Lorre Laws teaches nursing students peace and resilience
Assistant professor overcomes her own near-death trauma to pair healing arts with health sciences.
A life-threatening illness prompted Lorre Laws, PhD, RN, to go into nursing. She spends all her spare time working to help nurses overcome work-related trauma and burnout.
Photo by Gail Christison
Lorre Laws, PhD, RN, is on a mission. It’s one so compelling that she switched careers and has spent, by her own accounting, six years and six figures of her time and money to pursue it.
Her purpose: heal the healers.
Laws, an assistant clinical professor and assistant professor of practice at the University of Arizona College of Nursing’s Bachelor of Science in Nursing – Integrative Health pathway, is focused on helping nurses and other professionals recover from work-related trauma and burnout.
Lorre Laws’ personal mission statement is “It’s not necessarily how I make a difference; I just want to be certain that I do.”
Photo by Ellie DiBene
“Of critical importance is nurturing one’s inner landscape and aligning those deeper truths and meanings with the externals of daily living,” Laws said.
She shepherds her students toward these skills through NURS 379 Scholarly Inquiry for Evidence-Based Practice and NURS 390 Quality, Safety and Technology for Nursing Practice. She spends her nonworking hours trying to reach everyone else.
Laws said she felt such a sense of urgency, in fact, that she spent her own money rather than waiting for grant funding to do research. She has traveled the globe for speaking engagements, appeared on podcasts (including her own), started a nonprofit to help nurses and wrote a soon-to-be-released book.
Does Laws have more hours in her day than anyone else? No, she’s just driven.
“This is my calling,” she said. “And if you’ve ever had a calling, it provides you with a great deal of energy, motivation and drive. It’s my oxygen.”
Out of the mud
The College of Nursing campus in Gilbert has a simulation center where nursing students can train for real-life scenarios. Outside each simulation room is a lotus flower. It may look like a decoration, but it’s a very specific feature intended by Laws and the other founding faculty members at the campus to help ground those who enter.
Students are taught to touch the bloom as a way not only to remember the integrative nursing principles that guide them but to take a breath and connect with themselves.
“The lotus is something beautiful that emerges from mud,” Laws said. “Sometimes health care can be a little muddy. It can be a little challenging. There are not only a lot of disease processes, personality types, challenges, diverse backgrounds and dynamics among our patients but also among our colleagues.
“So, the lotus is sort of this universal symbol that is positively regarded. No matter what the circumstance, no matter what the challenge before us, there is always hope and opportunity for growth, for well-being, for healing.”
The plant is a symbol of resilience and rebirth – things Laws knows a thing or two about.
From death to a doctorate
It was a near-death experience that brought Laws to nursing.
Lorre Laws, left, shown here with Lois J. Loescher, PhD, RN, now professor emerita with the College of Nursing, went back to school at 48 and earned a master’s and PhD.
Photo courtesy of Lorre Laws
The mysterious symptoms first struck in 1994. Laws, then a married mother of three, was living in California and working in real estate when she started experiencing a cascade of strange, unrelated sicknesses: crippling pain, headaches, vertigo, memory issues, joint pain. That was just the beginning.
She saw doctor after doctor and received multiple diagnoses and medications. Nothing helped. Laws would go to her kids’ soccer games and couldn’t walk up the bleachers. She’d watch, lying down, from the sidelines.
It got to the point where she was nearly paralyzed.
“I was just trying not to die,” said Laws. “My only goal was don’t orphan your children.”
Laws, who long before she received her master’s and doctorate in nursing from the U of A College of Nursing was working in yoga, acupressure and therapeutic touch, among other healing arts, said she felt like western medicine had failed her, so she retreated to nature.
For a year, she left her children with their father while she camped and lived out of her truck. It took more than two decades to discover that all the strange maladies were the result of mold toxicity.
Six years ago, she, along with others, including Kelly Reynolds, MSPH, PhD, of the U of A’s Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health, launched the International Society for Environmentally Acquired Illness.
While she was battling to reclaim her health, she kept feeling a recurring need to “heal the healers.” With her marriage over and her life upside down, Laws wasn’t exactly sure what it meant. But she knew she was drawn to nursing, her original career path.
As a 14-year-old, her after-school job was cleaning toilets at a nursing facility. It wasn’t the most glamorous work, but Laws enjoyed spending time with the residents and became a certified nursing assistant before she could drive. She continued to work as a CNA in college at a local hospital until she injured her back moving a patient.
Because she suffered several herniations – that still bother her today – everyone from college counselors to hospital staffers told her the profession wasn’t possible. Turns out, nursing just got postponed. Very postponed.
Making a difference
Laws went back to school at 48 and, in 2013, earned her Master of Science for Entry into the Profession of Nursing. She discovered her love for research and teaching and earned a PhD.
Lorre Laws, who also practices healing arts, suffered extreme illnesses due to mold toxicity. She spent a year camping, working to reclaim her health. Distraught at being away from her children, she held a fire ceremony to try and heal her body and soul.
Photo courtesy of Lorre Laws
She was teaching in the U of A’s College of Social and Behavioral Sciences when the College of Nursing’s integrative pathway program was taking shape. She jumped at the chance to be part of it.
“I feel really fortunate that I get an opportunity to help nursing students learn about their career role through an integrative health focus and also through a systems- and concepts-based approach,” said Laws, whose middle child also graduated from the MEPN program. “I feel like they really get such a rich education.”
And Laws is a big reason for that, said Brian Ahn, PhD, dean of the College of Nursing.
“Dr. Laws is an exceptional asset to the College of Nursing and the profession,” he said. “Her passion for helping heal the healers and her dedication to fostering resilience in nurses and healthcare professionals are truly inspiring. Through her research, teaching and outreach, she equips our students with the clinical skills they need and the tools for self-care and holistic well-being. Dr. Laws exemplifies the leadership that transforms individuals and the healthcare system at large.”
Laws earns glowing reviews from her students for her accessibility and compassion. To her, not only is it important they learn the subject matter but also realize “that they matter.”
“My overarching mission statement is that it’s not necessarily how I make a difference; I want to be certain that I do,” Laws said. “What matters to my healer’s heart the most is to make a difference to my profession.”