Psychotherapist Tells Lawyers: Embrace the Rock
A psychotherapist and professional coach notes the travails of Sisyphus, doomed to push the same rock up the same hill day after day, and says many lawyers see parallels to their own law practice.
“At this moment, we all have a sense of our rock, of the suffering of the world, a suffering that seems to have no point,” Dallas area psychotherapist James Dolan writes for Texas Lawyer.
“Lawyers I speak to often express an acute sense of the absurdity of law practice; that it seldom has to do with right and wrong, with mending grievances, making a better world or helping those truly in need. They complain that it is more often a peculiarly isolated competitive business, logging billable hours or working alone through monstrous documents or meaningless research related to arcane forms of litigation.”
It would be easy “to develop a sense of futility and the absurd in this world,” Dolan says, but he encourages lawyers to consider how they would feel about their life if given a death sentence or fatal diagnosis. At that point, they may see their daily struggles in a different light.
“We each have a rock that is our daily struggle, and for lawyers it is the complexity and imperfectness of law practice,” Dolan writes. “There is no human free of his rock. Like a Buddhist, we can accept suffering as a given and transform it into something beautiful. And we must each learn to bless our rock, for without it and all of its obvious difficulty, we would only invent another.”
