Los Angeles DUI Attorney BlogFinding Self-Compassion After Your Los Angeles DUI Arrest
Your Los Angeles DUI charges have thrown your life totally out of balance. You’re not just worried about the immediate penalties – although you’d like to avoid jail time and losing your license, if possible. You’re also worried about the longer term ramifications for your life, career, and relationships.
• If everyone at your office begins to think you of as a “DUI offender,” how will that affect your employment/promotion prospects?
• Will people close to you forgive you, especially if you hurt someone while DUI?
• Will you be able to move beyond the unfortunate event to build new relationships and enjoy life again?
The answers obviously depend on many factors, including:
• The nature of your DUI crime (e.g. did you hurt someone while under the influence, or did you just get stopped at a checkpoint?);
• Do you have other DUIs on your record?
• Were you already struggling with career, relationship, money or self-esteem issues before the DUI?
• How psychologically resilient are you?
• Do you understand your potential DUI penalties and defense options?
• Etc.
We live in a world where people like to categorize other people in black and white terms. He is either a “criminal” or an “upstanding citizen.” She is either “a good person” or “a bad person.” We create labels for other people and for ourselves, subconsciously and consciously. We do this despite the obvious reality that human beings fluctuate wildly, depending on variables such as our environment, level of sleep, cultural encoding, peer groups, financial stresses, age and life experience. In other words, we’re dynamic creatures who are trapped by our language to think of ourselves as more static than we really are.
This “cataloguing issue” causes problems in diverse areas of our lives, but it causes particular pain for DUI defendants. After all, when you start to use the language like “I’m a Los Angeles DUI defendant,” you begin to think of yourself as having certain attributes – a lack of ability to control behavior, a tendency to be wild, etc. Associations connected with the term “DUI driver” glom onto you. You start thinking of yourself that way, and people around you start to think of you that way. And that can be very damaging. The label obviously fails to represent, accurately, who you are, what you’re about, and even why you did what you did when you did it.
Finding compassion – and reframing your situation to reflect a more objective reality – is no small task. Fortunately, you do not have to go through this process by yourself. The experienced, ethical, and highly effective Los Angeles DUI criminal defense team at the Kraut Criminal & DUI Lawyers is on your side to advise you about best practices.
Have you been stopped for DUI in Los Angeles, contact attorney Michael Kraut at (323) 464-6453 or online. Our team is located at 6255 Sunset Boulevard, Suite 1520, Los Angeles, California 90028.