Bad facts

Aren't we all at least a little bit culpable?

Hello! Good to see you here again. This essay mentions, in vague terms, acts of abuse and neglect that may not be of interest to some readers. With that disclaimer, please continue if you wish.

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People who work in criminal and family law know that sometimes we encounter unimaginably horrible circumstances—scenes of abuse and harm of all kinds. Like in many other professions, it’s part of the job, and some lawyers are skilled at compartmentalizing their emotional responses to our clients’ trauma. I’ve never been so good at that, but no matter. Compartmentalization has its own dangers—just google “lawyer mental health” and see what comes up. And although emotions might not play a role in most legal arguments, I’m finding that taking time to emotionally process the worst cases maybe isn’t such a bad thing at all.¹

Lately, as I’ve come across a few particularly awful fact patterns, I’m paying more attention to how my body reacts. In some instances it’s a heaviness in my chest; other times, as if I have something caught in my throat. And in what might be the most difficult facts I’ve ever read, in a child abuse case, it was literal tears and a lost appetite for most of the day.

It’s important for me to take stock of these reactions, the signals of my exposure to someone else’s trauma, of my own potential secondary traumatic stress. And sometimes, a case is bad enough to make me question whether I should even be doing this work—to question, for a moment, my beliefs about humanity.

I don’t believe in the binary of good people vs. bad people.² There was a viral twitter thread recently about the harms of “good girl” conditioning and how women who had been raised to be “good” are often more easily victimized and less likely to identify or trust their self-protective intuition. I recommend reading the thread, as it feels anecdotally related:

Dr. Nicole LePera @Theholisticpsyc

"Good girl" conditioning is messaging we receive beginning in childhood to be: agreeable, polite, and nice. HERE'S WHAT IT IS:

Indeed, the very concept of “good” and “bad” people is a controlling metric that allows us to (arbitrarily/to the people in power’s advantage) designate someone as “bad” and then justify the myriad ways we harm those bad people: namely, by depriving them of their human rights. (Prison, immigration detention, and slavery are excellent examples of this.) The above thread does a good³ job of explaining how the flip side, of rewarding certain behavior as good, can be just as controlling and destructive.

It’s not surprising that many people prefer thinking in the good/bad binary. It’s much, much easier to sigh, say someone’s a bad person, and proverbially give up on them than to grapple with the fact that someone did a bad thing, and that we all do bad things, and that some things might be worse than others but it’s not clear who should get to decide that and how we should quantify the degree of how bad a thing is and what the consequence for each bad thing is and, if we can think clearly, what factors may have led the person to do the bad thing and how can we try to prevent that bad thing from happening again in the future and also, also, ask how can we find a way to still live with the person who did the bad thing just as people may have found ways to live with us after we did a maybe less bad but still bad thing ourselves?

The Holy Transfiguration of Our Lord Chapel, Ninilchik, AK, July 2022.

If the above paragraph seems like a gross simplification of the problem, it is. I’m not trying to say that someone who murders their child has the same moral or societal culpability as someone who jaywalks—that isn’t right. But it gets less clear the more kinds of conduct we compare. What about financial crimes? What about intimate partner gaslighting? What about refusing to rent an apartment to non-white people? What about breaking into someone’s car and stealing a laptop on the seat to sell it for drugs, without which you likely wouldn’t survive (psychologically, physically) your life in a tent city? What about oil spills? What about animal cruelty? What about factory farms? What about ageism, sexism, transphobia? What about someone with schizophrenia who refuses medication and makes people uncomfortable by shouting and throwing things in the middle of the street?

…the list goes on.

People do bad things. And even if I’m not the actual victim of harm, it still affects me as a member of society to know about it, to grapple with it. But the solution is not to simply avoid reading those cases, to turn my head and avoid seeing the harm. How else can we build a better society without truly understanding the worst of who we are, the worst of what we do?

It’s like in college, and probably many Vermont towns, when someone would organize a week during which everyone had to place their trash bags on their lawns for all to see. Instead of keeping our filth hidden away in bins and landfills, we had to physically reckon with it: see it, smell it, feel sick about it. Maybe that's the push we'd need to become environmentalists; maybe after that we would think twice about using another Keurig pod.⁴

Similarly, I find it important to grapple with the worst kinds of things humans do to one another. And not just in the good people vs. bad people evening news or “true crime” kind of way; instead, in the way of processing my emotional reactions to be able to see past the harms to the humanity of the person who (allegedly?) caused them. To feel that bit of culpability myself, the idea that, as a member of society, I too played some butterfly-effect kind of role in allowing that harm to happen.

Our society is not set up to take care of each other. We still worship the myth of individualism, the American ideal that it’s each man for himself. But of course that’s a myth, of course it’s not true. Instead, we are all reflections of the worlds in which we were formed, the proverbial villages that raised us. So, too, are we responsible as village members for the bad acts that occur in our midst.

Each person deserves support, even as each action we take deserves a corresponding consequence. I’m not saying that abusers are “good” or should be let off the hook; not at all. I’m just saying that, when it comes down to it, no one is definitively good, no one is definitively bad. We’re all human, and even the worst things we do to each other—perhaps especially the worst things—need to be seen, felt, and processed in the open air. That’s the only way we’ll possibly figure out how to deal with them.

Laurie is the baddest of girls. Anchorage, June 2021.

On that dire note, hopefully you can all go watch some best-of Kate McKinnon and Aidy Bryant SNL skits to remind yourself of the better parts of humanity, like I did earlier this week. Or, if you’re in the mood for a happy cry, some videos of animals being reunited with their owners? YouTube has been delivering as of late. Does that mean humanity is doing something right??⁵

Be well,

Julia

P.S. I wanted to share that last week’s post really delivered! I’m syncing up with a friend on her work trip and will be headed to Milan, Venice, and a few other spots the week or so after Thanksgiving. Way to go, serendipitous blog universe! I’m truly grateful to you all for reading.

1. I’ll get to why I think that later. Hopefully.

2. Turns out I don’t believe in most binaries but, gender and sexuality aren’t today’s topics.

3. Ha.

4. This is a purposefully absurd example.

5. Sarcasm?!