Reflective Practice and Public Interest Attorneys
By Janeth Nuñez del Prado, LCSW | Desert Bloom Psychology & Consulting.
Reflective Practice and Public Interest Attorneys
On the chest that tightens before the mind knows why — and what it takes to do this work without losing yourself inside it.
The Moment My Chest Felt Tight
I recently received a referral in private practice for a mother who had lost her child. My initial thought was: yes, this is in my scope of practice, I can help her. But I felt a tightness in my chest during the call with my referral partner.
I told her I would think about whether this was someone I could take on right now, or whether there was someone in my network who would be a better fit. After I hung up, I thought: I have experience in traumatic grief. I should be able to do this. I want to see this client right away. I want to help ease her suffering.
Then, I paused.
I took a breath.
I became curious.
What was this tightness in my chest? What was my body telling me?
I realized the child she had lost was the same age as my daughter. It felt obvious the moment I saw it.
I changed the way I approached this case. Yes, I could absolutely work with this mother — but what would it cost me?
I sat with that question and realized that at this point in my life, if I took on this case, it is absolutely something I would bring home. And that would not be helpful — not to me, not to my family, not to the client herself.
I referred out. I felt ethical. I felt intentional. And I also felt self-compassion — three things that do not always arrive together, but did that day.
What I was practicing has a name. Mary Claire Heffron calls it reflective practice — the discipline of pausing to use your own internal reactions as information. Not as noise to suppress, but as signal. Asking yourself questions such as:
What does this case bring up in my own history?
What might my reaction be telling me about what the client is experiencing?
What would this cost me — and is that a cost I can sustain right now?
It is woven into the daily practice of trauma therapists. It is considered essential for any helping professional.
And yet…
Most attorneys have never heard the phrase.
They were trained in constitutional law, trial strategy, the rules of evidence. Reflective practice is simply not part of the curriculum — not in law school, not in continuing education.
And that absence has a cost.
The Pull to Do Too Much
I had a client who missed every appointment to meet me, even though she was fully capable of making it to my office. So I offered to come to her instead. I told her I could see it was hard for her to get to me.
On my way, I stopped at a coffee shop. Texted her. Asked if she wanted anything. She said yes.
We sat in her home and drank coffee together, and I asked her how I could help.
She was a young woman whose impulsivity had cost her a great deal. She had an early history of attachment disruptions, the kind that teaches a person not to trust that anyone will stay. But she also had a spark. A sense of humor. A real determination to change her life.
I left that meeting wanting to help her enormously. She had so many needs, and I could feel myself reaching to meet every one of them.
Then I paused. I asked myself what was coming up for me.
I realized — she reminded me of a younger version of myself.
That did not mean I shouldn’t work with her. It meant I needed to understand why my rescuer part was showing up — and move forward with intention. My role was not to save her. It was to support her. To scaffold her own capacity, and let her build the rest herself.
We worked together for a year. Her case was dismissed. She got a job. She went back to school. It was her journey. I was only the guide.
At the end of our work, she told me I had been helpful — that she had felt safe with me. I asked what had made her feel that way.
“When we first met, you came to my house. You brought me coffee. We sat and had coffee like normal people. I’d never had a social worker do that before.”
My interventions were not wrong. They were intentional, and they worked. I simply had to know what they were — and stay inside the boundary of my own role while I gave them.
Not Everything Is a Trigger
The word triggered has entered everyday language. It’s important that people have words for what they experience — but the word has been stretched to cover almost anything uncomfortable, and in doing so, it’s lost some of its precision.
Not everything that unsettles us is a trigger. Some things are simply hard to hear. And some are what I call a soft spot.
In the field of trauma, a trigger is something that activates our own unresolved trauma — a reaction that is sudden, disproportionate, and overwhelming relative to what is actually happening in front of us.
What I have come to call a soft spot is different. It’s something that resonates with our history, our identity, or our own longing — without being rooted in trauma or a deep fear carried from our past.
It might be a client who reminds us of a sister.
Or a case that echoes one from years ago — one where we felt especially effective, where justice was done, and for a moment, rightfulness and order were restored to the world.
The young woman who reminded me of myself was a soft spot. The mother who lost her child touched a place in me that required real attention.
Knowing the difference matters — because what each one asks of us is not the same.
Recruiting Resources
For cases that are difficult for us — whether trigger or soft spot — the answer is not always to decline or refer out, though those are valid choices. Sometimes what the moment calls for is reflective practice itself: pausing, naming what is coming up, and recruiting our resources accordingly.
I think of these cases like waves.
When we see one coming, we can prepare. Grab a life vest. Take up a surfboard and choose to ride it with intention. Or even let a trusted colleague pull you onto their boat and realize you don’t have to be in the water alone.
Some waves are small — easy to anticipate, easy to ride out. Others carry riptides, and those deserve real respect. We cannot be effective for anyone if we are the ones being pulled under, unable to come up for air.
It is up to each of us to know which resources actually work for us — and to recognize when we haven’t yet discovered the right one.
Not every season of our life calls for the open water. Some call for the cove. A different kind of water — calmer, but no less alive. Water that still feeds the soul without asking us to be pulled under.
I found one once, in Hawaiʻi, and sat looking out at the waves without analyzing a single thing. No insight. No reframe. Just what I have come to call primary being — the rare experience of simply being, with nothing to figure out. And it was just what I needed.
Monitoring Thoughts, Feelings, and Behaviors
Part of reflective practice is noticing the thoughts we carry, and staying curious about what they cost us.
Some common ones, in the helping professions and especially among attorneys:
I should be able to handle this case.
If I ask for support, it means I’m weak.
If I don’t take this case, it means I don’t care.
These thoughts usually come from a generous place. They are the voice of the hero archetype — a role that serves a real function, but was always meant to come home. A hero who never returns isn’t completing the journey. He isn’t bringing home what was won, to the people who were waiting. He’s just lost.
Feelings deserve the same attention as thoughts.
What happens in my body when I sit across from this client? What happens after I leave? After I review the photographs? After I watch the body cam footage? After I spend an afternoon reading records that describe the worst thing that has ever happened to someone?
What feelings am I bringing home that may not belong to me — and which ones do belong to me?
And then there are behaviors — what we do when we skip the noticing altogether, when we don’t recruit the resources we actually need.
We drink, or reach for something else to numb the pain.
We isolate, and slowly stop connecting with the people we were meant to come back home to.
We quietly let go of the things that used to bring us joy, one by one. Then one day we wake up and notice that they are gone and that we have been feeling the absence for a long time.
The Things We Carry
When I think about reflective practice, I think about the difference between a backpack and a suitcase.
Without reflection, things accumulate in the backpack over years — unsorted, unnamed, strapped to us without our ever choosing them. We don’t remember everything that’s in there, because we never named it going in. It just gets heavier, until one day the weight of it makes the whole journey feel unbearable.
Reflective practice is the act of opening the backpack. Looking inside. Deciding, piece by piece, what to do with what we find.
Some things need washing before they can be carried again. Some are simply too heavy, and we have to set them down for good. Setting something down does not mean it didn’t matter, or that we are dishonoring what it once served. It simply means it is no longer ours to carry.
What we choose to keep, we fold — and place intentionally into a suitcase instead. The weight does not fully disappear, but now we know exactly what we’re carrying, and why.
We cannot get rid of everything. Some of it will always be ours to carry. But named, folded, and packed with intention, even a heavy suitcase travels differently than an unexamined backpack ever could.
Maybe, eventually, it even becomes a suitcase with wheels.
Reflection and Intention
The practice of reflection is not about attorneys becoming therapists, or the courtroom becoming their therapist’s couch. It’s about something simpler: knowing that the person making the argument, filing the motion, sitting across from a frightened client — is also a human being, and does this work with their heart, their soul, not only their head. One with a history, a nervous system, a chest that sometimes tightens before the mind knows why.
Public interest work asks people to bear witness to the deepest layers of human suffering for years, often with no real end in sight, no clear victory to declare the battle has been won. It asks them to look at graphic evidence, to listen to audio recordings of people’s worst days, and then to walk into court and behave as if this is just another Tuesday.
Reflective practice doesn’t take away the difficulty of repeated exposure to trauma. It makes it sustainable.
The case will still be there. The evidence will still be there. The client’s pain will still be real and still be heavy. But between what happens to us and what we do next, there is a pause. The pause is not empty space. It is where the choosing happens. And in the choosing — there is room to meet this work without the heaviness of it deciding, on its own, who we become.
A Gentle Invitation
If something in this article speaks to you, I invite you to sit with a few questions.
What feelings came up while you were reading it?
Were there certain sections that resonated more than others? Why?
Did any part of this remind you of your own experience? Which part — and why?
What are the tools you already use?
Which cases feel like small waves? Which ones feel like riptides?
When do you know it's time to find the cove?
You do not have to have the answers.
The first step is asking the questions.
And in the asking, reflective practice begins.
This piece is intended for informational purposes and is not a substitute for individualized mental health care. Clients have been de-identified to protect confidentiality.