissonance & Cognitive Consonance
“The important and not often talked about role of cognitive dissonance makes me believe that all law students should both understand and reflect upon the concept prior to and while they engage in their early career role developing experiences as this will allow them to flourish in whichever path they choose. This was clear to me during my diametrically opposed roles as a legal extern and an OCI (On-Campus Interview) recruit candidate, wherein my sense of self and personal identity were affirmed as I simultaneously engaged in a professional role in distance and by proxy, cognitive dissonance.
During my second semester of law school, I vividly remember being told by my upper year friends to “be myself” during the OCI process. Like many of my peers who entered law school either wanting to pursue a public law career or who were unsure of where and what they wanted to practice, I was curious about the process of applying. I found that I was particularly spurred on by many of my friends who heavily coveted private law positions. What I failed to understand at the time was that the pressure to conform with my peers would force me to create this “new” self, a polished self, a self that would live to compete and network to survive. This professional me was everything that my true self dreaded, this self did not necessarily want to help the vulnerable. She wanted to be a zealous advocate. I felt as though I had to adhere to the notion that I could not be a lawyer and maintain my own personality. This self was a professional, while my true self was starting to feel small and suffocating behind the façade that I had created. The OCI process paired with constant training law students receive to “think like a lawyer” during school, only exacerbated the bifurcation of the self and the client-facing self. It is at this point where many law students such as myself who entered law school with a more public law leaning stance or who were unsure of where they would like to practice become unsure of who they are (Erlanger, Howard S et al. “Law student idealism and job choice: Some new data on an old question” (1996) 30:4 Law & Society Review 851).
Right in the midst of the cognitive dissonance that I was experiencing, I started to notice that as a student extern I was not being asked to separate my true self and my work self. On the contrary, I saw how many of my colleagues at the externship placement truly embraced who they were within and outside the work environment and used that to affirm their professional legal identities. I saw that my supervisor did not expect me or any of my colleagues to maintain a prim and polished façade, rather, the expectation was to be an actual mix of the true self and the “self” that my upper year friends had alluded to. The dichotomy of not having to engage in professional distancing at all at my externship while constantly doing so during the OCI processes began to reframe my concept of early professional role development. It showed me that there were other work opportunities and experiences other than the on campus interview process which would allow for the cognitive dissonance that many of us feel to begin to dissipate while we form stronger more reflective versions of ourselves that align well with who we want to be at work and who we are as people.”
(More) Cognitive Dissonance in the OCI Recruit
“As someone who entered law school leaning more towards the access to justice and public policy sphere of law, I found the experience of cognitive dissonance during the on-campus interview (OCI’s) recruitment process, particularly jarring compared to my student extern role in which both my personal and professional legal identities were affirmed without the need for professional identity distancing. Reflecting upon this, I notice how important it can be for students not to adhere to the standard conception of a legal professional identity. You do not have to “draw a bright line between your personal values and professional self in order to limit client dissatisfaction (Spaulding, Norman W. “Reinterpreting Professional Identity.” (August, 2003): 74:1 University of Colorado Law Review). You are allowed to be yourself while working as a professional and advocating for your clients. Ultimately, through self-reflection and understanding the idea of bifurcation of self and professional self early on in the professional legal development journey, students may become able to successfully acknowledge any cognitive dissonance that they are feeling and truly form a version of themselves that they are most comfortable with. This in itself will allow the legal profession to grow stronger and begin addressing some of the psychological distress that exists within the field. Building your professional identity is a stepwise process that should begin with learning about yourself, and through that, seeking environments which allow you to flourish.”
Reflection Questions
- How can lawyers use their role, responsibility and social location/ identity as members/ future members of the legal community? What about as members of other communities? What about our intersecting identities?
- Read the article “The Power of Role Models”. Identify for yourself who a role model might be for you. What lawyer(s) do you admire? Why?
- What do you anticipate might be points of professional and personal identity convergence and divergence in your placement? In the practice of law more generally?
- Have you experienced a “disorienting moment” in your placement experience thus far (or, perhaps, your law school experience)? How did you react to this moment? Did you connect this moment to overarching social and political structures operating in law and/or the profession?
