Remember Green Acres, that fish-out-of-water comedy wherein Eddie Albert drags Eva Gabor out to live on some tumbledown farm in the middle of nowhere? She’s a Park Avenue socialite, but he’s the husband and the penis-haver and it’s the 1960’s – so what he says, goes. If he’s jonesing for fresh air and farm living, she has no choice.
I don’t remember much more than the theme song and opening credits, but the concept – giving it all up, packing your bags and fleeing for the sticks, spouse (and maybe kids) in hand – resonates with my lawyer clients. Some are beginning to sound like aspiring Eddie Alberts.
I’d like to say there’s a great lawyer return to the land on the way – driven by a love for nature and the outdoors. To some extent that’s true. But mostly, it’s a product of desperation. The big themes are escaping biglaw misery, seeking adventure, looking for a healthier lifestyle… and fleeing school loans.
One client’s story weaves these themes into a magical tapestry of personal growth, spiritual awakening and debt avoidance.
He was suffering modestly at a big law firm in L.A. Then he got posted to an office in Asia, where he happened to speak the language. There he discovered how bad bad can be. The US office dished out standard-issue biglaw brutality. Nothing could have prepared him for the Asia office. The cruelties committed by the local staff and attorneys would make Hieronymus Bosch wince. In their laser-beam-like focus on punishing my client for speaking their language and attempting to work in their homeland, they achieved new plateaux of sadism on a weekly basis. He developed insomnia, migraines, then panic attacks – and was fired a year later, without comment.
That’s when the Green Acres theme began playing in his head.
I’m not sure where he got the idea, but for whatever reason, he bought a 500 square foot cabin in the middle of nowhere, snug against the 49th parallel. Then he wrote a blog about woodcarving. And that’s about all he did – that, and shovel snow.
Ten months later he remembered the $150k he owed in school loans and back taxes from his Asian debacle, packed his bags and caught a ride to New York City – and doc review. Foreign language doc review pays better than regular doc review, but it’s still doc review. Working with the burnt-out remnants of lawyers is refreshing after working with actual lawyers – and at first it was amusing to get paid to peruse an Asian businessman’s emails to his mistress, then click “relevant” “incriminating” and “privileged.” But even assuming steady work, he didn’t see how he could pay off his loans within a decade.
His solution? Hitch a ride back to The Great White North – and his rustic cabin. There, he could find public defender work in the local courthouse – and wait tables. He calculated that $30k per year would be enough to cover food and fuel – but insufficient to attract the attention of his creditors. Not even a bank addicted to the lifeblood of youth can squeeze that blood from a stone. In his free time – which is most of the time, at this point – he wood-carves. For whatever reason, he finds that more exciting than doc review.
Voila. All you weeping, tooth-gnashing, garment-rending lawyers out there who constantly ask me – what can I do now? Here’s a solution. Green Acres is the place to be!
When I launched The People’s Therapist, my intent was to get stuff off my chest – process a smidgen of psychic trauma. I’d write a column or two, exorcise the odd demon, piss off Sullivan & Cromwell and call it a day.
It never occurred to me I’d be deluged with lawyers as clients.
It never, ever occurred to me I’d be deluged with partners as clients.
It never so much as crossed my mind they’d be so unhappy.
It turns out being a partner can be…not all that. For many of my clients, the job boils down to evil middle management.
Permit me to explain.
Biglaw associates resemble the low-level evil henchman in James Bond movies – those omnipresent guys in jumpsuits who all look the same and do what they’re told. They drive around evil headquarters in little golf carts, manipulate dials in the control room, shoot at James Bond (always missing) – then get shot themselves. Presumably – like biglaw associates – they’re mostly in it for the money, rather than a genuine penchant for evil.
I felt like an impostor at S&C – only pretending to be a genuine low-level evil henchman. I was more like James Bond after he bonks the real low-level evil henchman on the head, then reemerges strolling through evil headquarters sporting that guy’s jumpsuit.
I was an impostor – trying to look like I drank the Kool-Aid, going through the motions. I wasn’t even a clandestine agent, battling evil, like 007. The plan to blow up the moon wasn’t my problem. I just wanted a way out of that crummy job – one not involving a fatal dunk in the evil piranha tank. Somewhere in that evil-lair-secreted-in-a-hollowed-out-volcano there had to be a door marked exit.
Most of the partners I work with are looking for the same thing. The difference is, as a partner, you’re not an impostor pretending to be a low-level evil henchman – you’re an impostor pretending to be evil middle management.
“Preposterous!” you sputter, outraged. “Partners never condescend to be middle anything! They crouch, smugly, at the pinnacle of the evil pyramid! With one wiggle of their evil little finger…they manipulate human life!”
It can look that way from the bottom rung, whence a partner appears as far removed from a low-level evil henchman as a junior associate from a positive bank balance.
From the vantage of the pyramid’s sub-sub-basement, all partners appear interchangeable – the unifying feature being their utter dissimilarity from anyone like you. A partner’s one of them – evil incarnate, possessing his own evil headquarters – his own creepy evil white cat (for stroking purposes) – and his own weird evil European accent (with which to mutter, “Come now, Mr. Bond…”) A partner doesn’t have to drink the Kool-Aid – an iv bag of the stuff dangles by his bedside.
If only that were true. After getting all up-close and personal with a bevy of partners, I’ve caught wind of a terrifying reality: All partners are not the same. Most are nothing more than evil middle managers.
I had the pleasure to sit down a few weeks ago for a nice long talk with the brilliant and thoughtful Dan Lukasik, creator of the brilliant and thoughtful blog Lawyerswithdepression.com.
For some background on Dan and his work, click here.
As always, it was great to talk with Dan – he takes his time, asks good questions and knows what he’s talking about. We explored issues around depression, talked a bit about my books, and related everything to law, lawyers and the environment of a law firm.
My thanks to Dan, for arranging and conducting this nice long talk about topics that fascinate and concern us both.
========
If you’re interested in learning more about the scientific and philosophical underpinnings of psychotherapy, you might enjoy my first book, “Life is a Brief Opportunity for Joy”
“I study. Then I study some more. Then I go to sleep. Then I get up and study again. It’s the same for everyone.”
At least, I proposed, the subject matter was interesting.
She demurred. “Yeah, I guess…but – really? I mean…Property law? Contracts? Torts?”
Her demurrer was sustained. She had a point.
Maybe it’s your turn to demur. The subject matter of law school – law itself – not interesting!?? That’s unthinkable. It has to be the school’s fault – my client must be attending some fourth-tier degree mill, with sub-par teaching and a dull-witted student body…
But the school’s not at issue here. She’s attending one of the top places in the country. Not that it would make much difference, since every law school essentially teaches the same thing, first-tier or fourth-tier.
Then it must be her fault. If she doesn’t appreciate the study of law – if this Philistine isn’t drawn to the greatness of legal scholarship – she doesn’t deserve her seat at an exalted institution.
I’m not convinced. This young woman projects intelligence, and turns heart-felt-y and passionate discussing her real interest – international human rights law. Unlike most law students, she did an internship and reads books, so she knows what international human rights law is (even if, like most law students, she vastly over-estimates its significance.)
It’s possible things will get better next year, when she takes a course on international human rights law. On the other hand, law school courses have a way of making topics less interesting than they were before you took them.
Maybe the fault doesn’t lie with any particular school, or any particular student. Maybe it lies with the myths surrounding law school itself.
Let’s gather for a moment, and contemplate the inconceivable: Maybe law school is just…well…not that big a deal. Maybe it isn’t engrossing or life-altering or – much of anything. Maybe the whole schtick – law school as the turning point in a young lawyer’s existence – is oversold. The legal industry itself is a bubble recently popped. Perhaps the mystique surrounding law school is due for puncture.
Ask yourself – is the subject matter taught in law schools really so engrossing? Or were you taught to believe the subject matter taught in law schools is really so engrossing?
I received the following letter regarding telling people things they don’t want to hear:
Dear People’s Therapist
I have been a fan of your blog for a long time, and thank you for running the blog! I have the following question:
My mother-in-law is obese. My father-in-law just passed away a year ago from diabetes. My husband wants to talk to his mother to get her to lose weight because he doesn’t want to lose her (she is almost 60 years old). We tried hinting but it got no where. We tried inviting her over to our house for healthy dinners but because I’m Chinese and my husband is Caucasian American, our Chinese diet of vegetables and tofu is not exactly her cup of tea. We tried analyzing the situation and decided that she doesn’t eat much during meals but she snacks a lot on junk foods. My husband wants to know how can he talk to his mother about her losing weight and not hurt her feelings or sound like we don’t like fat people (my husband and I are the only skinny people in the family)??
Thank you very much!!
Y
And here’s my response:
To submit a question to Ask The People’s Therapist, please email it as text or a video to: wmeyerhofer@aquietroom.com
If I answer your question on the site, you’ll win a free session of psychotherapy with The People’s Therapist.
========
If you’re interested in learning more about the scientific and philosophical underpinnings of psychotherapy, you might enjoy my first book, “Life is a Brief Opportunity for Joy”
You’re different. You disdain the crass blandishments of biglaw. You have a soul. Let the giant firms seduce your naïve classmates with their shameless wheedling. You’re made of sterner stuff.
Your ultimate goal? Something better. A place where you might actually do good. Few lawyers receive that opportunity. Many, exposed to goodness, would burst into flames.
That’s why you’re taking the high road, escaping the pervasive cynicism and greed. You’ve got your sights set on a not-for-profit institution, dedicated to the promise of a better tomorrow.
Will it work? Can a lawyer escape pervasive cynicism and greed?
Seems unlikely.
Let’s talk about the the not-for-profit track – its ups, downs and in-betweens.
Right off the bat, we have to discuss salary. I know – you want to escape all that – the obsession with filthy lucre. But there’s a stark reality you must grasp before reporting for duty at a not-for-profit: You will earn bupkis.
Maybe that’s okay with you – like Hebrew National, you answer to a higher authority. On the other hand, if – like most young lawyers – you’re sitting on a zillion dollars in bankruptcy-proof loans, an extended period of earning zilch could prove…inconvenient.
This aforesaid stark reality also explains one of the dirty little secrets of the not-for-profit world: It’s a magnet for rich kids. If Mom and Dad have already paid off the $200k you blew on an undergraduate degree and law school, then bought you the cutest little one-bedroom in Chelsea and a brand new Prius…well, the logical next step is to save the world. It’ll be fun!
Not-for-profits are bursting at the seams with eager-beaver trust-afarians – and it doesn’t stop there. Sometimes Mom and Dad (and their friends) sit on the board. Sometimes the charismatic founder and Executive Director is a grinning, twenty-something former college lacrosse star, just back from Burning Man. You can’t hold it against him if he wants to donate a snippet of grandaddy’s styrofoam factory fortune to making the world a better place. But his white-boy dread locks and penchant for calling you “bro” in the hallway make you wince.
Our initial task as client and therapist – our work during the first few sessions – resembles cartography. I begin, like a map-maker, drawing a square or a rectangle, then sketching the outlines of landmarks visible from afar – the mountains, the sea, the rivers. In limning a life, the prominent features are obvious – where you were born, and when, where you grew up, what you do for a living, who your parents were and what they do, your siblings, if you have any, and your relationships with them, your partner, if you have one, and your relationship with him. I get the big stuff down, then step back, and try to make sense of it all – take “the lay of the land.” Later, I’ll add shading and nuance, and fill in the details – tiny inlets and hillocks, copses and rills.
I conjure a map from blank parchment. It returns the favor – conjuring a New World from my collected observations, and serving as a trusty guide. The expanse charted in shorthand on the map permits me to “rack focus” (as they say in film-making) – alter my gaze to take a fresh perspective, observe an unaccustomed vista. The map, as it develops, assumes a shape of its own. Disparate regions are drawn together by common threads – the length of a river’s course, a shared coastline or mountain range. My attention drifts to objects on the edges of boundaries, features I might have missed. The elusive “big picture” – awareness, the ultimate goal in psychotherapy – begins to coalesce.
The first step in the process comes as a question from the therapist. The phrasing of that “first question” gets debated when therapists gather. I trained with a colleague who invariably asked the same thing at each first session: “So what brings you here today?” That feels twisty and indirect to me. I usually start with “So how are you?” or, depending on my mood, or yours, “So how’s it going?” Sometimes there’s serious upset taking place in the here and now, that needs attending to right away. Before I sketch the background – the mountains and the sea and the rivers – I need to know if there’s a battle occurring on that stony plain, a castle under siege, a forest caught fire.
This is an historical map. I am mapping a quest – an epic voyage. You are the hero. Ours will be the sort of map with crossed swords to mark battlefields and mythic beasts to guard those unexplored zones at the edges of awareness.
The first question doesn’t matter much, because your unconscious feelings function like a compass. Wherever you start, you’ll find yourself where you need to be.
I have a good sense of direction, too. If I sense we’re drifting off-course, I’ll lean my elbow on the tiller.
Your compass is guided by emotion, drawn to it as to a magnetic pole. If I detect an increase in feeling, I might grow cautious, slow our pace and sniff the breeze, comb the sky for a cynosure – fear, anger, sadness, hurt. Emotions guide our way.
A visit to my office has evolved into something akin to the road to Lourdes. Pilgrims arrive red-eyed and defeated, faces etched with misery, searching for a way out of a trap.
The standard story is some variant of the following: You are either out of work or loathe your work. You have $180k in loans. You have either no income or an impermanent income paid to you in exchange for any joy life might offer. You see no hope.
Let me spell out the critical element here: You are one hundred and eighty thousand dollars in debt.
Just to fully drive the point home: that’s bankruptcy-proof debt.
You’ve yelled at your parents, but it’s not really their fault. You’ve wept and wailed and gotten drunk and stoned and consumed a script of Xanax. You’ve tried sleeping and pretending you don’t have to wake up.
Then comes the pilgrimage. Perhaps I can heal with a laying on of hands.
Okay, here’s the feedback I’ll receive for what I’ve written so far:
You’re exaggerating. You’re bringing me down. Law isn’t so bad. I love law.
Yeah, well good for you. I’m not exaggerating.
It’s their own damn fault. No one made them go to law school.
Yes. They. Did. Stop kidding yourself – the entire system is engineered to lead smart, conscientious kids exactly where it leads them. And get off it already with the no sympathy/blame the victim routine.
How bad are things? How many times can I pose that (at this point rhetorical) question?
Young lawyers look me in the eye and ask, how am I supposed to carry on with my life? What they mean is – how is one supposed to live a life worth living – a life that satisfies one as a human being – trapped in the hell of law and law school loans?
Sometime, I ask them what they would be doing with their lives, if they didn’t have loans. Here are some of their answers: Continue Reading »
This is the situation: my boyfriend of three years is an overachiever. He attended the best schools and now works in NYC. He’s in finance, from his personal office he sees most of Central Park, and I love him very much. As for me, I am currently studying for the Bar Exam. I’ll probably pass, but it’s not like I’m very confident about it. I do not have either the background or the grades to make it to a big law firm, and I am uncertain about what to do with my career. When I’m with my boyfriend, I can’t help but to compare my situation with his, and even though I don’t want to admit it, I’m jealous. My boyfriend never pressured me, and he is 100% behind me, but I still feel like a loser. How to deal then when people in your entourage succeed and you feel you’re the only one having to catch up?
Thank you, S
And here’s my response:
To submit a question to Ask The People’s Therapist, please email it as text or a video to: wmeyerhofer@aquietroom.com
If I answer your question on the site, you’ll win a free session of psychotherapy with The People’s Therapist.
========
If you’re interested in learning more about the scientific and philosophical underpinnings of psychotherapy, you might enjoy my first book, “Life is a Brief Opportunity for Joy”
At Barnes & Noble, where I once worked as a marketing exec, we bandied about the phrase “aspirational purchase” to portray a small, but profitable segment of our sales.
Aspirational purchase meant you bought the book not because you were going to read it, but because you aspired to read it. You might even convince yourself you were going to – but in all likelihood it would serve as a pretentious coffee table tchotchke, an impressive (if un-cracked) spine on a decorative bookshelf, or a useful device to prop up a little kid’s butt so he could reach the cranberry sauce at Thanksgiving.
An aspirational purchase is intended to impress – you want to be seen buying it. It tends to be something conservative as well. And long. And difficult. “War and Peace” is the classic aspirational purchase, but you might also pick up something with a political message that makes you look wise and open-minded, like “The Satanic Verses” (which, for the record, I actually read.) (No, I’ve never plumbed War and Peace. However, I embrace the fact that plenty of you certainly have read it and, yes, loved it and desire for me to acknowledge you’ve read it and how much you loved it – to which I reply, in advance, how very nice for you.)
Law school is an aspirational purchase.
You choose law because it’s more impressive than an internship or “assistant” job – which is how you’d have to start out in an ordinary career. With law you jump directly to the land of the grown-ups without passing Go. From the moment you graduate, you have a “profession.” That means (at least in theory) you wear a suit and people take you seriously. You’re an “attorney” – not someone’s assistant.
Law is conservative, too. It’s about the least imaginative thing you could do. A law degree establishes (at least in theory) that you are serious and focused and down-to-business. No more staying up all night partying for you. It’s time to retire that giant plastic bong with the “Steal Your Face” decals and step up to adulthood, dude.
On my private practice website it says, right after my name, “Integrative Psychotherapy.” A number of people have asked me what the heck that means. Good question.
There’s room for argument, but so far as I’m concerned, there are two chief meanings.
The first is a bit technical. It means I integrate the two leading schools of psychotherapy – psychodynamic and cognitive-behavioral – into one eclectic approach.
Huh?
You can think of the two schools as vertical versus horizontal.
Psychodynamic work is vertical. It involves digging down into your past, looking for the root sources of your behaviors. When I work psychodynamically, I’m wondering when you started thinking or feeling a certain way. I want to make you aware of how the environment in which you grew up shaped the person you are.
If you always seem to expect honesty to be received with punishment, and so avoid telling people what you really think, I’ll wonder where that pattern started. Maybe you had a punishing parent, who responded harshly to being told the truth because she had trouble tolerating the reality of a situation. You may have observed that response to you when you were a kid, spotted a feedback loop of sorts (telling truth = bad response), and formed expectations. These expectations let you to adapt a strategy for survival (avoid telling truth = avoid bad response.) These sorts of strategies – learned behaviors – may continue to take over unconsciously today and lead you to sabotage your conscious goals in life. To address that situation, you need to understand where and when they started, so you can decide if you’d like to abandon learned behaviors which have become maladaptive to your life as an adult.
Cognitive-behavioral work, in contrast, is horizontal. I’m not so worried about the source of the behavior – I’m dealing with the here and now, trying to make you more conscious of your current thoughts and how they’re controlling your actions.
If you have a phobia about flying in airplanes, I will likely employ cognitive-behavioral techniques to make you conscious of the thoughts – predictions – that are frightening you. These thoughts are like tapes that play in your head – if you become aware of them, you can turn them off, and play another tape that will soothe you instead of freaking you out.
You might have a fear of plunging from a great height if a plane crashes. Once you understand that thought, you can reality-test it. Yes, it could happen that you would plunge in a plane accident, but it is exceedingly unlikely, since you’d most likely die quickly or fall unconscious – and in any case, it might be a risk worth taking, once you balance the enormous benefits of air travel against the very small risks of a crash. You could learn to formulate counter-messages to address frightening thoughts, perhaps something like “I’ve chosen to take a tiny risk because I want to see the world. I’m okay with that small risk, and can relax now and accept that I cannot control everything, and there is risk involved in all aspects of life – risk that need not lock me up in fear.”
Some psychotherapists – especially in the past – fought over the superiority of psychodynamic versus cognitive-behavioral approaches. That’s mostly old-hat at this point. The two techniques are considered tools in a toolbox – options for treatment, depending on what the therapist thinks is most likely to be effective and useful for the individual client in question. They are often complementary – two great psychotherapeutic approaches that taste great together.
Modern psychotherapy at its best is integrative, and eager to accept diverse, worthy approaches. Speaking for myself – I’ll use anything that works and helps my clients.
The second meaning of “integrative” with regard to psychotherapy refers to the greater purpose of the entire exercise – to integrate the unconscious into the conscious ego.
A law student client – already an MBA – said she needed convincing to drop out of her third-tier school.
I told her to calculate the return on investment for the final three semesters.
She crunched the numbers.
“Debit-wise, I’ve burned $80k in savings and I’m looking at another $100k of borrowed money. On the credit side, I might find a low-salary doc review gig.” She pretended to scratch notes. “So… big loans, interest payments, inadequate cash flow…opportunity cost of eighteen more wasted months learning legal mumbo-jumbo followed by the bar exam…”
“In other words…” I egged her on.
“I’d be totally screwed.” She affixed the cap on her pen. “Thanks. I’m convinced.”
I posed the question we were dancing around: “Why are we having this conversation?”
My client laid out the background: “My dad’s a lawyer. My mom’s a lawyer. My little brother’s taking his LSAT. This is what my family does. If I quit, I feel like I’m failing.”
She added: “It seems like it was different in my parents’ day.”
That’s because it was. A generation gap has opened in the legal world. On one side there are lawyers over-50, for whom law still looks like a safe, reliable ladder to the upper-middle-class. From the other side – where their kids are perched – law more closely resembles un ascenseur pour l’échafaud.
My client’s parents live in a time warp – a world trapped in a snow globe. Mom’s worked for 25 years as an in-house lawyer for a state college – safe, not terribly stressful (or interesting) work, with a decent salary, good hours and benefits. Dad’s worked for decades as general counsel for a local business. It’s no wonder that for them – and their generation – law still epitomizes a safe, low-stress career with good pay and benefits.
These over-50 types can’t imagine how bad it gets nowadays for someone calling himself an attorney. Their Weltanschauung doesn’t encompass windowless warehouses packed with contract lawyers logging 18-hour shifts of doc review for hourly wages, no benefits. Mom and Dad haven’t seen young partners at top firms getting de-equitized and struggling to snare in-house positions. If they knew that reality, they’d also realize their own sort of safe, steady work with benefits, a decent wage and reasonable hours constitutes a pipe dream for a kid graduating law school today.
Another client of mine – a 20-something from a decent school entering her third year in biglaw – summed up her reality thus:
“Really? I spent myself into life-long debt, endured hours of property law lectures, analyzed Erie problems on brutal exams, crammed for the bar…all so I could waste two years on doc review, then wait to get laid off (with the de rigueur bad review and zero career prospects) so someone younger and cheaper can take my seat? Really?”
If she’d studied computer science, or gotten an MBA or just quit school after college, she might have become a better-paid “e-discovery provider.” As a JD, it’s strictly “e-discovery peon.” In any case, five years from now a computer program will do doc review all by itself. As one client put it: “that’s when attorneys start living in cardboard boxes on the sidewalk.”
I received the following letter regarding humankind’s on-going battle with its own impulses:
Hi Will,
I really enjoy reading your blog, you give great insight. I have often been told that I need to focus (I do not have ADHD or any other attention disorder).My problem or what others see as a problem is that I tend have a large array of interests and life goals that are not necessarily connected for which I have much passion. There so many things I want to do, but the older I get the more I feel like everyone is right. I need to pick an area or two at most on which to focus. I have heard the arguments for and against the jack of all trades approach to life, but I am still not sold. I don’t want to focus; I want to do it all. I am I being overly idealistic? Is it necessary for one to focus on their energy on one specific passion? If so, how does one decide how to go about focusing their energy on something specific?
-DH
And here’s my response:
To submit a question to Ask The People’s Therapist, please email it as text or a video to: wmeyerhofer@aquietroom.com
If I answer your question on the site, you’ll win a free session of psychotherapy with The People’s Therapist.
========
If you’re interested in learning more about the scientific and philosophical underpinnings of psychotherapy, you might enjoy my first book, “Life is a Brief Opportunity for Joy”
Atul Gawande is a medical superstar – a surgeon at Harvard who’s also a New Yorker magazine writer, and the author of several books. His latest push is for doctors to use checklists to prevent common mistakes during surgery. A scary percentage of the time, it turns out, things grow overwhelmingly complicated in an operating room and a nurse or an anesthesiologist, or a resident (or whoever) gets distracted and forgets to do something basic – like confirm there’s extra blood in the fridge, or plug that little hose into the machine that keeps you breathing.
It happens. People forget things. Best to err on the safe side, and use a checklist.
The idea comes from aircraft pilots. It turns out they use checklists for absolutely everything – a pilot literally can’t step into a plane without a checklist. Pre-take-off, take-off, pre-landing, landing, and every possible contingency that might happen in-between is assigned a checklist. That’s because when you’re a pilot and you forget something, well…it can be a problem. Kind of like a surgeon.
Or a lawyer.
This isn’t exactly a new idea. The first thing I received at Sullivan & Cromwell when I arrived there was a checklist – and my first task was to start ticking off items. That’s how you handle a corporate deal closing – otherwise you’d never keep track of all the officer’s certificates and securities certificates and side agreements and various other bits of paper required for that six hundred million dollar acquisition of the rubber plant in Brazil (or whatever.) If you’re the junior associate and you forget something that needs to be on a closing table, well… it can be a problem.
But there’s another surprising finding in Gawande’s new book, “The Checklist Manifesto.” One required item on pilots’ checklists simply instructs them to stop and introduce themselves. During that process, they explain their responsibilities to one another, including any pertinent details regarding that specific flight. It sounds like this:
“If I don’t pass this test, I’m going to lose it.”
My client was a nursing student, who had to pass an important math test before she could receive her degree. She failed her first attempt, and her second was coming up. She was getting the jitters.
I pointed out that her approach to this situation – all or nothing – didn’t make sense. That’s because the likely outcome of this set of circumstances – like most everything in life – lay along the contours of a bell curve.
If you look out into the future, you are confronted with an array of foreseeable outcomes, some good and some bad.
My client, for example, might fail her last two tries at this exam, and be delayed in her attempt to finish her nursing program. That seems a remote possibility, because in past years only 8% of the class failed all three times, and to date she has scored near the top of her class. That bad outcome, while possible, exists on a narrow tail of the curve.
Out on the other tail, amid the unlikely positive outcomes, she might discover the school mis-graded her first test, and she already passed. That would be nice, but it’s a slim possibility.
The big, fat center of the bell curve, where the most likely outcomes reside, predicts she’ll pass during her second or third try.
As things turned out, she passed on the second try – with flying colors.
People tend to ignore the bell curve. You prefer to see yourself as the hero of your own adventure – the blessed, untouchable protagonist who sails into success. Or you go too far the other way, towards powerlessness, and go martyr, seeing yourself as the unlucky recipient of a cruel fate, singled out for suffering at the hands of the gods.
Neither is true. The future is a set of foreseeable outcomes that lie on a bell curve. You can look into the future right now, from where you stand in the present, and forecast the most likely outcome, and the less likely best and worst outcomes.
If you look at things realistically, there’s no reason to “lose it” if the actual outcome isn’t what you’d wish for. You merely fell onto a different place on the curve – but you’re still on the bell, and it’s still a foreseeable outcome.
Treating the future as foreseeable can be empowering. You are not all-powerful, and you are not helpless – you are doing your best in a world where you metaphorically roll the dice each and every day. Continue Reading »
It’s hard to conjure up bad stuff to say about clerking. It’s an honor, and an all-expense-paid ticket on an exclusive legal gravy train. If you’re lucky enough to clerk for a federal district or circuit court judge, you can rest assured you’re looking good and feeling good. You might even shoot the moon and sing with the Supremes. In that case, you’re good to go: You’ll never have to practice actual law again. You can sign up now to teach a seminar on “Law and Interpretive Dance” at Yale or attend sumptuous international human rights conferences hosted by African dictators. Life is good at the top. Imagine the stimulation of interacting one-on-one with the mind of a Clarence Thomas (and acquiring access to his porn collection.) You could be the clerk who builds an ironclad case striking down universal access to healthcare – or witness the day Justice T opens his mouth to speak during oral argument.
Even if you’re clerking for an obscure political hack (which is the norm), as a clerk you qualify to skip out of biglaw hell. The deal – as you probably know – is thus: you get to work non-law firm hours for a year, then return to the firm as though you’d suffered with the other monkeys. If you finish two clerkships, you double your fun and skip two years of Hell-on-Earth – then return with a third year’s salary!
Clerking gigs can be hard work – you could be researching and writing twelve hours a day. But you’re not putting in weekends (usually), and thanks to the court calendar, there are slow times built into the schedule. Your judge could turn out to be geriatric and losing his marbles (not a rare occurrence) or simply a lunatic – but you’re still doing substantive, important work – rather than, say, researching an un-busy partner’s attempt at a treatise or frying your brain with doc review.
Clerking is a sweet deal – one good reason to do litigation instead of corporate. As a clerk, you might learn something. That’s probably not going to happen as a junior doing corporate.
Yes, there’s a catch, and it’s a whopper: Most clerkships – a whole lot of clerkships – require relocating to the middle of freakin’ nowhere.
This month’s question for The People’s Therapist gets to the heart of how psychotherapy – “talk therapy” – actually works:
Why is psychotherapy conducted exclusively face-to-face, rather than in writing? I find that I express myself much more clearly and precisely in writing, after having had the chance to ruminate on my response — it’s one of the reasons I’m pursuing law as a career. I’ll bet this is something I share with other lawyers and law students. Having time to consider my response also reduces the risk that when I happen to have my precious hour in session, I’ll be guarded and not in a very sharing mood, and the hour will be unproductive for the both of us. Having the written word as an intermediary allows me to present myself much more honestly.
Thanks,
M
And here’s my response:
To submit a question to Ask The People’s Therapist, please email it as text or a video to: wmeyerhofer@aquietroom.com
If I answer your question on the site, you’ll win a free session of psychotherapy with The People’s Therapist.
========
If you’re interested in learning more about the scientific and philosophical underpinnings of psychotherapy, you might enjoy my first book, “Life is a Brief Opportunity for Joy”
At some point you have to get out of here. The question is when – and whither.
A vacation might help, if you could achieve the impossible and take one. My client pulled off a week – seven whole days! – at a Caribbean resort, only to return feeling like a condemned prisoner.
“It made things worse,” she lamented. “Now I remember the outside world.”
Sometimes it’s better to live without that distraction.
You’re in it for the money. Biglaw creates money to toss into the maw of a bank. But no one can stand this abuse forever. Change – any change – might be good, right? How about another firm? Working in a different building – working with different people – different acoustic ceiling tiles, different vertical blinds, different sound-absorbent beige carpeting, different cheap wood veneer bookshelves, different anonymous windows to stare out… Anything different counts as change, doesn’t it?
The omnipresent worry: out of the frying pan, into…someplace worse.
Could anyplace be worse?
Isn’t that what you said about law school?
Another client took the leap and fled his firm – couldn’t take it any more. Guess what? It was worse. Two months later he was begging to return to the frying pan.
Yes – it actually happened. He returned to his old firm, proving forever there are places worse than the-frying-pan-you-know. There’s the-frying-pan-you-don’t-know.
This guy was a fifth year groping for an exit from hell. Nights and weekends of endless grind congealed into a determination – no más. Anything was better than this. This – whatever this was – was killing him.
An escape hatch appeared in the form of a nearby firm (five blocks away) celebrated for “associate satisfaction.”
I was chased down the sidewalk by a breathless woman.
“You’re the guy who made me vegetarian!” she announced between gasps.
I didn’t know what she was talking about.
It turned out she’d worked as a paralegal, years before, at Sullivan & Cromwell. I didn’t feel guilty about not remembering her. We only toiled together once – a grueling all-nighter preparing for an M&A closing.
We ordered take-out burgers that night, and I opted for a veggie burger. She asked why I wasn’t eating meat. At first I played it down – mumbled something like “don’t feel like it.” Carnivores can grow testy if you fail to consume meat in their presence – they take it as a personal affront. I’ve learned to tread lightly.
But she persisted, with genuine curiosity, so I told her the truth:
“You don’t have to go there – no one’s asking you too,” I said. “But if you do go there, you’ll stop eating meat.”
That was it.
Ever since that night, she told me on the sidewalk, she’d been vegetarian.
All it took was going there – well, having someone tell you there was a “there ” to go to, then making the trip.
No, I’m not going to spell out where “there” is – you know perfectly well and I’m not here to preach. I’m here to talk about consciousness-raising, not vegetarianism. Specifically, consciousness-raising around alcohol.
You know, alcohol – those lambent elixirs stored in gleaming bottles; the all-American can of beer that pops open to seal friendship and inaugurate cherished memories; the cork shooting from a pricey bottle of champagne to harken in merriment and delight.
Yeah. Ethanol. Ethyl alcohol. Let’s tackle the popular mythology surrounding this stuff. We can start with what I call the Maya Angelou rule.
I’ve been talking to people – well, my people have been talking to people – about speaking engagements, radio shows, panels – celebrity stuff – the daily fodder of The People’s Therapist’s life of fame and glamour.
One group wants me to teach a workshop for young attorneys on “health and wellness.” Well, okay. Whatever. I can do that. How much?
They offered the same course in a different city last year, using another therapist-who-is-also-a-lawyer (I wasn’t aware others existed, but I’m not threatened.) To make things easy on myself, I asked how that other (lesser) therapist-cum-lawyer contrived to occupy her “workshop.”
“Oh, she gave them a list of pointers for ‘self-care’,” I was told. “You know, get enough sleep, exercise, eat right, that kind of thing.”
Piece of cake – except I’m not sure they need me to dispense said epiphanies. Richard Simmons manages to preach an identical gospel while everyone performs jumping jacks in lavender leotards.
No matter. Giving advice is what people expect therapists to do.
It’s like “sex therapy.” Remember “sex therapy”? Be honest: Did Ruth Westheimer ever teach you anything you didn’t already know? Yet you found it deeply, mysteriously satisfying each time she chirp-chortled that phrase – “with a firm greep on dee head of dee penis.” Tearing your attention from a tiny Israeli woman in her sixties discussing penises is like trying not to ogle a car wreck. Why fight the hunger?
Will Meyerhofer, JD LCSW-R is a psychotherapist in private practice in TriBeCa, in New York City.
You can visit his private practice website at: www.aquietroom.com.
Will holds degrees from Harvard, NYU School of Law and The Hunter College School of Social Work, and used to be an associate at Sullivan & Cromwell before things changed...
Now, in addition to his work as a psychotherapy, he writes books and blog entries and a column for AboveTheLaw.com.
The People’s Therapist writes books
The first book is called "Life is a Brief Opportunity for Joy"
Remember Green Acres, that fish-out-of-water comedy wherein Eddie Albert drags Eva Gabor out to live on some tumbledown farm in the middle of nowhere? She’s a Park Avenue socialite, but he’s the husband and the penis-haver and it’s the 1960’s – so what he says, goes. If he’s jonesing for fresh air and farm living, she has no choice.
When I launched The People’s Therapist, my intent was to get stuff off my chest – process a smidgen of psychic trauma. I’d write a column or two, exorcise the odd demon, piss off Sullivan & Cromwell and call it a day.
My client is finishing her 1L year. She’s bored.
I received the following letter regarding telling people things they don’t want to hear:
You’re different. You disdain the crass blandishments of biglaw. You have a soul. Let the giant firms seduce your naïve classmates with their shameless wheedling. You’re made of sterner stuff.
Our initial task as client and therapist – our work during the first few sessions – resembles cartography. I begin, like a map-maker, drawing a square or a rectangle, then sketching the outlines of landmarks visible from afar – the mountains, the sea, the rivers. In limning a life, the prominent features are obvious – where you were born, and when, where you grew up, what you do for a living, who your parents were and what they do, your siblings, if you have any, and your relationships with them, your partner, if you have one, and your relationship with him. I get the big stuff down, then step back, and try to make sense of it all – take “the lay of the land.” Later, I’ll add shading and nuance, and fill in the details – tiny inlets and hillocks, copses and rills.
The first step in the process comes as a question from the therapist. The phrasing of that “first question” gets debated when therapists gather. I trained with a colleague who invariably asked the same thing at each first session: “So what brings you here today?” That feels twisty and indirect to me. I usually start with “So how are you?” or, depending on my mood, or yours, “So how’s it going?” Sometimes there’s serious upset taking place in the here and now, that needs attending to right away. Before I sketch the background – the mountains and the sea and the rivers – I need to know if there’s a battle occurring on that stony plain, a castle under siege, a forest caught fire.
A visit to my office has evolved into something akin to the road to Lourdes. Pilgrims arrive red-eyed and defeated, faces etched with misery, searching for a way out of a trap.
I received the following letter from “S”:
At Barnes & Noble, where I once worked as a marketing exec, we bandied about the phrase “aspirational purchase” to portray a small, but profitable segment of our sales.
On 
Psychodynamic work is vertical. It involves digging down into your past, looking for the root sources of your behaviors. When I work psychodynamically, I’m wondering when you started thinking or feeling a certain way. I want to make you aware of how the environment in which you grew up shaped the person you are.
If you have a phobia about flying in airplanes, I will likely employ cognitive-behavioral techniques to make you conscious of the thoughts – predictions – that are frightening you. These thoughts are like tapes that play in your head – if you become aware of them, you can turn them off, and play another tape that will soothe you instead of freaking you out.
Some psychotherapists – especially in the past – fought over the superiority of psychodynamic versus cognitive-behavioral approaches. That’s mostly old-hat at this point. The two techniques are considered tools in a toolbox – options for treatment, depending on what the therapist thinks is most likely to be effective and useful for the individual client in question. They are often complementary – two great psychotherapeutic approaches that taste great together.
A law student client – already an MBA – said she needed convincing to drop out of her third-tier school.
Atul Gawande is a medical superstar – a surgeon at Harvard who’s also a New Yorker magazine writer, and the author of several books. His latest push is for doctors to use checklists to prevent common mistakes during surgery. A scary percentage of the time, it turns out, things grow overwhelmingly complicated in an operating room and a nurse or an anesthesiologist, or a resident (or whoever) gets distracted and forgets to do something basic – like confirm there’s extra blood in the fridge, or plug that little hose into the machine that keeps you breathing.
“If I don’t pass this test, I’m going to lose it.”
People tend to ignore the bell curve. You prefer to see yourself as the hero of your own adventure – the blessed, untouchable protagonist who sails into success. Or you go too far the other way, towards powerlessness, and go martyr, seeing yourself as the unlucky recipient of a cruel fate, singled out for suffering at the hands of the gods.
It’s hard to conjure up bad stuff to say about clerking. It’s an honor, and an all-expense-paid ticket on an exclusive legal gravy train. If you’re lucky enough to clerk for a federal district or circuit court judge, you can rest assured you’re looking good and feeling good. You might even shoot the moon and sing with the Supremes. In that case, you’re good to go: You’ll never have to practice actual law again. You can sign up now to teach a seminar on “Law and Interpretive Dance” at Yale or attend sumptuous international human rights conferences hosted by African dictators. Life is good at the top. Imagine the stimulation of interacting one-on-one with the mind of a Clarence Thomas (and acquiring access to his porn collection.) You could be the clerk who builds an ironclad case striking down universal access to healthcare – or witness the day Justice T opens his mouth to speak during oral argument.
This month’s question for The People’s Therapist gets to the heart of how psychotherapy – “talk therapy” – actually works:
At some point you have to get out of here. The question is when – and whither.
I was chased down the sidewalk by a breathless woman.
No, I’m not going to spell out where “there” is – you know perfectly well and I’m not here to preach. I’m here to talk about consciousness-raising, not vegetarianism. Specifically, consciousness-raising around alcohol.
I’ve been talking to people – well, my people have been talking to people – about speaking engagements, radio shows, panels – celebrity stuff – the daily fodder of The People’s Therapist’s life of fame and glamour.
The People's Therapist 