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, I want to talk about something that comes up all the time with lawyers who I work with. I mean, you've heard me talk about this issue on the podcast as well. So the issue that I'm talking about is I will be working with lawyers and they will say to me, "I don't really think I'm very good at my job. I don't really think I'm very smart. I don't really think I have any transferable skills," et cetera, et cetera.

The thing that is really unfortunate and sad and frankly enraging for me is that invariably, these are people who are extremely accomplished, who are extremely hardworking. This is something that I talked about maybe a couple of months ago on the episode about Your Law Firm Is Not a Meritocracy.

Here is the problem. If you are working in a toxic system, in a narcissistic system, which, frankly, most law firms of any size are on some level barring some incredible management skills that generally are not present, if you're working in a system like that—so let's put this in the context of a narcissistic relationship, whether it's a familial relationship or a romantic relationship—but one of the ways that a narcissist being in a relationship with a narcissist can affect you is that the gaslighting that the narcissist engages in, which is essentially invalidating your experience or doing something that causes a reaction on your behalf and then telling you that you overreacted or belittling you or suggesting that you don't really know what you're doing, et cetera, et cetera, all things that we see happen in law firms literally all the time, one of the things that does over time is that it starts to ingrain in the person who is in the relationship with the narcissist, what kinds of reactions the narcissist will have to different things that the person does.

What that person starts to do is they start to anticipate that gaslighting and modify their behavior based on that to try to avoid being criticized by the narcissist, being talked down to by the narcissist, etc.

Well, there's a very similar dynamic that happens for people who are working or living in a narcissistic system. What happens is you may be very unhappy where you are working. You may see a lot of the toxicity. However, you also frequently might have internalized some of the gaslighting that you're experiencing in your context. So it prevents you from actually making a move because you, essentially as a part of narcissistic abuse, as part of the abusive behavior that occurs in these toxic workplaces, you cut out the middleman.

I like to say it's like you cut out the middleman so that you don't even need to have someone gaslight you. You just come in before that even happens and tell yourself, “I was too sensitive. I shouldn’t be bothered by this. I’m either not going to do that thing in that way because I know I am going to get a particular response and that must be because I am not very good at what I do,” etc.

One of the things that are so challenging for me, and as someone who is no longer working in the profession actively, is that when you are embedded in a system like this, and when you have internalized this gaslighting, which let's be real, we all do when we're in those kinds of systems, this is not like, "Oh, if you've internalized it because you are a weak person," or whatever, side note, almost everyone that I work with and almost everyone who's been on the podcast has talked about feeling sort of like uniquely weaker or they can't hack it and everyone else can.

The thing that's really remarkable is in so many of these stories, you can see the strength of the person because in a lot of situations I both talked about on the podcast and with people who I've worked with and just lawyers that we all know, many of these people persevered for a long time in really problematic and troubling environments.

Yet, because of the nature of those environments, because of the toxicity, they/you are prevented from seeing the fact that you are, in fact, strong and you think that somehow you are uniquely unable to do things to work, et cetera.

Okay, that was a tangent. We're going to come back to the main point, which is that it is very difficult to explain how being in a toxic environment, really does warp your sense of the reality of the world. I say that because I have now run this podcast for over five years.

I've worked with many, many lawyers and I consistently see lawyers who are in a position where they're wanting to leave, they feel like they can't hack it, they feel like it's because there's something wrong with them, they feel like they are not smart, or at least they're not as smart as the people around them, all of these things that lead people to feel like, "Can I really make a change?" then once they make a change and they are out of that environment, eventually they will express that they no longer see themselves that way.

In fact, they can see in retrospect that it was a false perception that was being forced upon them by the system that they were in. If you're listening to this episode and you are in one of those toxic systems, there is a decent chance that you hear me talking about how we can internalize gaslighting and cut out the middleman and just gaslight ourselves and say, “Okay, Sarah, that's great, but it also feels true and is there really another way?”

What I want to say to that is I have seen over and over people who have this experience and who remove themselves from a toxic situation, often with therapy—as you know, I am a huge fan of therapy because this stuff will mess you up. Workplace PTSD is a real thing—but ultimately, I've seen over and over and over people who have internalized some of this toxic gaslighting that you get in these environments, and that's no longer their primary internal narrative.

They're able to see like, “Oh, that's not real,” “Oh, I know that I feel like I'm not smart, but also I went to law school, passed the bar, did all these various things, have accomplished lots of stuff, and it's only because I'm working in this highly problematic and abusive environment that I have been led to believe that I am something different than what I am.

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So I really wanted to record this episode because I know that there are people who are listening who are in that space of wanting to make a move but feeling this way and it feeling so real and true because it does when you're in that type of environment and so I just wanted to say I promise, the things that you've had to internalize to survive in many ways in these environments, there is a universe that in reality, those things are not true, and it is possible to make a move and get into a better situation.

Internalizing this level of gaslighting, it makes it feel like making a move would be pointless because you tend to have this sense of like, "I'm just going to feel this way no matter what." Again, there certainly are often things to work through as a result of being in these types of environments, one more plug for therapy. But the reality is that the things that a toxic environment makes you believe about yourself are not true.

Unfortunately, those things are often things that push you away from trying to make a move into something that's better and something that's different. But I can tell you, I've seen over and over and over and over consistently lawyers who are able to make the move out of a toxic environment into an environment that is better are then able to look back and say, "Oh, that was all a false construct, and these are things that become clear after leaving that environment.”

This is not to say, hey, if you notice you're gaslighting yourself, you should feel bad because again, there are reasons that we do this, and many situations you're trying to keep yourself safe in the toxic environment, but also just know that if you're in this situation, it is not all there is, it is not reality, and making a change is possible. The lies that gaslighting tells you, they aren't true. 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.