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.

So you all know that I talk about therapy on the podcast all the time, right? I'm basically constantly suggesting that lawyers go to therapy. And that's for a lot of different reasons, both the experiences that I myself have had in therapy and how helpful it has been for me, including with things around my career, but also the things that I've seen with the lawyers who I've worked with in the Collab and one-on-one.

It's very apparent to me that people who are in therapy make much more progress more quickly and also are able to answer a lot of the questions that you need to answer in order to really identify something that is the right fit for you more easily than otherwise. Now, when I say more easily, I'm not saying that it's easy, right? Because it's simple, but it's not easy. But it is easier, in my opinion, if you are working with a good therapist.

But there's something that comes up and I wanted to talk about it because it is a question that a lot of people have and I figured if I was getting this question a lot, that means there are definitely people who are listening who have this question.

And the question is, "Okay, Sarah, I've been in therapy or I've gone to therapy in the past, some form of talk therapy. It was helpful, maybe even really helpful. But there are still things that I'm struggling with and that I find myself talking about over and over. And essentially, I feel like therapy is not as helpful or has not been as helpful for me as it should be in terms of addressing certain issues that feel more intractable. So for example, in terms of being able to set boundaries or in terms of not being overly concerned with the way other people are going to perceive your decisions or your behavior around your career."

So, of course, standard disclaimers apply, right? I'm not a mental health professional. I'm just a person who has gone to therapy. But I've now seen this enough where I have some thoughts about questions that you should ask yourself if therapy doesn't feel like it's as helpful as it should be.

And in particular, this is I think the most important question you can ask yourself, which is do you feel like you're in a position where you know that something is true, but it doesn't feel like it's true? So in other words, do you feel like you are in a position where you have come to believe, at least on an intellectual level, that you don't need to please everyone? Or you having boundaries is okay? Or if someone, you know, if a supervisor isn't happy with you, that it's actually not the end of the world. If you're in a position where you feel like you believe those things, more than you did previously, maybe, but it still doesn't feel okay.

And by feel, I'm talking about your nervous system, right? So I know I've talked on the podcast before about polyvagal theory. Side note, a really helpful book if you're interested in learning more about polyvagal theory, which is basically about how your autonomic nervous system, regulates itself, The book by Deb Dana, Anchored, is a really great book. Very accessible and can be really helpful.

But the point being, when I say something that you know something is true, but you don't feel it's true, what I mean is, is your nervous system still activated? Basically, do you still have a fight-or-flight response when certain things happen, or thinking about certain things happening, especially at work, even though on some level you know those things are not your fault, or you don't necessarily "worry" about them on an intellectual level. This is where I find a lot of people end up feeling stuck.

And they feel stuck because it's often true, depending on the type, the modalities that your therapist uses, often, there are therapists who are focusing more on like, "Do you believe something inaccurate about your situation? And how can we help you take on board a more accurate belief?" The challenge, I think, that happens for many lawyers is they, especially because many lawyers are very intellectual and thinking, you often are in a position where rationally, logically, you believe something different than your nervous system thinks, if that makes sense.

So in other words, for example, if you feel panic when you see the little Outlook email pop up in the lower right hand of your computer screen, I don't know if it does that anymore. I haven't been on a non-Apple laptop in a long time. But anyway, if that causes panic, and you have worked with a therapist to sort of work through some of the thoughts that are generating that sense of panic, and it's still happening, then there is a decent chance that really what is happening is that the information that you have in your brain has not actually been processed by your nervous system.

I think this is a kind of foreign concept for many lawyers because we often do have this sense of mind over matter, right? That once we know it in our brain, then that's all that there is. And the reality is that that is not all that there is, and that is a huge part of what therapy that specifically focuses on trauma and processing trauma is dealing with.

If you want to know more about that, there's a great episode that I did with a therapist, Tiffany Rodgers, where we talked about some of those things, and I definitely recommend that. But often when I am talking with people and I mention the word trauma, the response is like, "Well, I don't feel like I'm traumatized." And I totally get it.

I think that is in part because we often have this idea of like big T trauma, right? So big T trauma would be like the events that we think of that we might associate with someone who has PTSD. So being in a war zone, going through a highly traumatic event like having a house burned down or something like that, right? Like a specific event that you can point to and say, "That thing was traumatic." For a lot of lawyers, the experiences that they have had, especially in the workplace, are not necessarily things that fall under the category of what we would call big T trauma, right? They are things that will be categorized as little t trauma.

And by that, I just mean they are things that your nervous system experiences as trauma. And if you are unable to process that, your nervous system is dysregulated and does not have the chance to fully process it and become regulated again. Another great book to read if you're not familiar with this kind of dynamic is the book Burnout by Emily and Amelia Nagoski.

They talk a lot about completing the stress cycle, which is basically experiencing the process of fight-or-flight all the way through to where your system then re-regulates. And the reality is that for most lawyers, in your job every day, you're not doing that. You're having a lot of different things happen, some of which are traumatic in the sense of like you're working for someone who's abusive.

It is traumatic. And some of it is just like a million random fires that come up. Your nervous system takes all of that on board as, "I need to spike into fight-or-flight." And if you're not ultimately getting through the entire fight-or-flight cycle, which they talk about a lot in that book, your system basically stays on high alert, or learns that it needs to be on high alert, that you can't go off high alert.

And even if in your brain you're like, "I don't need to be on high alert," your nervous system is like, "Oh, but I know better." So all of this to say, when someone tells me that they've been in therapy, it's felt helpful, but they don't feel like it's as helpful as it should be, or they are in this position where they're like, "I know these things are true, but I don't feel like they're true," what I tell them is that when I was in that position, what I ended up doing was I found a therapist who does EMDR.

And EMDR is basically a form of therapy. The EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. And it's a psychotherapy treatment that's designed to alleviate distress associated with traumatic memories.

It can be used even if you don't have a particular singular memory that has created that trauma within your nervous system. There are lots more details that I could go into about EMDR, and I won't go into tons of details because like I said, I am not a therapist. I'm not a mental health professional.

I'm just a person who has benefited from it. But basically, what EMDR does, and this is my completely colloquial description, it takes the information that you have in your head that you know is true, like I'm safe. Like I can set boundaries, and if someone's upset, it's okay.

Like I'm not in that situation with that abusive partner anymore. And so when I get an email, it's not going to be someone using abusive language and being derogatory. And so I don't need to feel like that's what's going to happen.

All of those things are things that EMDR is designed to help you process, to help your nervous system take on board like what the actual reality of the situation is, as opposed to the thing that it has been conditioned to think you'll respond to, etc. That is the extreme layman's version of EMDR. I highly recommend if you're interested or curious at all in learning more about it, you go to emdria.org. That is a the website for the EMDR International Association.

It's a body that certifies therapists in doing EMDR. And one of the things that's very helpful about that website is that it has a directory that allows you to find therapists who are certified in EMDR through EMDRIA. And when I went looking for a therapist who did EMDR, that is where I looked and I found someone in that directory.

There are other ways to look for this. For example, we talked quite a bit about the directory on Psychology Today, which also has the ability to let you search on all sorts of parameters including looking for someone who does EMDR. Often I find that people are in a situation if they've been in therapy for a while and they feel like it's not moving them forward anymore, they feel stuck because they feel like there aren't options, right? They feel like, "Okay, I've been in therapy, I'm talking about this all the time, but it's not really improving beyond a certain point. Is this just how it is for me?"

And if that is you or if you're someone who has not gone to therapy, but what I've talked about with respect to EMDR sounds like it could be helpful for you, I highly recommend that you consider it. I think that any sort of somatic therapy, which EMDR is one of them, and that just means like a therapy that is more body-based, more based in like again, this is my colloquial description, more based in directly working with your nervous system and your embodied self versus just your brain and your thoughts can be very helpful, especially for those of us who are lawyers because of the fact that we often like to live in our brains and sometimes it's bringing our body and nervous system into the mix that is the thing that we need in order to process some of this stuff.

So I just wanted to talk about that today because I know that there are probably people who are listening who are in this position and feel like, "Okay, I've been doing therapy, but I've sort of hit a wall. Does that just mean too bad, so sad? That is all the progress I'm going to make?" This is definitely an option to consider and one that has been really helpful for me personally and one that I've seen be very helpful for people who I've worked with as well and also just friends and etc.

So all the links to the various books and episodes and to the EMDRIA website will be in the show notes and in the blog post about the episode. I really appreciate you listening today, and I will 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.