Hi, and welcome to The Former Lawyer Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Cottrell. I practiced law for 10 years and now I help unhappy lawyers ditch their soul-sucking jobs. On this show, I share advice and strategies for aspiring former lawyers, and interviews with former lawyers who have left the law behind to find careers and lives that they love.

Today we're going to talk about something that I think a lot of lawyers who are thinking about leaving law encounter. It touches on, among other things, no surprise, things that you might talk about in therapy. Because, as you know, I am an advocate for therapy for all lawyers.

I'm going to start with the top-line assertion. Then we're going to talk about the different things that I think make it true. So here is what I think you need to know if you are a lawyer who's a high-achieving type, who's always done well in school and at your job, and you're used to getting accolades, and you probably are working now in a job where objectively lots of people think you're really good at it. You know, that's not every lawyer's experience, but that is many lawyers' experience.

Here's the thing. It is possible to achieve great things or it is possible to just be a high achiever in a way that's not sustainable for you as a human being. I say that because I think that there are a lot of lawyers, I definitely was one of them, who were like, "Well, I can do this, so I should do this. I am able to do this work. I'm getting good feedback. People want to work with me. I'm advancing. I'm getting good reviews. It would be crazy to do something else." Because all of those external markers are saying you're doing a good job. You're achieving.

I think this is especially true if you are someone who is neurodiverse. So if you have autism or if you have ADHD, this can also be true if you're someone who has PTSD or CPTSD, there tends to be, for those of us who fall into any of those buckets, a lot of black-and-white thinking. By that, I just mean it can be difficult for those of us who fall into those buckets, which many of us do, to look at ourselves achieving and say, "This is not right for me," right? Because so much of how we've been conditioned, both as lawyers and as people just in our upbringing and elsewhere, is we've been conditioned to judge whether what we're doing is the right thing for us based on what types of external feedback we get.

As you know, for example, we talk about ADHD on the podcast quite a bit because it is many, many lawyers' experience to have ADHD. I work with so many lawyers who have ADHD. I work with lots of lawyers who we've started working together and then they have been assessed and they've been diagnosed with ADHD. One of the things, of course, about ADHD is that task initiation can be a challenge for someone with an ADHD brain because of the way that the dopamine uptake is interrupted. So some of the ways around that, one of them is by creating urgency, right? So essentially, if you're someone with ADHD, instead of creating anticipatory dopamine for completion of a task, you can get yourself to start a task by dumping a lot of adrenaline and cortisol into your system.

Which means that people with ADHD are often really, really good in high-stress situations, really, really good at getting things done at the last minute, really, really good at doing what needs to be done when it needs to be done. However, putting yourself in a situation where you do have that repeated, constant, or even persistent adrenaline and cortisol is not great for you as a person, as a human being. It's not great for your nervous system. It's not great for your emotional health. It's not great for your physical health.

This is not to say, "If you have ADHD, then you shouldn't be a lawyer." That's not what I'm saying. This is just one example, I think, of the ways in which people who do well as lawyers can look at the fact that they're doing well and think, "Well, this is what I'm meant to do," even if at the same time you have this internal sense of, "This is killing me," or "I am so miserable," or "My felt experience of what I'm doing is not at all congruent with what people see in terms of how they perceive the work that I'm doing or the kind of lawyer that I am."

Similarly, this ability to sublimate your own needs, nervous system needs, other needs, whatever, is something that many people develop as a result of PTSD or CPTSD. So there are lots of lawyers who grew up in various types of contexts that were traumatizing, whether we're talking about what a lot of people think about as trauma, like in terms of physical abuse, food and housing insecurity, those sorts of things. There are also a lot of lawyers who grew up in households with parents who were narcissists. We've talked about narcissism on the podcast before and how prevalent it is in the legal industry.

If you grew up in environments like that, it is highly likely that you developed adaptations, adaptive behaviors, to get you through those environments. Especially if you're in an environment with a narcissist or a parent who is a substance abuser, it is highly likely that you developed perfectionism as a result of that experience. Because perfectionism and the things that go along with it are ways that your young self tried to keep you safe. So either it got you recognized when you wouldn't otherwise be recognized and got you the connection that all humans need, especially young human children, or it allowed you to fly under the radar, to not be noticed and to not experience negative consequences.

So I say this to say that there are a lot of lawyers who roll into the legal profession and they are highly adapted to be able to deal with a ton of shit. The reason for that is because they have developed these adaptations because of their past trauma. This, again, is not saying, "Oh, you have trauma, you shouldn't be a lawyer." I am not saying that. But I do think that it is really important to recognize that some of the reasons that you are able potentially to sublimate your needs, like your emotional, physical, et cetera needs, to your job and to be the person who people are like, "Wow, this person is so great. They're so dedicated," is because you already developed those adaptations to push through and not notice how I feel, what I need, how something is affecting me, because those patterns have already been set.

Related to all of that and this whole idea that it is possible to be doing really well and yet have it be a very bad situation for you, have it be a situation that is not sustainable for you, is that so many lawyers in that position have been conditioned to believe that they are less valuable. That they as a person, just as a human, are less valuable than the version of them who achieves. So if they're an achiever, they're valuable. If they're not an achiever, they're not valuable. So it can be very hard to let go of that behavior that helps you succeed, even if it's to your own detriment, right? Even if it is something that is damaging to your nervous system because of either your neurotype or trauma or just because what's being asked of you is too much for your nervous system.

Again, to circle back to what I said at the very beginning, this is why I talk so much about therapy and going to therapy if you're someone who's thinking about leaving law. Because there are so many lawyers who are high achievers, who are perfectionists, who are the kind of people who can be relied on to get stuff done. You're the responsible one. You're the one who is consistent. You're the one who carries the group projects or carried the group projects. You're the one who people turn to when stuff really needs to get done. That is an amazing set of skills and qualities to have. But that also tells me that there's a decent chance that some of this is active for you and that it might be very hard for you to see that you as a person are valuable apart from the things that you achieve.

Until you are able to believe that you are valuable apart from what you achieve, which, by the way, is quite difficult, to be clear, I'm not sitting here being like, "And it's a breeze. I accomplished that super easily." I am still working on that. I've been in therapy for, I don't know, 12 years. It is really hard to let go of the behavior that helps you succeed as a lawyer, even if it is to your own detriment, even if it is not sustainable for you, even if it is having adverse effects on your mental, physical, emotional health, on your relationships. It is very hard to let go of the things that allow you to achieve if you believe that achieving is what makes you valuable as a person.

Again, this episode is for people who are working as lawyers and are doing well, but it is just emotionally, mentally crushing them, who feel like they have to keep doing it because they're good at it. So that must mean it's the thing they're supposed to do. What I'm saying is you have options. The fact that something is not good for your mental, physical, and emotional health matters, you may, for various reasons, have been conditioned to think it doesn't, but it really does.

I cannot encourage you more strongly to get into therapy if you are not, because unraveling these questions and these feelings can be the difference between being able to make a move to something that is better for you and feeling stuck in something that is just soul-sucking. Thank you so much for listening today. I'll talk to you next week.

Thanks so much for listening. I absolutely love getting to share this podcast with you. If you haven't yet, I invite you to download my free guide: First Steps to Leaving the Law at formerlawyer.com/first. Until next time, have a great week.