Psychotherapist's Lawyer Diagnosis: Preparing to Live Syndrome
Professional coach and psychotherapist James Dolan says he has seen too many lawyers living for retirement as they sacrificed happiness and their real passions.
Dolan has coined a term to describe this lawyer affliction: preparing to live syndrome. He writes in Texas Lawyer that too many people fail to grasp that the here and now is the only moment in life that they truly possess.
Instead lawyers tolerate unhappiness in anticipation of “some future point when all will come together, and life will again take on sparkle and value. In the meantime, there is nothing the sufferer can do, and the solution always lies out of reach, in the future.”
Putting off hapiness can result in a “search for relief in addiction, pay raises and promotions, and all manner of frantic behavior,” Dolan’s article says.
He suggests that the lawyer who always wanted to become an author should begin to write in her spare time. A time-pressed lawyer should take a few moments to spend time with family or talk to co-workers. “It will mean taking your foot just slightly off the gas pedal, remembering that wherever it is you think you are going, you have in fact already arrived,” he writes.
