Traditional law practice overlooks unique opportunities for clients to truly improve their lives and the lives of those around them. The narrow focus of traditional law practice fixates on objective facts to the virtual exclusion of ways in which the parties, and others impacted by conflict, relate to those facts. The ways in which we relate to our unfolding life experience are largely a function of learned conditioning – the result of accumulated past experience – together with genetic predispositions.
Typically, when a client comes to an attorney for advice, they do so because of some real or perceived loss or threat of loss in their life. This loss may be economic, physical, or ego-related such as feared loss of community standing or identity. The reality is that an objective fact or set of facts have arisen in the world of which the client has some awareness. What will widely differ among individuals is the layer or multitude of layers of meaning that he or she will (usually unconsciously) impose on these factual events or scenarios. These predispositions, to the extent they remain unconscious, largely dictate the ways in which we relate to life experience.
Because legal conflict so often gives rise to these layers of unconscious relation to experience, it presents an ideal opportunity to explore a client’s conditioning and habitual ways of relating to experience. The failure to explore these tendencies at particularly challenging times is likely to result in these tendencies becoming increasingly solidified in the client’s life. Because traditional law practice largely ignores these underlying dynamics, clients far more often than not look back on their “legal problems” with disdain, representing just one in a long series of frustrations resulting from their habitual relation to experience in more or less unconscious ways.
Holistic law practice stresses the transformative potential in conflict. The holistic lawyer acknowledges and explores with the client his or her ways of relating to past and present experience that may have brought about or exacerbated the “legal problem.” Often, when these previously unconscious orientations are explored, clients become able to let go of these tendencies and see more clearly the nature of what has happened and what is happening, and deal with it in a far more compassionate and less reactive manner. More importantly, the client comes to realize that his or her future behavior need not be dictated by conditioned thinking and habitual reactions.
To learn more about holistic law practice, contact Licensed Psychotherapist and Attorney Michael Lubofsky by calling (415) 508-6263 or by visiting https://therapyforlawyers.com.