February 1999 

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Swimming Through Seaweed:
Emotional Hazards
in the Culture of Law

We don’t know who discovered water" someone once told me, "but it wasn’t a fish." Those who are swimming in something are often the least likely to see what surrounds and sustains them. This article is an attempt to identify six ingredients of the culture of law in which lawyers often swim.

The practice of law is a noble profession and populated by intelligent, hard-working men and women. My focus here is on those aspects of the culture of the legal profession that, even as they may be functional in the practice of law, at times work against a lawyer’s capability to maintain productive professional and personal lives. As a therapist, my attention is drawn to those aspects of law practice that adversely affect a lawyer’s mental health: the seaweed, so to speak, of the professional sea in which lawyers swim.

Over the years that I have worked with lawyers and law students, I have identified six components of their experience that seem to be of common concern within the culture of the legal profession. These are Time, Anomie, Logic, Competition, Mistrust of Emotion, and Money. While most of these factors are a necessary part of a career in law, there are down sides. The negative aspects of these factors will be discussed below.

Many lawyers and law students experience time differently than most people do. For those in the legal profession, time is compressed, intense, valued for its capacity to produce, linked inextricably to money or research, and defined by deadlines. Time, for lawyers, is often experienced more as a "movement towards" something rather than something in itself. For many lawyers, time -- like water to fish -- envelops them and exerts a constant pressure.

Dr. Stephen Reichtschaffen of the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York distinguishes two different experiences of time: "on time" and "in time." He uses the term "on time" to describe that experience of time that comes with schedules, deadlines, and appointments. This is the experience of time that most of us have most of the time. This "on time" experience is necessary for accomplishing tasks and getting things done.

This way of experiencing time has an important, useful place in our lives. Time is oriented toward the future. In the law much of what happens occurs in this "on time" experience. This includes court dates, deadlines, responding to faxes, billable hours, and so forth. The pressure exerted by the press of time, under the best circumstances, can be an additional boost to productivity and a challenge to creativity.

This experience of time can have its down side. Time can be seen as a commodity that is "used" rather than sensed. In this experience of time, one is conscious more of what needs to be accomplished than what one is experiencing at any given moment. Sometimes a lawyer’s "on-time" experience promotes anxiety: a heightened sense of vigilance and scanning and difficulty calming down. Here time is too scarce, and the tasks too demanding.

For some lawyers the effect is depression: the opposite of anxiety. Here time looms large and becomes heavy. Time seems to slip away as the lawyer stares at her work or plays computer games, while becoming increasingly mired in guilt and self-reproach.

In contradistinction, "in time" experience is focused on the moment and on the experience of the moment. Here time is not apportioned in minutes on the clock but by the inner experience of the moment. Time stands still. One becomes unconscious of time. Usually one’s richest moments occur during "in-time" experiences: playing with your daughter, having coffee with a friend, sitting by a lakeside. Dr. Reichtschaffen quotes the statement, "To choose the simplest definition of time, one could say it is what measures a transformation."

Unfortunately, if one is predisposed to hard work and "on-time" experience of life, it is difficult to cultivate "in-time" moments. The culture of law works against these moments. My clinical notes are full of reports by disgruntled spouses who complain of their partner lugging a laptop to their child’s baseball game or missing dinner many nights.

My point is not to suggest that "on-time" experiences are "bad" and that "in-time" experiences are "good" but that a balance of both needs to be present in one’s life. Perhaps, the time devoted to the important activities of the day should reflect the balance that one hopes to achieve in one’s life overall. For if you don’t have it in every day, or at least in every week, you likely won’t get it in your life.

Richard Wagner is a a psychotherapist in Minneapolis and serves as the coordinator of Counseling Services at William Mitchell College of Law. He regularly provides individual psychotherapy to lawyers and runs groups for lawyers on behalf of the Minnesota State Bar Association.

Copyright © 1999 by Richard Wagner

"Isolation affects those working in large firms as well as those in solo practice."

Emile Durkheim coined the term "anomie" at the turn of the 20th century to characterize the mental state of disenfranchised workers who were experiencing personal anxiety and isolation as well as feeling separated from their capitalist employers. This term, with an updated twist, can characterize some aspects of a lawyer’s experience of a legal career. On the positive side, unlike workers at the turn of the century, lawyers can be well-paid, have status and position. At the same time (and similar to those workers) they can experience a vague free-floating anxiety or depression and feel separated emotionally from others.

The sense of isolation from others is a frequent complaint of lawyers with whom I have spoken. This isolation needs further description to be fully understood. It is not immediately obvious to a casual observer. Isolation affects those working in large firms as well as those in solo practice. In a large firm, lawyers may be busy with tasks, talking to one another, occasionally joking and casually bantering. However, once a lawyer shuts the door and moves into his own space, that lawyer may sense dissonance between how he just presented himself and how he actually feels. Whatever their gender, lawyers may feel estranged from one another by lack of genuinely meaningful contact with another human being. While many people share this experience, this type of isolation seems to occur frequently among those in the practice of law.

Isolation is a constant part of experience for many lawyers in solo practice. Their work is frequently performed alone for hours or days at a time. Since their income depends on how many hours they bill, they have a persistent disincentive to develop social contacts: it literally costs money to do so. Ironically, this isolation may contribute to depression, which lowers billable hours.

Once, unbeknownst to either, I was seeing two people from the same firm. They each individually described their own experience of feeling alone with their apprehension and depression. When I suggested they might talk to some colleagues whom they might find receptive, their conviction that they were the only ones feeling that way and that it would leave them too vulnerable to being seen as weak kept them from finding some comfort by talking openly about their situation. This is isolation.

I am also reminded of a lawyer whom I saw for individual therapy. He came in complaining of depression, anxiety, and feeling isolated. This was an individual who had spent his childhood obtaining approval from his parents through a bright mind and good grades. His parents, while clearly loving, seemed to be able to express this love only through approval of his concrete achievements. He was quite prepared for the particular law firm that employed him because here too approval came through financial rewards for a job well-done. What was missing was personal contact: something to affirm him for who he was rather than what he did. Ultimately he decided to leave. In his final week his office was crowded with colleagues. They were not there to say warm good-byes, however, but to insist that he finish work on certain cases before he left. This is the experience of anomie.

Logic is a skill that is developed and required for the practice of law. The value of this skill is not challenged. Logic, like the other ingredients in the culture of law, exerts a quiet but significant influence on a lawyer’s life. This influence can be detected most frequently in the lawyer’s insistence on speaking logically. Speaking logically is most critical in legal matters, but an emphasis on logical speech also seems to permeate conversations in legal settings when the topic is not necessarily logical and in nonlegal settings when legal minds are part of the conversation.

Experience shows that the value of logic can be overstated and it can be misapplied. Here are a couple of examples. One lawyer related an incident where she had made small talk in a library by mentioning to a colleague that it was a nice day. She was challenged on the veracity of the statement with several logical contradictions to it being a "nice day."

Another example that I encounter frequently comes up when I am conducting marriage counseling with a couple, one of whom is a lawyer. They are unable to work though marital problems because the lawyer is skilled at legal (not marital) arguments and quickly and deftly shoots holes in his or her partner’s logic. All too often the lawyer "wins" the argument and loses the intimacy.

Logic is a skill and should not be a way of life. The saying, "If all you have is a hammer, you treat everything like a nail," applies here. Especially in close relationships, the skills of empathy, understanding, and acknowledging faults are more useful than logic.

An additional consequence of the overemphasis on logic is diminished respect for emotion in a person’s life. This will be discussed more in the section on "Mistrust of Emotions."

Competition is a hallmark of the legal profession. Class rank in law school, securing a position in an intense job market, winning or losing a case, making partner, aspects of the size of one’s office, as well as home and automobile ownership all have competitive aspects.

The down side to competition is the impact it has on aspects of one’s personal and professional life. Competition creates winners and losers and distinguishes strong from weak. Competition seems to exaggerate perfectionist tendencies that many lawyers exhibit.

One who places a high value on competition is often motivated to reveal only the strong, winning side of oneself. Yet we know that no one is always a winner, always calm, always logical, always strong, always on time, and always productive. Law is a demanding profession, full of anxiety and pressure. Regrettably little room is provided for lawyers to discuss openly these quite normal, quite human experiences. The result is for the individual lawyer to keep these things to himself, exacerbating the isolation and emotional bottling up that is so prevalent in the practice of law.

Competition is also a good way of achieving mastery over the skills needed in one’s profession. The striving for mastery is one of two major pushes in an adult’s life. The other is striving for intimacy. In her article, "Why Executives Lose their Balance," Dr. Joan R. Kofodimos explains how striving for mastery can sometimes conflict with striving for intimacy. Dr. Kofodimos describes how an organization can come to seek out and reward those executives who can put aside their emotions to get the job done. She writes:

. . . the individual who predominates in the organization is detached from emotions, especially from uncomfortable feelings and thoughts that would conflict with his conscious attitude of confidence and enthusiasm about organizational life. To compete and win, he must be detached from compassion for the losers. To devote himself to career success, he must insulate from the loneliness, guilt, or regret regarding sacrifices in his personal life. Thus the executive who strives for mastery and avoids intimacy is exactly what the organization wants. (Kofodimos, Joan R. "Why Executive Lose their Balance," Organizational Dynamics, p. 69.)

(It should be reemphasized here that this article attempts to highlight the potential negative effects of some aspects of the culture of law. This article is not an indictment of the overall practice of law. Perhaps another article could highlight the positive effects.)

"Many lawyers seem to act as a prosecuting attorney toward their symptoms, treating them as criminals that need to be put away."

Closely associated with the preference for logic is the mistrust of emotion. While these two concepts are related they are nonetheless distinct. The prized valuation of logic seems to contain a devaluation, at times even mistrust, of emotions. Rather than emotion being seen as something to remove only from logical thinking, it may be seen as something to remove from one’s life generally.

Emotions need to be listened to, not ignored, suppressed, or disparaged. Yet, frequently, it appears that lawyers are induced to avoid a discussion of this aspect of their professional life. Worse yet, many lawyers hide their emotional responses from themselves and others because they view them as an indication of weakness.

If a lawyer separates himself from his emotional life he loses access to significant information about himself. If logic is the language of the rational mind, then emotion is the poetry of the psyche. Both have a place in one’s life, yet one needs to listen to logic and poetry in different ways. As a therapist I hear hour after hour of people’s irrational fears. As a therapist, I have been trained to listen to these painful irrational fears in an attempt to understand what they mean, just as a physician examines a patient’s symptoms to understand the cause of physical pain. Many lawyers seem to act as a prosecuting attorney toward their symptoms, treating them as criminals that need to be put away.

I knew an attorney who was regularly disturbed by several recurrent obsessions; one was that a single mistake by her could ruin her whole day and a second obsession was that any interaction with a colleague at the firm had the potential to reduce her to shame. These were clearly irrational fears, yet her powers of logic were no help against the painful onslaught of the obsession. Fortunately, this woman listened to her pain rather than attempting to hide it. She was able to trace the source of her current obsessions to shameful events in her childhood which were being displaced onto her current work situation. Through attending to the messages in her symptoms, rather than avoiding them, she found relief from the obsessions.

Many of life’s richest moments are full of emotion. In fact the ability to remember events from the past is closely connected with the emotional experiences surrounding those events. Logic clearly has its place in a lawyer’s life, but so does emotion.

Money is, like time, ubiquitous in its influence in the field of law. Billable hours is a major area of scrutiny and a major measure of success. While this is perhaps an inevitable part of the legal world, it also has its downside. The effect of money on the culture of law can be viewed in at least two perspectives: one perspective is how an individual lawyer views the money he or she makes; the other is how the lawyer compares his or her money-making ability to that of other lawyers.

Let’s consider first the perspective a lawyer may have on the money he or she makes. When one is making $75 or $100 or $200 an hour it is easy to consider that additional hour or two as a small price for more income. Working more hours is viewed as positive; often its physical, emotional, and family toll are not considered. If work is perceived only in terms of its monetary reward, many other things may suffer. The normal office socializing and good will that promote team building and loyalty are reduced since these activities don’t produce income. The idle hours at home, which contain the potential for meaningful interaction with one’s children, can be crowded out when they compete with the certainty of earning more money. If the richness of life is measured just in money, we all are poor.

Let’s now consider the perspective that a lawyer may have in comparing her income to others’. This perspective produces a facile measure of worth: one is as valuable as the money one makes. This perspective has a number of negative aspects. First of all, net worth is a shaky measure of self-worth. So many other factors contribute to the measure of a person: ability, integrity, teamwork, relationships, values, love, and so forth. These factors are harder to assess than income, but, I would contend, more important.

A second negative aspect of this perspective is that even a lawyer who does not equate net worth with self worth may compare himself unfavorably to those who make more money, rather than appreciating the income he has. We regularly hear through television and newspapers about significant hourly rates charged by high power attorneys. The common assumption of many people, including lawyers, is that lawyers -- other lawyers -- make more money than they do. This comparison is usually unfavorable to the person doing the comparing. The facts about the general income of lawyers do not support these exaggerated assumptions.

As an outsider looking into the sea in which lawyers swim, I have hoped to point out some of the emotional seaweed that inhibits a fluid journey. Once Sigmund Freud was asked what made for mental health. The person asking the question assumed he’d receive a long technical answer but Freud replied simply, "To be able to love and to work." This article has attempted to explore some aspects of a lawyer’s love and work life that may help strengthen a lawyer’s mental health.

I have noticed that there is an acronym -- talcum -- that may offer a useful means for remembering our discussion of these six aspects of the culture of law: time, anomie, logic, competition, unemotional and money. Maybe if you’re feeling an emotional rash you can explore some of these ingredients. I hope it can help clear up the rash.