Transform your legal advocacy by mastering trauma-informed strategies that build client trust, mitigate burnout, and sharpen professional judgment.
Lawyers frequently work with individuals experiencing significant stress, conflict, crisis, loss, and trauma, yet many legal processes remain structured around assumptions that do not reflect how trauma can influence communication, memory, emotional regulation, behaviour, and decision-making. Misinterpreting trauma responses can affect client relationships, increase conflict, create professional frustration, and contribute to poorer outcomes for both clients and practitioners.
This session examines legal practice through a trauma-informed perspective, focusing on how lawyers can better understand behavioural responses arising from trauma while maintaining professional boundaries, ethical obligations, and effective representation. The course explores brain-based approaches to communication, common interaction patterns in high-stress environments, the impact of trauma on legal processes, and practical strategies for improving client engagement and reducing professional strain.
Key Topics Discussed:
Executive Director, Physician | Beyond the Cycle of Trauma Institute
Erika Cheng is a Family Physician who does emergency, hospital and clinic work. She also served for many years as the local medical director, and provides Trauma-and Dissociation-focused psychotherapy. Her areas of interest includes ways to positively shift the negative dynamics that often occurs when those who have experienced early relational trauma intersect with healthcare, educational and other services – dynamics leading to increased stress and burnout for providers, and worsened outcomes and retraumatization in Survivors. It was this interest that led to her passion for teaching frontline workers brain-based, healing-aligned skills for working more effectively with people who have a history of trauma. She is also the Executive Producer and co-writer of the “Reaching Past the Cycle of Trauma” © series of short films, and serves as Executive Director of the nonprofit organization, Beyond the Cycle of Trauma Institute.
