THE WELLNESS ISSUE
COGNITIVE DISSONANCE, HARD DECISIONS, AND WELLNESS
T
his is not an article offering wellness tips or advice. Those are very important and lawyers have too long neglected their mental and emotional health. Our Delaware Lawyers Assistance Program offers a variety of resources and opportunities to take steps toward wellness. Please use them. DE-LAP also offers confidential assistance from professionals and peers for any Delaware lawyer who has, or thinks she might have, a problem with substance abuse or mental health. Please contact us if you think you might need help. That is the most important message the DSBA and DE-LAP can offer to members of the Delaware Bar. It is more important now than in the past. The Covid pandemic has only exacerbated our profession’s unwellness. In this article, I attempt to discuss one aspect of our thinking about values and actions and how it can impact our wellness. Based on my personal experience and the years I have been working with Carol Waldhauser to help impaired attorneys, I am convinced that too many of us are stressed, sad, or anxious. None of us should be surprised that we feel stress. We deal with the legal rights of our clients, including freedom of the accused, protection of society, reputations of persons, and large amounts of money in transactions and litigations. We must deal with 22
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The simple process of
recognizing the truth, deciding what we
value and
really trying
to act in line with our
values is, it
seems to me, a difficult
assignment
these days.
lots of competing demands from clients, partners, supervisors, staff, counterparties in transactions, opponents in litigations, and judges. I am also convinced our profession, to do it well, requires a large amount of time — there is simply no escaping it. In addition, we are currently living in a world and society that has plenty of problems to make us uncomfortable: the war in Ukraine, inflation, climate change, suicide rates, drug and alcohol addiction rates, gun violence, poverty, deep political divisions, and the nastiness of political and social discourse, to name a few. I feel like I have no or little control over many of these stressors and problems. All this forced me to take a hard look at what I could try to control — my thoughts and conduct. I discovered they often do not match. Cognitive dissonance refers to a situation involving conflicting attitudes, beliefs, or behaviors. When Leon Festinger published his Theory of Cognitive Dis-
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BY R. JUDSON SCAGGS, JR., ESQUIRE
