The divorce file you carry home: emotional regulation for legal professionals in family law

By Sonja Cilliers and Maryke Swarts, PMRI · 12 September 2026

A family practitioner’s morning: a consultation with a mother who has not slept in a week, a letter from the other side that is designed to wound, a call from a client who has just found out what his wife told the children. Then, at eleven, a settlement agreement to draft, in clean, precise language, as if none of that had happened.

Nobody trained you for the switching. Legal training taught you the law of divorce and the procedure of the maintenance court. It did not teach you what it does to a nervous system to sit inside other people’s grief for six hours and then produce careful work, and it certainly did not teach you what to do about it. The profession’s unspoken answer has been to get harder. It works, for a while, and then it costs you the thing that made you good at this.

What is happening in you

Human beings are built to catch emotion from each other. Sitting across from someone in acute distress, your own nervous system moves toward theirs: heart rate, breathing, the low-level alarm that the body runs when it senses danger nearby. This is not weakness or over-involvement. It is the same machinery that makes you able to read a client, a witness or a magistrate, and it cannot be switched off selectively.

What can be managed is what happens next. Left alone, the alarm stays partly on after the consultation ends, which is why the settlement agreement at eleven takes longer than it should, why small errors creep in, and why the irritation at home in the evening arrives out of proportion to its cause. The load did not leave when the client did. It was carried into the next matter and then into the car.

Over months, a nervous system that is never allowed to come down starts to protect itself. The clinical word is numbing. Practitioners describe it as “not feeling it any more”, and often say it with some pride. It is the early sign of a system that is running out of the capacity it needs for the work, and it tends to show first in the places that matter least to the firm and most to the person: patience with family, interest in anything outside the office, sleep.

Three habits that hold

The first is a boundary in time rather than in feeling. You cannot decide not to feel the consultation; you can decide when it ends. Two or three minutes between the client leaving and the next task, used deliberately, tell the body that the emergency is over. A slow breath out, longer than the breath in, repeated a few times, is the fastest signal the body accepts. Walk to the kitchen. Look out of a window at something far away. It sounds too small to matter, and it is the difference between the alarm switching off and the alarm running all day.

The second is writing before drafting. Before you open the agreement, write three lines on paper: what the client said, what you felt, what you need to do. The first two lines take the experience out of working memory and put it somewhere it can be left. The third line is the task, on its own, and the brain can now attend to it. Practitioners who do this describe the agreement “going faster”, which is exactly what happens when the prefrontal cortex is no longer sharing its capacity with an unprocessed hour.

The third is a deliberate end to the day. The mind will replay the hardest consultation on the drive home unless it has somewhere to put it. A short note at the end of the day, one line per matter that is still carrying an emotional charge and one line on what happens next, closes the loop for the evening. What is written down is no longer a loose end the brain has to keep checking.

What this is not

None of this is about caring less. The practitioners who last in family law care exactly as much as they did in their first year, and they have learnt to let the body come down between the moments that need it. That is a skill, it can be trained, and it belongs in the same category as drafting and cross-examination: part of the craft, taught late or never, and worth learning on purpose.

PMRI’s Burnout Prevention Framework webinar goes through the stress physiology behind this in detail, with the assessments and the workbook. For firms with a family law department, it is one of the sessions most often requested.