Sarah Cottrell: Hi, and welcome to The Former Lawyer Podcast. I am your host, Sarah Cottrell. And on this show, I interview former lawyers to hear their inspiring stories about how they left law behind to find careers and lives that they love. Let's get right to the show. Hello everyone.

Sarah Cottrell: This week on the podcast, I'm sharing my conversation with Heather Horton. Heather practiced law for many years, and she experienced some significant trials and traumas in her life. And I shall describe in the conversation, she tried to sort of move along as though nothing had really happened and that did not work out so well as it does not work out so well for all of us if we try to do that.

Sarah Cottrell: What Heather does now is she works with people to help them recover from grief. And I really think this conversation is so important. One of the things we talk about a lot in the conversation is how grief shows up in all of our lives in so many ways, and especially in the last year plus with a pandemic and everything that goes along with that.

Sarah Cottrell: Just the ways in which our inability to be with our grief and to move through grief can really create a lot of stuckness including in our careers. So I think this is going to be really helpful for you. I think it's a really, really important topic, and I was really glad to be able to have this conversation with Heather. So let's get right to our conversation. Hey, Heather, welcome to The Former Lawyer podcast.

Heather D. Horton: Thank you, Sarah, for this opportunity to share with your audience. I'm definitely looking forward to our conversation.

Sarah Cottrell: I am really looking forward to it as well. You and I have talked before on boxer, and I know that some of the topics that we're going to talk about are I think really, really important topics for lawyers to be thinking about that we just don't think enough about. So why don't we start with you introducing yourself to the listeners?

Heather D. Horton: Yes. Well, I am Heather D. Horton and I'm a lawyer by training, but now I actually operate my own company, The H-Squared Group LLC, where I provide grief recovery, support and coaching to lawyers, because pretty much mostly we're managing the burdens of the world, but we're not managing our own burdens. So I'm actually trying to transcend lawyer wellbeing through stigma-free recovery and support through my business.

Sarah Cottrell: I think that is well, like I said, I think that's so important. And normally we start with what made you decide to go to law school, but I think I'd like to first just talk about sort of this idea of grief and why it matters so much. So I think a lot of people, well the non lawyers, when they hear you say grief recovery or when they hear someone talk about grief, they have a very specific idea of what is being talked about.

Sarah Cottrell: And it's a very limited idea. I think a lot of people think of grief as something that you don't necessarily encounter a lot. And when you do, it's like really a very particular set of traumatic life circumstances. I would love for you to share how you define grief.

Heather D. Horton: Yes, that is the one thing that sort of trips everyone up. It's not what we think it is. It is death, but it's more than just death. We experience grief every day because grief is the normal and natural reaction to any type of loss or change. And we experience loss and change every day, we just don't label it as that.

Sarah Cottrell: Yes, I think that's so true. And I think that one of the problems with failing to recognize that we are experiencing something that is creating grief, and I'm sure you can speak to this more, but if we don't realize we're experiencing grief, then we don't allow ourselves to grieve.

Sarah Cottrell: And if we don't allow ourselves to grieve, then that just gets all locked up in us in our nervous systems, et cetera. And it's going to come out some sort of way. A lot of times it comes out in anger, for example. And I think that a lot of lawyers who may have come up on the podcast over and over, but we have this idea that we can just think about our situation and process information in our brain and then move on.

Sarah Cottrell: And it's been my experience that learning how to grieve like you said, change or loss, which is a constant presence in our lives really involves understanding sort of the entire mind, body, spirit integration, and the fact that you can't just think something about a thing and then move on.

Heather D. Horton: That's so true, because grief is not a head issue. It's a heart issue and lawyers are always trying to use their heads or make logic of something. And really when loss and change happens, our heart is broken. It's not our head that's broken.

Heather D. Horton: And if you don't process the little things, when the big things come, you're trying to process the big thing and all of the little things that are now have cumulated, which lead you to seeking comfort in things that only provide you short-term relief, but end up causing you long-term damage.

Sarah Cottrell: Yes, and I think I find that many lawyers compound the problem because they don't think their heart should be broken.

Heather D. Horton: Right, because we're not supposed to be vulnerable and show any emotion. And that's so... We're people before we're lawyers and we brought our past into law school. And if we haven't processed our past before we go to law school, and then we matriculate through law school and deal with all that comes with that, and then think we're going to establish a healthy practice, that's so much further from the truth.

Heather D. Horton: And it sets us up for failure, which is why the legal profession is at the point where they are overwhelmed with mental illness and substance abuse.

Sarah Cottrell: So, okay. I want to move to talking about sort of how you ended up finding your way to doing this work. So let's talk a little bit about how you ended up becoming a lawyer in the first place. What made you decide to go to law school?

Heather D. Horton: Actually it's a funny story. I have maybe one lawyer in my family and it's not blood related. It's my aunt who her husband is a lawyer. And I didn't see many female lawyers when I was growing up, but I was actually in a job where I was examining credit unions and my credit union started having issues with bankruptcy.

Heather D. Horton: I hadn't filed bankruptcy, so I didn't know how to deal with it. And I was like, this is a legal issue. And then maybe I should go to law school and figure this out. And at the time I was dating a guy who had roommates in his house and one of the roommates was a girl who was in law school and I thought, wow, I can do that.

Sarah Cottrell: If she can do it, I can do it.

Heather D. Horton: Exactly. It was just something I never thought about, and so my process about going to law school was very quick. I applied to law school, probably the end of Christmas break, 1999. Took the LSAT only once in March, February or March of 2000. And I started school in July or August of 2000.

Sarah Cottrell: And you had already been working, it sounds like at that point for the credit union?

Heather D. Horton: Yes. I had worked about seven and a half years. I graduated with a BS in accounting, so I was doing accounting and auditing. And then like I said, I sort of got a little bored. I passed the CPA exam, but I knew there was something else that I wanted to do.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah, which is a little bit of a different story from some people who sort of have that like when I was five, someone told me I was good at arguing and I decided to become a lawyer and that was the path all along. So for you, you'd worked in this other field, you sort of became interested in law because of this specific thing.

Sarah Cottrell: Decided to go because you saw this other person who was going to law school and thought like, well, if that person could do it, then I can. So that makes me think that when you got to law school, you didn't necessarily have this like this is going to be the most wonderful and life changing experience. It was more just like, it's just the next professional step for me. Is that a fair way to describe it?

Heather D. Horton: Yeah, I think it's a combination of both because I feel like I was just open to anything because I really didn't want to gravitate back to business and tax, but it was just a natural flow for me. I wanted to see what was available and there's so many options available when you go to law school.

Heather D. Horton: But again, I just naturally gravitated back to the business side and tax things. So it just worked for me, and I had a very supportive professor who continue to push me through, and that's why I'm in this space I am today.

Sarah Cottrell: So tell me a little bit about sort of your progression in your legal career and then we'll circle back and talk about how that intersects with your experience with grief.

Heather D. Horton: Yes. I started as a trial attorney with the IRS Office of Chief Counsel in their New Orleans office in June of 2004. I actually, before I went to law school early on in my career, I worked for the IRS on the client side for a couple of years as a tax auditor.

Heather D. Horton: And so I had a really good concept of what to do or what I was looking for in representing them. And so I worked in that as a trial attorney in New Orleans, and then in Arizona, Phoenix, Arizona. I moved to Phoenix, Arizona in December of 2005 and stayed in the trial attorney position until October of 2010 when I came to our headquarters of my division, which was the small business self-employed division to work for two years as a staff attorney in our headquarters to see how we operate on a global perspective.

Heather D. Horton: In that time when I was on the two year detail, I didn't even complete the two years and I wound up actually becoming an associate area council, which is like a manager of a group of attorneys in our Washington D.C field office. And from there, I did that for about two and a half years, almost three years and decided I didn't want to manage people anymore.

Heather D. Horton: I just wanted to manage me. So I went back to being a trial attorney for about six months and things just didn't work out. I actually moved to North Carolina to be closer to my family, but something happened at the office. And I really realized that my voice needed to be heard on a national level with respect to diversity and inclusion and hiring.

Heather D. Horton: And so literally the job that I wanted when I left and moved to North Carolina came open like the week after I moved. And I thought, oh, what did I do? But the government is very slow in hiring. So they didn't actually put the position or the job out to fill the vacancy until like September, October.

Heather D. Horton: And like I said, this situation happened at the office and I was like, wow, this is great timing. So I put in the application, got the job and moved back to Washington D.C within six months of moving to North Carolina. So I moved in June, 2014, came back in December of 2014. And in that position, I was the director of headquarters operations for the small business self-employed division until I left the IRS in August of 2017.

Sarah Cottrell: And can you share a little bit more about some of the issues that you were seeing with diversity and inclusion and what you were hoping that you'd be able to do in that role?

Heather D. Horton: Yeah, it was interesting because when I started in 2004, we had a national CLE and I actually got a chance to meet other attorneys of color that worked for the IRS two counsel's office. And they're few and far between, I think I could have counted them on both of my hands.

Heather D. Horton: And it seemed like even 10 years later as I matriculated through different areas, there was not a concentrated effort on getting more minorities in the small business self-employed field division. And so I took it as a opportunity to every time that there was an opportunity to recruit, I would go so that I could find other people to bring more diversity in differences of opinion to our organization.

Heather D. Horton: In most of the offices I worked in, I was the only attorney of color. Honestly, literally when I went to Phoenix, Arizona, there was another woman of color, but she wound up leaving. And then, so again, I was still the only one, but that never deterred me from doing my job and moving forward.

Heather D. Horton: But I think in my last position, I wanted that job because it involved direct access to be able to recruit people of color and add more diversity to the organization. And in the time that it was in the job, I think that was when we added more people of color to our organizations, because I intentionally reached out to the six HBCU law schools.

Heather D. Horton: And HBCUs are just in case someone's not aware, our historically black colleges and universities, there's six of law schools. And I reached out to those schools personally to ask them to share the announcement with their law students so that, and their alumni, so that we could increase our numbers and gain more diversity and inclusion.

Heather D. Horton: I even went so far as to find a coaching program that centered solely on diversity and inclusion in order to bring that back to my organization. And I think at the time when I was in this position the people around me were the people that if this was going to change, these were the people that were going to help move it forward, but there were still some pushback there and that just didn't sit well with me.

Heather D. Horton: I also even actually put together an event, a chief council lecture series, where we focused on implicit bias and how that impacted the legal profession. And I wish I could remember the exact name of the program, but it was the first time that the chief counsel's office had had an all black attorney panel.

Heather D. Horton: Well, all of them weren't attorneys, but they were either attorneys or accountants. And we actually had a white male champion as the moderator of the panel, and it was just an amazing event. So amazing that when I went to lunch with the people afterwards, I was like, I don't even want to go back to work because this is... Today was so profound.

Heather D. Horton: That day was so profound that I thought, wow, if nothing changes, then I know this is it for me. And that's kind of how everything kind of fell apart. I didn't see that people were going to make huge strides in this area. And at that point I decided, I didn't know what I was going to do, but that was...

Heather D. Horton: I was looking to do something else as far as my career went, because I even went so far as to apply for a senior executive series position and that didn't pan out. And then the person who got the job, it was just really funny. If that's who they wanted, really there was no reason for me to even apply.

Heather D. Horton: But yeah, all of that kind of created the space for me to say, hey, maybe my expertise and my values and everything else I bring to the table were needed elsewhere. And that happened about 2016.

Sarah Cottrell: That's really helpful, and I really appreciate you sharing because I know that there are a lot of listeners and also people in my program who are interested in careers in diversity, equity, inclusion, which makes sense because I think a lot of people who go to law school, go in part because of a personal commitment to justice, equity, equality.

Sarah Cottrell: But we had a panel in the collaborative back in the fall with a different form of lawyers who now do diversity, equity, inclusion work. And I think that it is so needed, and also there are just lots of things to be aware of if people are thinking about moving in that direction because of the level of resistance in some of the things that you were describing. So I really appreciate you sharing that.

Heather D. Horton: Yeah, I actually remember the name of the program. It was called The Inclusion Quotient and it was more so focusing on inclusion rather than diversity, but because that's a whole different thing. Diversity is inviting people to the party, but inclusion is actually asking them to dance, which doesn't happen a lot. You'll bring the people in, but they don't feel like they belong and so you really haven't done anything.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah, I think that we see people talking about diversity, equity, and inclusion more, but like you said, I think there still is a lot of misunderstanding or failure to sort of understand the difference between, like you said, diversity, inclusion, belonging, all of these different things.

Sarah Cottrell: And I think as lawyers, people are so trained to sort of live in their brains, like live in their heads that I think people sometimes it can be... If people hear terms like inclusion or belonging and I think some people have been trained to not even be able to completely see why that is something that would matter, but it really, really does.

Heather D. Horton: Right, because they already belong. That's why they can't see.

Sarah Cottrell: Yes, very true. Okay, so this is sort of your story of how you got to the point where you were wanting to make a change and your role at the IRS where you're practicing law, but there's another very significant part of your story, I know and it relates to grief. So what would you like to tell us about that part of your story?

Heather D. Horton: Well, in my first year of practice, I started practicing in June of 2004. And before I even made a year, there was a tragic accident that occurred in my life that shifted everything for me. May, 2005, actually May 17, 2005, I was involved in a single car accident.

Heather D. Horton: My uncle was driving and my mother and aunt and two of my uncle's grandkids were in the vehicle that we were traveling in and my uncle fell asleep at the wheel. And when he woke up, he over-corrected and we flipped several times and it was just tragic. My mother died the day after the accident, which was May 18th, 2005, and my aunt died two weeks later.

Heather D. Horton: And so that was just a lot to digest, to process. I don't even know that... Well, in hindsight, I didn't even process it. Because in addition to losing my mother and my aunt, I fractured my neck in several places. I fractured my thumb, had lots of scrapes and cuts and bruises all down my right side.

Heather D. Horton: And so it took a while for me to recover from it. And I was wearing... I wore a C collar for three months. And so literally I couldn't drive, I couldn't do anything. I was just being shuttled between my dad's and my grandmother. And it was just a difficult time because I was used to being independent and the 12 weeks passed.

Heather D. Horton: I'm no longer in the C collar, I'm able to drive again. I'm released to return to work. I'd only returned to work for two weeks, was only working half days because I couldn't sit very long without becoming stiff. And as you recall, August, 2005 was when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans.

Heather D. Horton: So I literally lost my mother in May and then in August it was like my world was turned upside down because of Hurricane Katrina. I was able to shelter in place about 80 miles inland in Baton Rouge, Louisiana where my parents live, but it was six weeks before I could get back into the city to even figure out what, if anything had happened or what was left of my apartment.

Heather D. Horton: When that time came, because I lived downtown, I was one of the first people back into the city to check on things. Everything was just like I left it, which was very odd. I got everything and I left and I said, no more. I realized I felt like there was nothing left for me in Louisiana. My mother and my best friend was gone.

Heather D. Horton: I felt like an orphan, even though my father was still alive because my parents were divorced and I just wanted to be alone with my thoughts. I didn't want to talk to my family because my family didn't want to talk about what happened. And that just really put me in a different space. And just, like I said, I just really needed to be alone with my feelings.

Heather D. Horton: So the office allowed me to move to Phoenix, Arizona because I was the first attorney they'd hired in 17 years. And everybody there had their lives and families and homes were already established. And again, I was just in my first year of practice. So as soon as I was released from physical therapy, because I started physical therapy probably... I was supposed to start the Monday after Hurricane Katrina.

Heather D. Horton: I had to shuffle around and find some place to actually do physical therapy, and I did that. And about November I was released, that's when they reopened the office in New Orleans and I decided I wasn't going back, and then I moved to Phoenix, Arizona.

Heather D. Horton: But what I didn't realize is while I was trying to flee from everything that had happened and be alone with my thoughts, I didn't realize that moving was a grief experience or something that had to be grieved because what happened is I didn't realize I was leaving the community that I'd lived in for 33 years.

Heather D. Horton: I had to reestablish who I was. I didn't know anybody in Arizona, other than one person I met through a friend who lived there and I only knew her probably like a month before I moved there. So having to recreate your life, figure out what your identity is, who you are as a person without your mother when you've had her for so long in your life, that was a very troubling experience.

Heather D. Horton: But it also, because I moved away, I feel like it gave me permission to seek help because I felt like if I didn't talk to someone, I was going to lose my mind. And so I actually started seeing a psychologist and I don't know that I would have done it if I was still living in Louisiana.

Heather D. Horton: Again, because of the stigma. And I saw her for five years. She labeled me as having PTSD, but what I realized now later is that PTSD it's real, but it is also a label and it is not a solution. And so the work that I've done now, or the work that I'm doing now allows you to take action steps to get to a solution versus living with a label.

Sarah Cottrell: Hey, it's Sarah and I'm popping in here to remind you that I have created a free guide, First Steps To Leaving The Law for anyone out there who is just like, ah, this job is the worst. And I need out, where do I start? Which that is exactly where I was when I realized that I didn't want to be a lawyer.

Sarah Cottrell: So you can go to formerlawyer.com/guide and sign up and get the guide in your inbox today. And when you grab that guide, you get on my email list, which is the way I keep everyone the most up-to-date about everything that's happening with Former Lawyer. It's also the best way to get in contact with me because I read and respond to every email.

Sarah Cottrell: So, if you are ready to figure out what's next for you, go to formerlawyer.com/guide, download the free guide, First Steps To Leaving The Law and get started today. Tell me more about the process from sort of having that experience, feeling like you could seek help when you maybe felt like you couldn't because of the stigma previously and then ultimately, and how you ended up where you are today. What brought you to where you are today?

Heather D. Horton: I will say the talk therapy that I went through with the psychologist that helped me to talk about it, but I wasn't taking any action steps. And in order to move through grief or process grief, you've got to be taking action steps, and just talking about it is not enough on the surface.

Heather D. Horton: You've got to really look at... I think what moved me to now was I realized after leaving my job that, in 2017, that I guess my last supervisor presented himself like my father and what I didn't realize, and I don't know if I've said this before. I did say my parents were divorced. I had of much anger towards my father after my parents divorced.

Heather D. Horton: We didn't have the best relationship before my parents divorced. And so when my father left my mother, I had such disdain for him. And I carried that anger probably into like 2018 when I came into and found the grief recovery method. Because what I didn't realize is I felt like when he left, I was like, I don't need him.

Heather D. Horton: I'm going to show him that my mother's going to have the same life that she had with him without him, because I'm going to take care of her. And I took that on and I didn't realize that that anger probably spewed out to every male that I ran into because it spue over into my romantic relationship life.

Heather D. Horton: I had numerous breakups because I would just get angry with people. And anger became a short-term energy relieving behavior for me, which created some long-term damage until I came to the realization that this anger was taking over my life and clouding my heart. Again, it's a heart issue. Grief is a heart issue. It's not a head issue.

Heather D. Horton: So I realized that I was still angry with my father when in 2018, I experienced another breakup. And my ex said to me, you need to work on your relationship with your dad. And I thought, what does that have to do with you and I or anything? But what I realized is what you resist, persists. And I resisted working on that relationship.

Heather D. Horton: I resisted wanting to have a conversation with my father to even figure out what really happened. I was just angry at him from what the outside, the external things of what I saw between his relationship with my mother. And what we fail to realize is relationships are about the people involved. They're not about people that are seeing things from the outside.

Heather D. Horton: And so literally when I was able to focus on the good that my dad added to my life, but not just the bad, I wasn't only be deviling him, but I also kind of looked at the good. I didn't enshrine him, but I had to look at both sides. You can't intrude someone or be devil them.

Heather D. Horton: And so when I was able to look at the relationship as a whole, I thought, wow, I'm concentrating on one thing and I'm missing out on all the other things that my dad added to my life. It really shifted things to a point where now I am grateful for the time that we have, but I wish I had done this work sooner so that we could have used our time better, if that makes sense. I'm not sure I answered your question. That was probably all over the place.

Sarah Cottrell: I was going to ask, how old were you when your parents divorced?

Heather D. Horton: I was in my early 20s because I was a junior in college.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah, I thought I remembered our previous conversation. And the only reason I asked that is because again, I think that there are so many people, certainly many of lawyers who are listening to this who would feel like, well, this thing happened when I was an adult. So I shouldn't be affected by this.

Sarah Cottrell: And if I feel like I'm affected by this, that's just me being whatever people tell themselves, whether it's weak or whatnot. And one of the things that I hear you saying is a lot of people might look at your life story, your experiences and say like, oh, well the big grief, the big trauma was this horrible accident and losing your mother and your aunt, which of course that was traumatic.

Sarah Cottrell: And of course that was a huge source of grief, but what I'm hearing you say is the problem was that yes, that was awful and that was traumatic and a huge source of grief. But there are all of these other things that were already sort of percolating under the surface that sort of made it where you can't just pick and choose which trauma or which grief you process.

Sarah Cottrell: Because in trying to resolve or trying to deal with one, you sort of you're turning up all of it.

Heather D. Horton: Yeah, I would agree with you there, totally. I feel like I'd already worked through my mother's death, but to realize that for 30 plus years I've been carrying anger like that, it was humbling. It was frightening. It was a lot of things. And what I didn't realize is between the ages of two and three, we actually develop 75% of our coping mechanisms.

Heather D. Horton: And between the ages of two and three, we're actually not really talking a lot, but we are observing. And that's where we learn how to manage our emotions from our observations of other people. By the time we're 15, 90% of our coping mechanisms are set in stone, unless we do something different.

Heather D. Horton: And so what was happening is every time I would be triggered by my dad, which was not very often, so that was another reason why I really didn't pay attention to it because after I moved, we weren't staying in the same place. What happened was I had an out-of-body experience once.

Heather D. Horton: I was just going off on him and I had a... It was like my angel was there sitting on my shoulder. And it was like, why are you doing this? You look kind of crazy doing this. And I even said to myself, why am I actually this angry? I couldn't even understand it. It was just on autopilot, the anger that would spew out. But a part of me was like, I don't want to do this anymore.

Heather D. Horton: And so I had to do something intentional to shift that. I was acting out like a child although I was a well trained and learned adult. When I was triggered, because I had not managed those emotions around that relationship, I acted out like a child. And that's why we see a lot of adults acting out like children, which again goes back to you've got to learn how to manage your emotions.

Heather D. Horton: And those who have children have got to learn how to teach their children how to manage their emotions because the children are our future and the way that the world is going now, if we don't learn how to manage our emotions, we're headed for disaster. But this also relates to COVID-19 and where we are right now.

Heather D. Horton: And the reason I say that is because people think that COVID-19 is like... They just want her gone. But what they don't realize is all the issues that they're dealing with existed before that. It just brought it all up to the surface. I was giving somebody an example the other day.

Heather D. Horton: I don't know if you've ever been to New Orleans and you know that most of the graves are above ground that's because New Orleans is below sea level. But when there's like a serious rain or like Katrina, a lot of the coffins and things kind of started floating. And it was almost that's how I equate COVID to now.

Heather D. Horton: This stuff was already there, but now we've been flooded with all of this change and loss from COVID and now the coffins are floating, but people don't realize that was always there.

Sarah Cottrell: I think that is so spot on. And I also think, I think you and I talked about this before, the grief that is caused by the pandemic for everyone, right? If you can't recognize grief for what it is, it comes out in other ways. Like you were talking just a little bit ago about sort of your anger about being so angry and to the point where you were like, I don't know why I'm this angry.

Sarah Cottrell: And we've certainly seen lots of anger around aspects of the pandemic. And I think as someone who has had to sort of walk through my own experience of learning how to process grief and recognize that grief doesn't just happen sort of very occasionally with some big events that people sort of associate with grief.

Sarah Cottrell: It's you se how the inability to process grief, but then comes out sideways as anger, like you said, touches all sorts of things. And to your point that you made earlier about, you mentioned that your boss sort of the way you interacted with him or the way you perceived him was sort of in the way that you perceived your dad at the time.

Sarah Cottrell: And this was before you processed your grief. I think that... I mean, every lawyer listening knows that there is a lot of anger and just casual cruelty that happens in the legal profession. And I think that one of the reasons for that is this issue of grief that we're talking about, that people have not processed the grief in their life, whatever it is that they have nothing to do with their job per se.

Sarah Cottrell: And then they are working out the result of that on the people that they work with or the people who work for them and they're harming them and themselves because they can't recognize it for what it is. And I'm not sitting here being clearly like I have it all together and I have recognized all of my grief and fully processed it and what's wrong with other people.

Sarah Cottrell: I'm speaking as someone who has walked through the experience of not realizing that some of what I was experiencing was grief and then realizing that's what it was and learning how to process it. And it's hard. It requires a lot of courage and it's not necessarily something that you see modeled.

Sarah Cottrell: So you can feel like you're sort of just, am I the only one who's doing this? If it was such a big deal, wouldn't everyone sort of be on board? And I think to your point into what you do now in your work, it is something everyone should be doing. And we're seeing all of the bad fruit that's a result of people not working through that.

Heather D. Horton: Yeah, and you're right. It's not modeled, but it doesn't take as long as people think. There are options. And there are certain people you need to talk to because for instance, my psychologist, most psychologists, I would just say this, only take one grief course in their training.

Heather D. Horton: So they're not really trained to help you manage grief, which is why after five years of talk therapy, I was sort of still in the same place. I talked about it a lot, but I really hadn't taken any action steps. And so the program that I do through grief recovery method is it's an action program because what we tend to do is think that time heals all wounds, but time doesn't do anything.

Heather D. Horton: Which is why I found myself years later after my parents divorced, still angry at my father. You got to take actions in order to move through the pain and release the pain and some of the things that I have... I haven't said this, I don't think, during our conversation, but I wanted to just kind of point out some things that actually are grief experiences that we may not actually recognize.

Heather D. Horton: We hear the words burnout and stress a lot. That is actually grief because we're only burned out or stressed because something changed or we lost something. Change in your finances, which a lot of people are experiencing now, whether your finances increased or decreased. A divorce really... People don't realize the magnitude of divorce.

Heather D. Horton: And I think if they did, they would really think twice about it because a divorce not only impacts the two people that are a party to the disillusion, but it impacts their children, their families. Anybody that knew them is impacted by that change in relationship. Empty nests actually is a grief experience because things have changed.

Heather D. Horton: Your children are no longer there and your life may have centered around them and now they're just gone. But there are also intangible losses, like loss of hopes, dreams, and expectations, loss of fertility, losing faith, loss of safety and trust. Those are just as important as something you could tangibly touch, but there's also miscarriages.

Heather D. Horton: And one of the biggest things, and I think I touched on this when I said I moved to Phoenix, Arizona and lost my community was moving. Moving, people don't realize that moving is a grieving experience. It's because you've got to grieve what you're leaving before you can actually be happy in the new place going.

Heather D. Horton: It's also like for relationship. You can't just end the relationship without grieving it and try to replace it because that person's never going to get your whole heart because you're still stuck in the previous relationship. Pet loss is a huge thing too. People don't realize that losing pets are just as or more important than losing humans because pets provide unconditional love that that humans don't.

Heather D. Horton: So people in your life that lose pets really need to go through this process of grieving because we don't get unconditional love from most people other than maybe our mothers or God. If I can just say this...

Sarah Cottrell: Yes, please do.

Heather D. Horton: Your focus is on people that want to leave the legal profession and what people is that retirement or leaving a job is a grieving experience also. Again, you've got to grieve what you've left in order to be able to accept which you're moving into.

Heather D. Horton: And that happened to me when I left my job, there was a period of time where I had just had to reflect and process all of the painful things that I had suppressed to continue to move up to the top. And it was very, very painful, but it is not something that you can't move through.

Heather D. Horton: It just, again, takes... You can't eat an elephant all at once. You've got to eat it one bite at a time. But it is possible to move past the pain. It's just, you have to do it. You have to get comfortable being uncomfortable. And literally, I feel like the world's not going to change until we all get comfortable being uncomfortable.

Sarah Cottrell: Yes, I think that is so true. And I think one of the reasons that we so naturally resist experiencing our grief is that we think it will never... It feels so big, it feels like it will never end. And like you said, that's not actually true. You can move through it.

Sarah Cottrell: Which doesn't mean you become a robot who doesn't still... Who isn't effected by their past circumstances, or isn't sad about past hurt or trauma. But part of why it feels so enormous to people is because they aren't moving through it. And to your point, part of that is because it feels bad and uncomfortable.

Sarah Cottrell: And we think if something feels uncomfortable, then that means that it's wrong. It's not something... And sometimes that might be true, but we aren't talking about this circumstance. We're talking about experiencing and moving through your grief, and I noticed this is what you were saying, but basically you cannot get to a point where you have processed your grief without experiencing the discomfort.

Sarah Cottrell: And I think your point about people leaving a job or leaving the law and needing to let themselves experience that grief is so crucial. Heather, I see it all the time. People want to just be like, well, this isn't working. I'm going to find something else, I'm going to move on.

Sarah Cottrell: And it needs to work and I need to feel happy because if I don't just feel happy about it and it's great. Then it was the wrong thing, and I'm afraid that it might be the wrong thing. And that's the whole other thing, grief and fear combination, and you're right.

Sarah Cottrell: Even if it is the 100% right choice close for you, you still have to process. You still will grieve, and you still have to process that grief, or it will just follow you around.

Heather D. Horton: Yeah, and I will share with you how quickly it can happen because literally I came into the grief recovery work, got certified in their program at the end of July, 2018. On August 2nd, 2018. I broke my right ankle, which meant I couldn't drive. I was on crutches and in a cast for 12 weeks.

Heather D. Horton: I'm not married and I don't have any kids at this point and at that point, and my dad was the person that had to come and take care of me. And that experience because I had the tools to process my grief, process things as they happen and allowed myself to do that, that experience felt like it was the world to me. I mean, I feel like I got my childhood back.

Heather D. Horton: And now when I'm with my father, we have fun. We can talk about things. It may sound so real, but because I processed the pain around our relationship, I'm now able to be present in a different way, whether or not my dad does the work on himself or not. Because the only person you can do something about is yourself.

Heather D. Horton: You can't change other people. So we've got to make the decision to process the pain around our relationships because it's not that I don't miss my mother, because I miss her every day. But it's the relationships that we continue to live with that we've got to learn how to manage.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah, I'm trying to think... Okay, if there's a lawyer listening, and first of all, you ran through all the various things that could cause grief. So, I mean, you had so many things. It's hard to imagine there's anyone who would say like, none of those things have ever happened to me.

Heather D. Horton: And I didn't say everything.

Sarah Cottrell: Yes, you didn't say... Right. So if someone's listening and they are like, I don't know, is this really something that I need? Or how do I know if it's something that I need, what would you tell them?

Heather D. Horton: If you've experienced any of those things that I mentioned, you need this.

Sarah Cottrell: Yes.

Heather D. Horton: If you have a strained relationship with either of your parents, you need this because it's impacting every aspect of your life and you don't even realize it.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah, I think the reality is, and I feel like we've said this multiple times, but I'm just really wanting to make sure that people are hearing it, grief is impacting you. And it's impacting you in your life, But also in your job, in your work, in your process of trying to figure out what to do next. This is something that it will pervade and-

Heather D. Horton: Yes, what you resist persists.

Sarah Cottrell: Yes, 100% so true. So as we were getting to the end of our conversation, is there anything that you would like to share that we haven't talked about yet?

Heather D. Horton: For lawyers, I will say this, this is not just for you. This is also for your clients. And the reason I say that is, I'll give an example. If you're a personal injury lawyer or a bankruptcy attorney or any attorney that deals with loss, which is most of us, this helps your client to be a better client, if that makes sense.

Heather D. Horton: Because for someone who's lost a loved one and you are trying to recover damages on their behalf, once they've gone through this process, they're more complete. Because here's the thing, if you're able to recover some damages, millions of dollars and you give them the check, that gaping hole is still in their heart because they haven't processed the pain around that situation.

Heather D. Horton: So this is not only for you to be a better advocate for your client, but it's also to help your clients. So this work is a ripple effect and so much so that I feel like it could change the world if we were all able to process our pain.

Sarah Cottrell: Yes, I agree completely. And I really appreciate you sharing about your experience and what you've learned. If people want to connect with you, work with you, just hear more about this, where can they find you online?

Heather D. Horton: They can find me at www.heatherdhorton.com. Remember the D, but Heather Horton, you'll be talking to an artist in Australia, I think. And I'm also Heather D. Horton on Instagram and I'm Heather D. Horton-ACC on LinkedIn. And I also have a podcast called The Reef Unplugged podcast.

Heather D. Horton: I started it in 2018. I have eight episodes, but I literally was talking specifically about grief being death. And I have not talked about grief in all these other aspects that are talked about today, but I am in the process of relaunching my podcast to talk about all these other things from my perspective as a lawyer and also as a human being.

Heather D. Horton: And I am planning to launch that in March, but it's already available on Apple Podcasts and people are still listening to it. I still get people saying, wow, this is just so amazing, and they're waiting for me to restart it. So yes, if you never decide to work with me, I think you will still be able to gain great tools from just listening to the podcast.

Sarah Cottrell: I think that's super helpful obviously since people, if they're listening to this, they know where to find podcasts. And when this releases, it'll be probably passed March or towards the end. So there may even be new episodes. And I will link out to that and all the other things that you mentioned in the show notes.

Sarah Cottrell: So for anyone who's listening, if you want to just go to the episode posts, you can find all of the links to Heather to learn from her and work with her. And Heather, I really appreciate you coming in and talking about this topic. I just think it's so important and really appreciate you sharing your story as well. Thank you.

Heather D. Horton: Thank you, Sarah, for this opportunity, because I will say this, I don't think there's anybody out there checking for lawyers and we need this. We need to sustain the legal profession because the world needs lawyers, but we could approach it in a more humane perspective if we work through our pain so we can help others work through their opinion.

Sarah Cottrell: I think that's so true. Thank you so much.

Heather D. Horton: You're welcome. Thank you.

Sarah Cottrell: 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.