Here’s a letter I received recently. Yes, it’s real, but I’ve removed anything identifiable to protect the sender:
Hi Will,
I read your thoughts of the legal profession on Above the Law and thought you neatly summarized my situation. I wish I was the type of person who could expel all the anger but instead I feel my self esteem disintegrating. It’s starting to become apparent to my co-workers (i.e. I cry at work). There’s one other female associate in my office and she’s going through the same thing. My problem is I believe the negative things my bosses tell me. I explained this to my boss (when he asked why we were crying) and promised him I would try to develop better coping skills. How do I make myself not care when he goes off on me?
For better or worse, this letter is typical – I hear a lot of stories like this.
An institute director I used to work with – a grizzled veteran of the therapy trenches – used to tell patients he wished he could make the world a better place, but he couldn’t. He could only better prepare them to deal with the world the way it is.
That’s how I feel about law firms. They can be brutal, and I can’t do much about that. But there are ways to deal.
My advice to this woman is to stop acting like a baby bird.
Allow me to explain.
Under stress, it is natural to regress to a child-like way of relating to the world. That’s because stress makes you feel overwhelmed, which is how young children, who are small and helpless, feel all the time. Feeling small, helpless and overwhelmed takes you back to a time early in your life, and old behaviors can kick in. You can start relating to authority figures like parent figures, focusing on pleasing them and forgetting that you have an adult’s right to judge your own behavior on your own terms, and to fight back and defend yourself.
There’s a good evolutionary reason why children are such natural parent-pleasers. A child evolves to survive by pleasing a parent. That’s because nature can be brutal – and so can parents. It has been shown again and again that, lacking sufficient food, a mother bird will toss a new-born chick out of the nest to die. It happens in most species, and at some level, the parent animal is selecting the child that fails to please for culling.
Baby chicks are warm and fuzzy. Nature is not. When a little bird fails to please its parent, that chick quite rightly panics and blames herself – and frantically tries to please as though its life depended on it.
You don’t have to act like a baby chick. Not at a law firm.
If you fail to please a partner, you don’t have to panic like a child and locate the blame within yourself. That will only make your self-esteem plummet and regress you all the way back to a weeping infant.
That path leads directly to depression.
Awareness of what you’re doing could be enough to snap you out of it. You’re not a child – and that miserable partner isn’t your dad. You’re an adult, and you’re doing your best. You might not always be right – but you probably aren’t always wrong, either. Meanwhile, he sounds like a jerk who doesn’t know how to manage.
Managing means motivating and inspiring an employee. It means finding a way to praise work, and keeping the criticism constructive and upbeat, so your employee always has an attainable goal – a way to do better. That’s what it means to motivate.
Some of you might be ready to write in and say I’m being too soft – that this lawyer is probably doing a bad job and deserves criticism. But even if that were true – and I see no reason to assume it is – this guy still appears to be a terrible manager. You don’t make people cry. Not at the office. That isn’t motivating.
You might also say that this associate is being manipulative and using tears as a way to control her boss. To some degree, that’s probably true. From the sound of things, the partner is abusing his position – and the associate is being inappropriate as well by regressing to a degree that is distracting and unprofessional.
There isn’t much I can do about law partners being poor managers. But if you find yourself in this associate’s position, there are better ways to handle someone like that. For starters, you can snap out of the regression, and act like an adult. This is not an appropriate situation in which to break down in tears. It is a situation in which you could own your right to anger, and take action to help yourself.
You’re not helpless. You are capable of objectively critiquing your own work, and knowing how you’re doing. For most associates at law firms, the problem is that you know, objectively, that you’re doing good work, or at least trying your best – but you’re not receiving the recognition you deserve. That’s typical. The trick is to stop expecting water from a dry well. Law firms are filled with terrible managers who never praise their employees. You have to understand and accept that as a fact of life. You may have to objectively critique yourself – and remind yourself of past achievements – in order to maintain a realistic view of your accomplishments and your abilities. That, sadly, is part of working at a law firm.
You could also stop breaking down emotionally during confrontations with lousy managers. Instead, you could take a time-out to pull yourself together, speak to a partner like this one about his people skills – and maybe get a job with someone less socially autistic.
Fight back. Let that partner push you out of the nest. You’re not a baby bird. You’ll do just fine on your own.
[This piece is part of a series of columns created by The People’s Therapist in cooperation with AboveTheLaw.com. My thanks to ATL for their help with the creation of this series.]
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The People's Therapist 
As the Mother of a son, 29, with autism, I take exception to the very last word characterization describing an attorney or manager as being “autistic.” If you research the disability of autism, you’ll see what I mean. mas.
I apologize for the misunderstanding. My nephew suffers from mild autism, and I would never knowingly disparage anyone suffering from that condition. When I used the phrase “socially autistic” I was reaching for irony. I’m sorry if I fell short.
Could you please suggest some phrases to use when speaking to the abusive partner?
I think it is fair to ask for some positives to balance the criticisms offered in any review or evaluation, and to point out areas where you believe you have made progress, and to ask for these positives to be acknowledged. If you think a criticism is unfair or ill-considered, it is reasonable to self-advocate.
Even now, just shy of 44, I find myself trying to please the people in authority. My dad was a lawyer, so it feels very–well, comfortable isn’t quite the right word, but it’s something like that. I have to make a conscious effort to remember that I am an adult, that I have wants and needs, and that it’s ok to have them.
The worst they can do is fire me, and one thing I know by now is that I’m not going to starve to death. Don’t get me wrong. I actually was fired once. I worked at the place for less than 6 weeks, and it was clearly a bad fit for them and me. It sucked ass. But I didn’t miss any meals, and I didn’t have to move in with my parents, either. Knowing that helps.
Was she crying during the confrontations, or caught crying later in her office? Because I’ve done the latter, but never the former. It really surprised me. Although I am a woman, I’ve never been a cryer–didn’t cry during basic training once, and all the guys did. She shouldn’t feel bad if that’s the way she expresses frustration in private, I think crying is just a physiological reaction to stress/upsetting situations, and one that women are much more likely to experience due to hormonal differences (got this perspective from reading interviews with men-born-women discussing transitioning and how much harder it was to cry when they wanted to post-transition, and also from hearing about how certain men, around their 40’s-50’s, get much more weepy due to hormonal changes).
If she was crying during, there are certain things you can do to prevent crying–the harder (but better) techniques involve steeling yourself for the conflict, and telling yourself that you should listen to the criticism, push back where it is unwarranted, and later on, divide it into legitimate criticism, illegitimate criticism, and criticism that is caused by perception–i.e., things you aren’t doing wrong, but that you can do differently so that the partner perceives whatever s/he wants to perceive. The easier (but worse) techniques involve doing things to yourself to prevent tears, i.e., biting the side of your tongue, or pinching the inside of a hand–pain is a good distractor from sorrow or inappropriate laughter, but those are just physiological cheats, which aren’t dealing with the real problem.
The real problem being your boss is probably a jerk, but whether he is or not, you can only change his behavior by changing your own. Sometimes male colleagues are a great asset for knowing how to deal with bosses if you aren’t naturally confident/assertive, just ask them, so and so said x to me, has someone ever said something similar to you, and if so, how did you react?
I had a boss like that. In hindsight, it was as if he was pushing buttons and when he found the right combination, that was that. There was no winning, and everyone else in the office had a buffer, meaning a manger between them and the boss. I didn’t; I had to deal directly with the boss. And when I resigned (I had another job lined up that was more in line with what I wanted), he took it as a personal insult.
A problem I ran into with changing my behavior, as Anonymouse suggests, was an inability to shake the sense that I was giving in. Changing my behavior was someone granting satisfaction I did not want to give. It might have just my particular situation; there really was no winning, behavior change or not. It’s problematic when you do something as instructed, only to be told that wasn’t how it was supposed to be done by (2 months into the job) I should be able to read his mind and figure that out. I should be able to anticipate the direction and how far he is going to move the goal posts.
I do like the the suggestion of talking to male colleagues. I’d go a step further and say a senior male colleague, and one with whom you feel comfortable. Having an outside, unbiased opinion can do wonders.
Oh, and if you ask for positives to counter the negatives, be prepared for them to be back-door positives. “You did well on this but…” kind of things. Either that, or the positives might be rather general, like “you’re very personable at client meetings.” It’s a positive, sure, but can also come across as incomplete.
And I’d find a healthy way to relieve stress; be it exercise, going out with friends or getting totally lost in a TV show or movie. Might sound trivial, but it can do wonders.
I have found that yoga and mindfulness have made these situations easier for me. They have both helped me see people from a different perspective. This boss sounds like he was the bullied kid in the park, and instead of turning to guns, he turned to being a jerk himself. But when we can see people for who they are underneath, we can meet them where they are. This does not mean fighting back, but it can mean stopping him from letting his fighting irritate us. Instead, recognize it, tell him that it is inappropriate, and ask him to treat you with respect. Building confidence outside of the law firm is essential, and yoga is a great tool for such confidence building. Will, you are also absolutely right that we regress to childhood tendencies, but it is not always possible to “just grow up.” We need the correct tools to do that.
I can’t commiserate enough with the woman in this post. I am a second-year associate at a huge law firm and have been working with a verbally abusive partner for the past half-year. Despite long hours and putting in 110% of my effort, nothing ever seems to be good enough. When there are problems with my research or motions, he explodes at me and calls me “incompetent” or “ridiculous” or “incredibly frustrating.” When I go to him for follow-up questions, he yells at me for not paying attention the first time (even though he doesn’t let me take notes during our meetings because it breaks up the flow of conversation). Even when I hand in satisfactory work, he likes to remind me that I’m a very difficult associate, but that he is sticking with me in order to “mentor” me into a competent lawyer. Ha!
I used to be a gunner and go-getter, but I’ve decided I have no career ambitions here. Still, I find myself trying to please this partner and devastated whenever he attacks my competence. I wake up on Monday mornings in cold sweats with my chest and heart thumping at the thought of having to go in and deal with him. I’ve tried everything from exercise to meditation to breaking down and crying in my office, but nothing takes the anxiety away. I figure there’s nothing to do but live with it and wait for the day when I can lateral to a place that respects me and my work.
Just want you all to know that you’re not alone–and it’s great to know that I’m not alone either.
Just found your blog and really love your insights! At the outset, I apologize for the length of my comment, but your post resonated so strongly with me that I ask for your indulgence…
Like many of your readers (and clients), I’m an attorney making a career transition. This post made me recall my dark days as an associate at a small law firm and how I would often get a “dressing down” from one partner in particular. He never made me cry, but his words stung badly. Here’s a typical exchange (and hand to God, it’s true):
ME: I’d like to have more challenging work (i.e. better cases) to further develop my lawyering skills.
PARTNER: Well you’re not going to get any.
ME: Why not? I’ve been helping “Ken” (another partner) with the Martin case and—
PARTNER (interrupting me): Because your an ASSOCIATE, that’s why. And you know the first three letters of that title.
I thought I would cry/die right then and there, but something happened: I GOT PISSED. So, I took a chance and sharpened my own tongue:
ME: Were YOU ever an associate?
PARTNER: Of course—for several years.
ME: Huh. That’s too bad…cuz’ your first name’s Jack.
That was the end of my life as a baby-bird. Now I’m not advocating insulting your boss like I did. But my story had a good ending: we both laughed—albeit uncomfortably—and the insults stopped for a short time. No, I still didn’t get any better work at that firm and I did eventually quit. But the point is, you have to stick up for yourself and ask for what you truly want. Cry if you have to. But do it on your own time and in private. Then get mad. Mad is a step up from sad, so you’re headed in the right direction if you let yourself feel it. For me it happened fast, but once it happens for you, you’ll never have to learn to “cope” with these bastards!