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.

Hello, my friends. This week, we are talking about something that is related to what I talked about last week on the podcast.

So last week, I talked about how you can have the experience of being really good at your job, achieving, and from the outside it looking like this is the thing that you're supposed to be doing, like you are meant to be a lawyer. And on the inside being like, "This is soul-sucking. This is causing me extreme mental, physical, emotional distress."

There is another thing that often comes up when people are talking about this topic. I think that it's really important to talk about because I've had people say things like this to me. To be clear, this was tongue in cheek, but I think there is a kernel of truth in it. I think it's something that a lot of people who listen may have in their mind.

For lots of reasons, many of us who became lawyers think that our feelings are optional. So a lot of us, whether it's because of the environment we were raised in, whether it's because of our neurotype, whether it's because of any number of factors, nature, nurture, who knows, a lot of us believe that our feelings are optional.

In other words, a lot of us believe that if something happens and it is something that could make us sad or could make us angry, that we can choose not to be sad or we can choose not to be angry or we can choose not to be, let's say, nervous or whatever. That's not how feelings work. That's not how emotions work.

You may have been taught that emotions are dangerous, right? Like you have to examine them. Feeling them is dangerous. There are good emotions to feel and there are bad emotions to feel. The thing that I know we've talked about on the podcast before, but that I think is really important to remember, is that feelings—literally the physical feelings in your body that attach to what we think of as emotional states—those are reactions that your nervous system is having. They are not optional.

Now, many of us think that feelings are optional because for a very long time, possibly from the time we were born, we have been conditioned to ignore physical sensations that tell us that we are having feelings because we've been told that it's optional.

So in other words, let's do an example. Let's say you are in first grade and something happens that upsets you and you either are going to cry about it or you're going to throw some tantrum or some expression of anger. Someone, whether it's a teacher, parent, caregiver, whatever, tells you essentially that you shouldn't cry or it's not okay to be angry.

Now, I have young kids. We talk with them a lot about the fact that you can feel all your feelings, but there are different ways that are appropriate and not appropriate to express them. So I'm not just saying what should have happened is you should have been able to do whatever with no limits.

However, many of us learned from this that like, "Oh, I'm not supposed to feel sad. I'm not supposed to feel angry." If I have a feeling in my body—like my stomach feels sick or my chest feels tight or whatever way the feeling manifests for you—we often have been taught to suppress that and to not notice it.

In so doing, we believe that basically we can choose not to feel things. But we don't actually not feel them. Our nervous system still experiences them. We just don't process them, and they get kind of smashed down in there.

I mentioned this because I was talking to someone recently and we were talking about some of the things that were coming up with their job. Because as we know, being a lawyer can be soul-sucking and quite shitty. Not for everyone, but for many people. This person said to me something like, "I'll feel things when I retire."

Which, when you hear that, probably sounds like a kind of ridiculous statement. But honestly, I think this is what a lot of us think. Like, we're in it. We're in the job. We're grinding. We've got all this other stuff. You have family stuff, potentially. Maybe you have kids. You have pets. You have friends. You have the things that are going on in the world, which require a lot of emotional energy and focus and dedication and et cetera.

I think there is this sense of, "I can't afford to feel because it would derail me," right? There is this sense often of, "I can't afford to feel feelings because if I feel how annoyed or terrible it is to be working in this environment that I'm working in, or if I feel the sadness around the things that it's keeping me from that are things that I care a lot about and that are really important and in alignment with my values, then I won't be able to function at the level that I think that I need to function."

This is just me saying if you are functioning—even if you wouldn't say to me, "Sarah, I'll just feel things when I retire." Even if that's not a sentence that would come out of your mouth or be in your brain, it is still possible that that is basically, and honestly maybe a little bit likely, that that is part of how you are functioning, especially if you are in an environment that's particularly toxic.

Basically, like, "Okay, I'll feel things, but eventually." Well, here's the thing. That doesn't work. That is a big part of why I work with a lot of people who will tell me, "Yeah, I knew this was terrible for me. I was very unhappy. It was having a really bad effect on my relationships and my mental, emotional, and physical health."

Then basically what happened was my body started falling apart. Either I developed an autoimmune disease, my hair started falling out, or I had a nervous breakdown. These are very common things that happen to people in these lawyer environments.

The reason for it is because we think that our feelings are optional, but they're actually all getting—this is obviously not the technical way it works—but they're all just getting smashed down in your nervous system. Eventually, your nervous system is like, "No."

When that happens, when your nervous system is like, "No," it will expel those feelings and the negative part of those experiences regardless.

So my goal for people is not to be like, "Feel bad because you are dissociating from your feelings because you have to function." Because let's be real here. In the real world, that does happen.

But I do think that it's really important to ask yourself, "Am I behaving as though feelings are optional? Do I find it irritating when other people have feelings that I think they should be able to choose not to feel?"

That is a huge flag for you that that's probably something you're doing to yourself as well. Because if you think that it's optional for you to feel feelings, then you almost certainly think it's optional for other people to have feelings.

Again, there's a difference between having feelings and expressing them in an appropriate way, right? So I'm not saying someone can have a feeling and express it in any way and that's fine. It's actually not at all. Everyone is responsible for their own emotions.

But if you are someone who thinks your feelings are optional, it is highly likely that you are setting your nervous system up for a crash. That is what I have observed in myself, that is what I have observed with my clients, and that is what I have learned from the many interviews I've done for the podcast.

So I think it's really important for those of you who listen to the podcast to ask yourself, "Do I think feelings are optional? Do I actually let myself feel my feelings? And if not, what do I want to do about that?"

You know that I will always say therapy is a great option, and therapy is a great option. It's especially a great option in this context because if this is something that you find to be true for you, this is not something that you developed overnight. It's not something that you can unravel overnight. It is something that is much easier to do and much more effective with professional help.

So feel your feelings. If you can't feel your feelings, know that you're not alone. There are many of us who have had that experience and decided that we wanted something different for our lives. It was worth it. Thanks so much for listening. 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.