The month of June in Michigan is a glorious duality. Most years, we enter June fresh from the splendor of flowering, pastel-colored trees and green yards dotted with bright tulips and daffodils and end it in full summer mode clad in shorts at backyard barbeques and planning, or having already enjoyed, a trip up north to revel in the state’s many natural gifts.

The ancient Romans must also have experienced the duality of June. They were the ones who gave June its name in honor of the Roman goddess, Juno, herself an interesting study in duality. Juno is traditionally associated with being the protector of women and childbirth.¹ Yet Juno was also viewed as the principal deity and protector of the state and is regularly depicted as an armed goddess complete with shield and spear.²

Juno had her own festival, Matronalia, which celebrated spring and the renewal of nature.³ She is also honored as a protector of the military, and legend has it that her sacred geese alerted the Roman military to the impending attack on Rome by invading Gauls in 390 BCE.⁴

Though most of us accept the happy duality of June, much of our modern world is uncomfortable with reconciling dualities in life:

The dualistic mind is essentially binary, either/or thinking. It knows by comparison, opposition, and differentiation. It uses descriptive words like good/evil, pretty/ugly, smart/stupid, not realizing there may be a hundred degrees between the two ends of each spectrum. Dualistic thinking works well for the sake of simplification and conversation, but not for the sake of truth or the immense subtlety of actual personal experience. Most of us settle for quick and easy answers instead of any deep perception, which we leave to poets, philosophers, and prophets ...

We do need the dualistic mind to function in practical life, however, and to do our work as a teacher, a nurse, a scientist, or an engineer. It’s helpful and fully necessary as far as it goes, but it just doesn’t go far enough. The dualistic mind cannot process things like infinity, mystery, God, grace, suffering, sexuality, death, or ove; this is exactly why most people stumble over these very issues. The dualistic mind pulls everything down into some kind of tit-for-tat system of false choices and too-simple contraries ...⁵

One need only look at the headlines to see a world awash in either-or and us vs. them thinking, and the suffering such mindsets cause.

Because of our culture and the way we’re wired, lawyers are particularly ill-equipped for the task of integrating dualities. This is in large part because we primarily inhabit only one aspect of Juno’s dual nature.

The legal culture easily identifies with Juno and her role as the protector of the state. Many of us are comfortable, and even quick, to engage in battle to protect those we perceive as vulnerable. We take up our swords and shields in the form of logic, reason, analysis, and objectivity. Then, in courtrooms and at the bargaining table, we battle opposing lawyers and their clients — people struggling, to one extent or another, to reconcile duality.

We identify with our role as officers of the court and have become accustomed to, and even comfortable with, doing things in our role that are confusing and even occasionally morally distasteful to “civilians,” as one of my friends calls non-lawyers. If the law is one of the three learned professions along with medicine and theology, it is the only one lacking a clear healing, nurturing component to its mission. We are the one learned profession that focuses not on healing the person directly but rather fixing their legal problems and hoping that their minds, bodies, and hearts improve as a result.

Though all three professions serve people when they are at their most vulnerable, the legal culture is fundamentally uncomfortable with vulnerability. Our culture is predominantly adversarial — as evidenced by the conflict inherent in litigation, negotiation, billable hour rates, salaries, and jury awards. We are also a culture where an addiction to work is not only excused but encouraged.

Further, the very traits that make us good at our craft also keep us mired in binary thinking. Dr. Larry Richard of LawyerBrain indicates that lawyers as a group deviate significantly from the general population with regard to the following psychological traits:

• skepticism
• autonomy
• urgency
• abstract reasoning
• sociability
• resilience
• empathy⁶

We are all familiar with the statistics about the perilous state of the mental health of attorneys. The connection between the statistics and Dr. Richard’s data regarding these psychological traits makes sense intuitively and is quite insightful when explored more deeply.

In a 2020 article in General Counsel magazine, Dr. Richard recommends lawyers employ techniques to improve resilience and train their brains to seek out positives and identify strengths, not just highlight deficiencies that need improvement. He recommends focusing on positive social emotions such as gratitude, compassion, and pride, but adds that research shows that strong social connections are the most powerful antidote to problems caused by negativity.

I mean ongoing, authentic connections with people. Where you interact with people and you reveal your true self, which might entail some risk or vulnerability, and you show a genuine interest in the other person. Listening to people’s stories, giving them your full attention — there’s actually some very compelling research on the power of presence, the power of full attention in building social connection.

There is strong evidence that these shifts in mindset not only change the outlook, but they also change your biology, they change your immune system for the better, so people get sick less often, they have less frequent common colds, they can actually live longer, and they are more likely to make balanced decisions. That’s a bit of speculation on my part, but all the pieces are there for me to make that inference.⁷

In the legal realm, the restorative justice and collaborative divorce approaches are efforts to integrate the dualities of the legal system and make the law the healing profession it can (and should) be in appropriate circumstances.

In short, Dr. Richard urges us to reconcile duality — to be both the defenders of the state and life-affirming individuals — which we cannot do without recognizing and becoming comfortable with vulnerability, compassion, and regularly laying down our cognitive and metaphorical tools of war when nurturing and healing is the order of the day.

Doing so will not only heal others, but it will also heal us. Happy June!