Health / Wellness

How Mindfulness And My Inner Lawyer-Mom Helped Me Face My Own Anger

Lawyers often seek out mindfulness practices because they want more peace and calm in their lives -- but it can also help you make peace with your anger.

By Claire E. Parsons  
on
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Ed. note: This is the latest installment in a series of posts on motherhood in the legal profession, in partnership with our friends at MothersEsquire. Welcome Claire E. Parsons back to our pages. Click here if you’d like to donate to MothersEsquire.

As a lawyer and meditation teacher, I am often asked whether I was drawn to mindfulness because I am “naturally calm.” This is a fair question, but it’s hard for me not to laugh and yell, “Hell, no!” In reality, I was drawn to mindfulness because I am naturally not calm. I am anxious, intense, and frequently negative. Law school exacerbated this by priming me to be rule-based, judgmental, and argumentative. Early in my law practice, this cocktail of evil traits combined to make me lonely, critical, worried about the future, regretful about the past, and most of all angry.

I was angry that law practice was so hard. I was angry when adding motherhood to the mix made life feel impossible. I was angry that I repeatedly had to remind my husband to help me at home and with our daughter. I was angry that life seemed easier for others. Normally, I would keep this anger to myself. I would seethe inside or let it turn into a tepid depression. I would keep myself busy to try to ignore it. I hated that I was angry. I feared it because it couldn’t control it.

Despite my attempts, the anger would eventually come raging out. Almost always it would take me be by surprise. Some tiny misfeasance, like the dishes not being done (again), would happen, and it would be like I was possessed. I’d rage, yell, call names, and make accusations until I could be alone. Then I’d hate myself, feel like a mess, and try never to think of it again. I’d go back to my rules, judgment, and control in the hopes that next time would be different.

Change did come for me eventually, but it was only after a period of depression made me realize that the rules, control, and judgment were the source of my unhappiness rather than my salvation. I started meditating and slowly began the process of noticing how my body feels while living life, rather than simply thinking about and internally reacting to it. Over the years, I started to understand what anger felt like, how it arose, and what helped me manage it.

I learned that anger felt like electricity coursing through my body. Though it was intense and at first seemed impossible to tolerate, I noticed that it lasted only a few minutes when I could just feel it. Anger arose for me when one of my rules, standards, or boundaries was violated. Some of the management of my anger therefore meant that I had to let go of or at least loosen my grip on some of my rules that things be done in particular ways. I had to learn to laugh at myself or make a choice to bend in order to keep peace and my own sanity.

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The harder form of anger management, though, was when a boundary violation happened that implicated a deeper personal value. This was, however, the far more interesting and rewarding kind to explore. On the occasions I could keep control, I would just sit when I noticed the feelings arise. I would breathe into the anger and let my body expand around it. This gave me distance from the sensations and made the anger smaller and less intimidating. I would then just watch the anger, and I was amazed often to see that, under what I had always seen as a terrifying, wild beast, there was instead a thoughtful, deep-feeling, but scared child.

When I saw this child hiding beneath my anger for the first time, something inside me changed. I had always hated my own anger. I had always tried to push it away. I had always known as a woman and a lawyer that anger was out of bounds for me because I could not control it. But the mother in me saw past those rules when she saw a scared child who just needed love and to be heard. So, I let the mom in me sit with the hurt, scared, angry child, and they would talk while I just watched and breathed.

After they talked, I didn’t hate myself or feel like a failure. Instead, I knew with clarity what I had to do next. I may have to talk to the person who had hurt or upset me. I may have to re-establish boundaries in my life or arrange things better to avoid the same conflict in the future. I may have to apologize. I nearly always had to forgive myself. While these resolutions were often uncomfortable and challenging, they felt a lot better than the shame and self-hatred I’d experienced before. Over time, too, I found that it was much more effective. I was angry far less often because I clung less tightly to my rules and made a habit of honoring my emotions, rather than ignoring them until they exploded.

Lawyers often seek out mindfulness practices because they want more peace and calm in their lives. That’s initially what I was looking for too. Mindfulness helped me make peace with my own anger, however, because it helped me give myself permission not to be calm. Through practice, I learned to use my breath as a tool to steady myself enough to see clearly when I was not calm. When I could do that, I was staggered to see that I could love the part of myself that I had always feared and hated. And when I could love that childish, unruly, wild, warm, emotional part of myself it was that much easier to love the wild, unruly, unexpected, and uncontrolled parts of my life and law practice.

In the end, maybe I was drawn to mindfulness because I wanted to be calm. But I’m grateful I never attained that because permission to not be calm and the courage to face myself while not calm was what I needed to find peace. In other words, I needed to balance the lawyer part of me with the mom part of me to learn to accept and care for my own anger and that’s when I found calm.

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Executive Close CropClaire E. Parsons is a Member at Adams Law, PLLC in Covington, Kentucky, where she focuses her practice in local government practice, school law, and civil litigation. She is the mother of two girls and a former Board Member and volunteer for MothersEsquire. Claire is a certified meditation and yoga teacher and she writes about mindfulness for lawyers on her blog, Brilliant Legal Mind. You can follow Claire’s blog on WordPress, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter and you can find more of Claire’s content or connect with her on LinkedIn.

 

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