Concerned for My Safety

July 2, 2025

Dear Advy,

With the rise of online harassment and threats against lawyers and judges, I’ve started feeling unsafe in my practice, especially when dealing with high-profile or contentious cases. This is something I don’t want to have to worry about, but I find it is becoming harder to come into the office on a daily basis. Any suggestions for a more junior lawyer that is worried I may be blowing things out of proportion. Should just get over myself?

Sincerely,
Concerned for My Safety


Dear Concerned for My Safety,

You’re not imagining things. For example, judges in the United States are recently reporting a rash of serious, credible, and disturbing threats on their own lives and those of their families. The practice of law in all jurisdictions has become more susceptible to threats and to actual violence in the last few decades. There has always been danger in this job, but easy access to online platforms makes threats more prevalent and often more chilling.

No, I’m not going to tell you to get over yourself. “Get over yourself” is the equivalent of telling an unemployed person to “Get a job.”  It’s not only rude and hurtful, but it’s also completely unhelpful.

I’m also not going to try to give you advice about personal security, beyond saying that if you feel your safety is at risk, please make sure to get the help you need and contact the appropriate authorities.

Fundamentally, the issue you write about arises out of rumination. You keep thinking and re-thinking about these risks you’ve read about, and I anticipate you are imagining scary scenarios that leave you afraid to go to your workplace. The word rumination comes from the term for what cattle and other grazing animals do when they eat, then re-eat the same food over and over (often called “chewing cud”). That word root itself gives you an idea of what we mean when we refer to cognitive rumination. When we’re talking about the human mind, rumination “…refers to repetitive thinking or dwelling on negative feelings and distress and their causes and consequences.”

Now you’re thinking “Great. I asked for help and get called a cow. This isn’t going well.” 

Psychotherapist Katie Krimer has written very short, very approachable book on damaging self-talk called Sh*t I Say to Myself (page 50-51). She sets out a six-point practice she has developed to manage rumination, from which I am borrowing liberally below:

  1.  Identify and label the thinking loop or rumination you are experiencing. Some people recommend giving the thought loop a name, so that you can identify it as something that isn’t you.
  2. Write down as many thoughts as you can about what comes into your mind when you are experiencing this rumination. Don’t edit yourself. You want to get out all the sensible and ridiculous thoughts that come to you without judgment. Your comment about getting over yourself suggests to me that you may be employing more than a little judgment to yourself for having these thoughts. Whatever else we might say about self-judgment - which could be its very own topic for a column one day - it’s really unhelpful in managing this problem.
  3. Reflect on the function of the loop. You aren’t doing this for nothing. Most worries are rooted in thoughts that are actually helpful even if they sometimes spin out of control.
    1. Are you trying to protect yourself from the pain of uncertainty by replaying this tape?
    2. Are you replaying it because you don’t want to forget something? (Hint:  Then write it down somewhere you can find it later. For more ideas on that front, read Daniel Levitan’s book The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload)
    3. Is there a specific problem you are working on solving?
    4. Is there some other need you are fulfilling?
  4. Accept that you have to live with uncertainty. I’ll have more on this later.
  5. Engage your mind in something that is purposeful. Your hands, your eyes, and ultimately your mind can pull you back into the present by doing things that take your focus. That something can be work, yes, but it can also be a hobby, a sport, or learning something new. Thinking about something other than your own anxieties can help tremendously.
  6. Each time you notice the thought loop return, remind yourself that you have worked through this problem already. If your new rumination isn’t adding anything useful in terms of working out some kind of concrete plan to manage that uncertain future, take action as set out in point 5 above.

The hardest part of this process is accepting uncertainty. This takes practice.

A threat can be simultaneously real but not a significant factor around which you structure your daily life. To put that negatively, just because there are threats to our physical and psychological safety connected to the practice of law does not mean that those threats are something that needs to occupy your thinking most of the time.

Social media tends to heighten our awareness and concern about real but relatively remote risks. Within the logic of social media, that makes sense. Something scary or outrageous tends to generate more attention and engagement. Try posting something about how low the chances of a serious traumatic event are and see how much interaction you get from that post. My guess is, very little. None of that is to minimize the significance that these rare events have on people when they do happen. However, it is important for your well-being to understand that risk is not an all-or-nothing proposition. Something can be a real risk and simultaneously be a remote risk.

Of course, that’s easier said than done. We humans are given to black-or-white, all-or-nothing thinking, and those of us with depression, anxiety or other psychological conditions can be even more prone to that kind of perception. How do we develop our capacity to see, and live with, the shades of grey in between “This is real” and “This is likely to happen to me.”?

It may help to curate your social media and online content consumption. I’m not saying you must quit reading news feeds or the like. Remember, though, that these sites are selling you something. In this case, they are using inflammatory messages about your personal safety in order to hold your attention, and while they’ve got your attention, they will show you the ads that make social media profitable. If you want to keep up with the news and can afford a subscription, consider paying for your news. Subscribing to an actual news site that charges you for access can allow you to keep up with current events but do so in an information environment that doesn’t rely as much on grabbing your attention with things that will leave you shaken.

Consider developing a mindfulness practice which will help you identify these dichotomous thoughts and manage the discomfort uncertainty brings you. There is an international group of lawyers who help one another do precisely what you are trying to do.  Your local lawyer assistance program probably also has one or more programs in your community to help, and they can also match you with a professional counsellor and often a peer support volunteer to assist with this too.

Remember that managing anxious thoughts isn’t something you do once, and it’s fixed. This kind of problem is something you will have to attend to again and again. To use an analogy, this is more like doing laundry than fixing a broken pipe in your bathroom:  It is something that has to be done over and over. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Be well (and safe),
Advy