The Therapist Who Left Law: Treating Perfectionism in Lawyers

Katya Valasek:

We're joined today by Doron Gold, a practicing therapist who focuses on helping lawyers navigate the unique pressures of their profession. Doron was once a practicing lawyer himself and spent roughly a decade in law before his pivot to therapy. I want to get into that transition and learn more about your therapy practice today, but before we do that, I want to go back to your law years. Why did you decide to become a lawyer in the first place?

Doron Gold:

I would say that why I decided to become a lawyer is similar to a lot of people, which is often an unsatisfying answer, and that is it was the most logical thing to do in the absence of anything else to do. I was a political science undergrad, and I loved poli-sci, and I loved politics, and I loved advocacy and promoting issues. I wasn't going to be a dentist, and I wasn't going to be a salesperson, and I didn't want to go into my father's coat factory business, and so law seemed to fit some of the bill.

I should say also, because I was so interested in politics, most of the people I knew in politics were lawyers, so it seemed to me at the time in my mid-20s that I guess law is a potential prerequisite to getting into politics, and I didn't love the law. I had never aspired to be a lawyer. I had never watched movies about lawyers and thought that looks awesome. I just thought it's the least illogical thing to do, and I gave it a shot and got in.

Katya Valasek:

Sounds like you decided it was the least worst option for your next step.

Doron Gold:

That would give me opportunities in life, and that would give me a career, and that would keep me intellectually stimulated. There were things I could have done. I could have been a cab driver, and sometimes when I was a lawyer, I wished I was a cab driver. But it was one that seemed like a really solid career and profession, and that seemed legit.

Katya Valasek:

And you did have that career. You spent about 10 years practicing law in Canada, which like the U.S., is founded on British common law. So there are many similarities to practicing in Canada and practicing in the United States. What kind of cases were you handling when you were practicing law?

Doron Gold:

So first of all, I will add in to honor my Quebec fellow Canadians. They are the only ones who aren't based in British common law. They're based in French civil law, but everyone else is absolutely common law.

And I didn't start as a family lawyer. In fact, I should say that there were two areas of law I was certain I would never practice in when I was a law student. One was criminal law, and one was family law.

I was sure based on the family law courses I had taken that it just felt like I was somehow taking advantage of the misfortune of others, and I was very idealistic, and that was the mindset I had. Early in my career, I started working in wherever I could get a job, which early on was civil litigation. So it was insurance law, it was personal injury law, a little bit of trademark litigation. I did some refugee law work for a couple of years. It was not a good market in the mid-90s. And so I worked where I could work, and at some point working with one firm, I was doing primarily construction law. They had one primary client, which was a general contractor who would build water treatment plants and other municipal projects, and I was filing construction liens, and I was involved in a trial involving a tender for a couple of power plants. And then the one primary institutional client fired my boss, and we no longer had that lifeblood of the firm. And I scrambled to find work, so I still had a job, and one of the lawyers in the office was doing legal aid family law work and said, you could do this.

So I took it on, and I learned it on the fly, and I kind of liked it. As much as I could like law, I liked what I called and still call pseudo-social work, which is the part of family law that involves helping people get their lives back, that involves children growing up in healthy homes, that involves people being financially secure as they raise their kids. I became sort of the favorite lawyer of a couple of women's shelters in the area I was living in because I developed a reputation as someone who didn't just do the work, and because it was a legal aid certificate and I was being paid minimally, a lot of lawyers getting that kind of pay often didn't take the files that seriously, and I really just cared about the subject matter.

So it allowed me maybe for the first time to really feel like I was doing something important in law. And what's important is based on your values, and your values are different than my values. So just based on my values, I never felt like arguing over a construction lien or litigation over a faulty widget was ultimately important in the larger scheme, but making sure that a woman gets to escape a violent marriage with her kids and be safe and have the financial means to raise them was compelling to me.

Katya Valasek:

Yeah, you really liked having the ability to help these women, but at what point did you then realize, I don't think I want to do this anymore?

Doron Gold:

So to answer that question, I will go back to when I went through and graduated law school. I didn't like law school. I didn't enjoy law school.

And when I graduated from law school in 1994, I immediately looked into doing a Master in Social Work because I didn't think I wanted to be a lawyer. And I spoke to the dean of a social work college that also had a joint program with a law program. And after hearing my story, she said, there's not enough lawyers who think like you.

Don't give up on it yet, which in hindsight was very good advice. What I really probably ultimately didn't want was to look back at my career, having never practiced law and think, I could have been a lawyer, but I was too afraid of it or something like that. I didn't want to carry that burden.

I needed to do it first to see if it's what I want to do ultimately. And so when I get to the point where it's around 2005 and I'm really unhappy, which is an important indicator of career success, I was anxious a lot of the time. I felt this pressure related to all of the fighting I would have to do with opposing counsel, with the other lawyers who were often very uncivil. And I'm not really a fighter. I could do it and I did it well, but I never felt good doing it. And I just wanted us all to be grownups and do the job and advocate for our clients and be nice to each other, be colleagues. Often it didn't work that way. And so that built up and built up and built up in a way that I started thinking, okay, I promised myself I would give this a period of time to decide if it's what I want to do. How much longer am I going to give it? Because it's not getting better. In some ways it's getting worse.

Katya Valasek:

Was there an experience that was the last straw for you? Was there a pivotal moment when you knew it was time?

Doron Gold:

There was, but it's not what you would think. There was no awful court appearance. There was no getting yelled at by a client or something. It was actually during a meditation. I'm meditating one morning and suddenly I feel this enormous weight on my chest. This is the fall of 2005. I feel an enormous weight on my chest, like the kind of weight that impedes your breathing. And I don't know what it is. So I just keep meditating. I'm just visualizing. Suddenly I realize there's a piano on my chest. Why is there a piano on my chest? Keep breathing through it. Keep breathing through it. And it becomes very clear, the piano is law practice. It is suffocating me. I can't get out from under it. And in the day-to-day, I feel like, oh, I can do today. But some days are better than others, and most days are not as good as I'd like them to be. In that moment, I thought, I can't do this anymore. And I actually went to work that day and said to my boss, I'm getting out of law. I'm going to stay for two months. I'll give you time to hire someone up and get them up to speed on the files. And in January of 2006, I'm out of here.

And I should say that I called my mom and told her. And my mom was a very widely admired school principal with an honorary doctorate in pedagogy from an American university, admired throughout the community, and a loving mother. And I said to my mother, I quit my job today. I'm not going to be a lawyer anymore. I can't do it anymore. It's killing me. And my loving, adoring mother said to me, go back and beg for your job back. At which point I said, did you hear the part about how it's killing me? And she said, with all the care in the world, she said, well, you know, not everyone loves their job. And you worked really hard to get here, all the levels you had to get to get to the point of being a lawyer and being an experienced lawyer. And you're making a living and you have a mortgage to pay. And being a lawyer is a very prestigious profession. And it's hard to imagine someone not wanting to be a lawyer if they were one. She gave me all the reasons that everyone will say about why wouldn't you want to be a lawyer? And I was by that time almost 40. So I had enough life experience to know I don't think she's right, so I'm going to follow my gut. And I did.

Katya Valasek:

I think it's really interesting because I also went to law school, graduated, I passed the bar in two states and I'm doing I'm doing different work than what people expect. And I also found that it was the people who hadn't gone to law school, who hadn't practiced law, that said things to me like, so you just wasted three years of your time or you're just throwing away all the effort. But people who had been to law school or practiced law sometimes saw it in a little bit of a different light. What did the attorneys you worked with say? How did they respond to your announcement that you were leaving law?

Doron Gold:

It's been a while, but my recollection is at least in terms of a couple of groups, there was the group that was on my mother's side and thought, what are you crazy? You have a job, you have a career. And then there's a group that said, uh-huh, yeah, I get it. In fact, when I work with lawyers now in therapy, this subject comes up a lot. I had a client earlier today who works at a very large and prestigious Toronto law firm who's been doing it for a long time and is thinking, I want to do this. And they have a lot of the same issues in their mind around, should I do this? Is this even done? But when they start to open the door to the possibility or even do it, a lot of the people around them may even say to them on the QT, God, I wish I had the guts to do that.

Katya Valasek:

It is very brave. And I have to tell you, I wanted to ask you, well, how did you weigh your decision? But honestly, I think coming to this decision in a meditation is one of the most thoughtful career change stories I've ever heard.

Doron Gold:

After years of a creep, creep, creep, creep of this. It's not like it happened all at once. This came really slow because nobody, these decisions are hard, but there was a moment of clarity.

Katya Valasek:

Tell me a little bit about how you worked through those doubts.

Doron Gold:

I had the internalized oppression of, are they right? Am I giving up the Holy Grail? Not a lot of that because I never kind of felt it was the Holy Grail, but it did feel like I was raised to believe in stability. I'm the son of a Holocaust survivor. Stability is important. Being able to make a living is important and support your family and have a roof over your head. You don't have to love your job. You just have to be able to pay for food and shelter and have a future. So it felt a little selfish. It felt a little self-indulgent. It felt a little like first world problems. People have said, oh, you don't like your job, poor dear. You should follow your fulfillment. Well, some people think that's a little airy fairy. I actually am a big fan of following your fulfillment where it is financially plausible. I, at the time, had worries about what I'm going to do because as much as I had in anticipation of leaving, started to train as a personal coach because at the time the idea of being a therapist appealed to me. I had done therapy myself. I had found it constructive. I had felt like I have a fascination with human motivation and human behavior and human distress actually, but it felt like don't you have to go to school for 10 years to become a therapist and I'm already 40. I'm not going to do that.

So I trained as a personal coach and thought that would be the way in, but I didn't really know what coaching was. It was a relatively new profession and it didn't really even resonate with me that much. I was really attracted to human distress, not executives who want to be 30% more efficient, things like that. So I wondered, am I going to be able to make a living? How's my self-esteem going to be? When people would ask me when I was a lawyer, what do you do for a living? And I would say, I'm a lawyer. Their reaction would be, hmm, they were impressed. He must be smart. After I left law and people asked me, what do you do? And I said, I'm a personal coach. They'd go, hmm, like that's curious. What's that? There was no validation. There was none of that people being impressed with you, which as much as we don't need other people's validation, it's nice sometimes. So it made me feel a little insecure.

The thing I did, which I think was effective ultimately, but I didn't know would be effective, was first of all, I had the moment of clarity, which was so compelling, I couldn't ignore it. So I had to act on leaving the thing that is harming me without knowing what to move towards with any real clarity. I just trusted the universe a little bit.

Katya Valasek:

Well, and as someone who is a lawyer and believes in building a case and having that stable background to rely on as you're starting to make a claim and an argument for why something should be decided in a certain way, that has to be particularly terrifying. At what point did you make the pivot from coaching to really go all in on the therapy perspective?

Doron Gold:

In 2006, it's early 2006, I am trying to build a coaching practice. I'm calling around to different places, trying to solicit business. I'm not a particularly sales-oriented person or self-promoting person, so it was uncomfortable.

At some point, I called the lawyer assistance program here in Ontario, Canada. Every jurisdiction in the United States, Canada, Australia, Europe have lawyer assistance programs. They exist to support lawyers and law students when they're going through stuff. I called that assistance program thinking, I know their cohort. I know their population. They had me come in and talk to them, and I explained to them how I'm recently parted from law practice. I know the stresses. I know the population, and I think I could help your people, so you should refer people to me. It was a business development call.

They sent me, I think, one person once who was not particularly suited to coaching, but not much came of it until two months later when they called and said, would you like a job? We've gotten funding for a part-time case manager. Case manager essentially being the person who answers the phone, talks to the law student lawyer about what's going on with them, and directs them to services, directs them to counseling, directs them to a peer support program, directs them to groups, and also is supportive themselves.

To me, that was just a good way to supplement my income and be able to work with the population I knew, and maybe it would lead to something, but I didn't know if it would. In very short order, they asked if I wanted to do it full-time, having done it for a little while, and that work was very satisfying. I started to do presentations in the legal community about mental health and addiction and such, and I felt I was really good at this, and I understood it.

And at some point around 2008 or so, my boss who was a social worker said, you should buttress your skills. If you want to do this in a more meaningful way, you should get more training. You should do a Master of Social Work. And she even suggested a program through the University of Windsor, which is in southwest Ontario, right across the river from Detroit. I didn't have to go there. They had a cohort right near my office for a working professional's Master of Social Work, meaning you have your day job, you can still pay your bills, and then every second weekend, you go in all evening, Friday night, and all day Saturday for two and a half years, and you get your Master of Social Work. And a Master of Social Work qualifies you to be a therapist.

Katya Valasek:

So you said you didn't enjoy law school. Did it feel different when you were in this Master program with social work students? Did you find that it felt more meaningful to you?

Doron Gold:

I didn't find the MSW program particularly edifying. I learned more about how to deal with clients, how to have boundaries, how to have emotional intelligence in my coach training than I ever learned in my MSW program. The MSW program was a better fit because the subject matter was interesting to me. But I was very single-minded at that point. I needed to get the letters next to my name so I could go be a therapist.

Katya Valasek:

So you did. So you took this whole wide world of social work, and you carved out this very specific niche in which you practice, which is supporting lawyers in therapy. Who are your clients today, and what issues bring them to you?

Doron Gold:

So I should say that I'm not exclusively a lawyer therapist, even though it's a good chunk of my practice. I work with couples, I work with teenagers, I work with non-lawyers, but I primarily work with lawyers and law students. And the kind of things that come to me, they're varied.

A lot of it is people who are very unhappy in their work and they're not sure why. And unhappiness can manifest as anxiety, it can manifest as depression, it can manifest as substance use, it can manifest as family problems, but they're unhappy. They're not great at pointing to why am I feeling this way.

And so part of the therapy process in that case is me finding out who they are, which starts with, how'd you grow up? Which sounds very stereotypically like a therapist, but I've learned over the years it is so very useful to know how a person grew up, what kind of values they learned, how attended to or not they were, what types of sibling rivalries they had, what kinds of traumas they had. The client I spoke with this morning, I won't get into any details that are identifiable, but there was enough negative experience in childhood that led this person to become very perfectionistic, which is often a trauma response in childhood, where if bad things are happening, a child won't think these grownups are a problem. The child will think it's my fault, there's something wrong with me. I have to figure out how to make this better. I need to be better. If I'm perfect, I won't attract any negative attention. And it makes for very, very unhappy, burned out adults, because they're doing it for the wrong reason. They're doing it for external affirmation. They're doing it to mean something, to matter in the world.

And a very clear lesson I learned in my process and through working with clients is, if you're not happy with yourself, you're not going to get happy with yourself out there. No one out there is going to make you feel better about yourself. No action you take is going to make you feel better about yourself. Managing your relationship with yourself, seeing yourself as good and decent and enough from the moment you're born, you're enough. And so that comes up a lot in these sessions. People who have from an early age felt like they're not enough, and they have to find ways to matter, find ways to be enough. And they're chasing it like chasing a drug. And maybe they get affirmation for having won a trial, but the good feeling lasts for about 10 minutes. And now they have to go get another one. Because it's fleeting. It's not real.

Katya Valasek:

Yeah. And I'm sure that this is, I mean, pop culture portrays lawyers as overworked, stressed, burnt out. Burnt out is something you hear a lot about now with working professionals. And as a group, lawyers are prone to depression and suicide more than the general population. When a lawyer comes to you in that state, where do you begin beyond the how did you grow up? Or what was your childhood like? What's the next step in helping someone unravel why they're burning the candle at both ends and living in a state of burnout?

Doron Gold:

Burnout has different elements. Burnout can be about a mismatch of values in the workplace. Burnout can be about overwork. Burnout can be about lack of respect, lack of fair pay. Burnout can be on any number of things. There is also why did you get into law in the first place? Who are you? What are your values? What matters to you? And is what you're doing everyday matching that? Or is it disconnected from that? Because that absolutely can burn a person out because you are doing something that doesn't align with who you are and what makes you tick.

So when I'm talking to them, I want to find out like the client this morning. This is someone who's been a lawyer at a major firm for now eight years and is currently on a maternity leave. And this person has been unhappy for a long time in law. And I just said to them, do you want to be a lawyer? And I said it to them as like a homework question. Think about it between sessions. She said, no, I can answer right now. My visceral answer is no. You keep doing it because that's what one does. One seeks stability. One seeks status. One seeks financial stability.

Change is scary. So a lot of it is in allowing the person to accept that they are who they are. And that there's nothing wrong with that. In fact, it's awesome that they are who they are. And now what would that person do with their life? Sometimes that doesn't mean leave law. Most of the time it means work in a place where they don't yell at you. Work in a place where they don't expect 1800 billable hours a year out of you so that you forget the names of your kids. Work in a place that's smaller, that has less hours. Work in a different area of law.

The client this morning has never liked being a litigator. People who don't like litigation should not be litigators. It's a really unpleasant job for a person who isn't suited to it. I kind of want to say a general proposition, which is law practice, in my experience, is wonderful. It's a great profession. It can be fascinating and lucrative. And you can do really important work and help a lot of people. It is awesome for people who are suited to it. And it's really not for people who aren't. And there is no shame in not being suited to law. My brother's a dentist. I'm not suited to be a dentist. I don't want to put my hands in people's mouths and drill. And there's no shame in that. It's just not who I am. I'm good at other things. Law is like that too.

Katya Valasek:

How do you work through these mental stumbles or mental struggles with your clients when they come to you as a fish that's trying to climb a tree?

Doron Gold:

The nice part about being a therapist, it's one of the greatest things, it's kind of one of the great things about being a lawyer too, actually. I'm objective. I'm outside of the person's storm. I'm watching them tear themselves apart and beat themselves up for not wanting to do something when they think they absolutely should have to do it anyway. And I can stand on the outside objectively and say, that seems really unpleasant. And you seem to have affinities over here, or you seem to absolutely have dissonance with what you're doing. Isn't that important? Doesn't it matter that you don't like what you're doing? That it stresses you out all the time? That you have the Sunday scaries on Sunday night because you know you have to go back to work on Monday? Isn't that problematic? Yeah, but that's just because I'm not strong enough. I have to be tougher. I have to have more grit. Yeah, but what if you're really gritty? What if it takes a lot of grit to keep doing something you don't otherwise want to do? That's gritty. What if you actually fit a square peg into a square hole instead of trying to keep getting it into a round hole?

And you notice how things start to flow when that happens. People find it hard to believe that that's true, particularly for themselves. They will be very supportive of someone else thinking about this. Oh, you're great. You'll be awesome. Whatever you do, you'll be awesome. With themselves, they can be very critical and they can be very doubting of their ability to find a better path. So as a therapist, I can slowly help them thaw that out and contemplate what would it be like if you were actually enjoying going to work every day or feeling really fulfilled by the work that you do every day? Even if we don't know what that is yet, what would that feel like? We explore. They gain insight over time.

Katya Valasek:

Yeah, that's real important work. And real important work that some people may be afraid to open themselves up to because they are worried that they'll have to divulge privileged or sensitive information in working with you. How do you navigate confidentiality with your lawyer client?

Doron Gold:

So it's technically touchy, but in reality, not really. I am not a doctor, so I don't have patient-client confidentiality. If my clinical notes and records are subpoenaed by a court, I have to hand them over.

And other ways that confidentiality gets pierced is if there's a risk to the individual or to someone else or to a child. There are certain confidentiality-piercing things. It never happened to me, I should say, in all the years I've been doing this, which is why in reality it's very rare.

But I'm also a lawyer who knows that you don't write a contract for when everything is going well. You write a contract for the possibility that something goes wrong and you need to know what to do. So yes, it can happen.

And I always let my clients know they sign a terms of service document that says it is not airtight. And some people, it's not enough. I have found that for most people, they don't worry that that's going to happen.

Sometimes if a person is involved in a divorce, they might worry that their ex might try to get their clinical records. Someone's involved in a business breakup or something. There are occasions when a person is extra cautious, but mostly the confidentiality that they need is my reassurance. Can they trust me that I'm not going to talk to anyone other than if I'm legally obligated? And are my practices, are my ethical practices set up to reassure them as such? Is the platform I'm using for a video counseling session a secure platform? Are my notes saved in secure places? Do I not talk to anyone? I keep a really, I learned this in law, keeping a very clear line ethically around what can be divulged and what cannot be divulged. What is solicitor client privilege in that case, right? So I learned a lot of things in law that I use in therapy.

Katya Valasek:

You mentioned already, you keep in mind what can be divulged. Does it impact how you take your client notes? Are there some things you just don't write down because of that possibility of the first time you're going to get subpoenaed?

Doron Gold:

Particularly if I know a person is in a particularly vulnerable state and that's something that they wouldn't want written down potentially, there's no reason why I need to write it down. And also the notes shouldn't be too voluminous anyway. It shows up in ethics generally.

Law teaches you ethics because it has to. It's a profession that is underpinned by ethics. And so is therapy. And I learned, I built the muscle in law. So it allowed me to very easily know how to know where the line is about what you can or cannot discuss with someone. Even if you've got a couple that you work with and one of them wants to hire you individually. Is it ethical to work with a couple and the individual? Do you have to get their consent? I mean, there's a lot of these questions that law teaches you that helped me to know what that looks like and to more easily navigate it. So that's the way law helps. I would have to say the most powerful lesson I learned in law was professional, not professional distance, but as a family lawyer, my clients would come to me often in enormous distress. They were going through terrible times. They were being threatened that they'll take your kids away and all these kinds of terrible things.

And if I immersed myself in their pain the way I really wanted to, because it felt like the only way to do the job right is to get in there with them, shows I care, then I'm going to get lost in it. And the objectivity is gone. And it's also going to destroy me. It's going to burn me out. So I learned early on as a family lawyer in particular, and as a refugee lawyer too, that you have to keep enough professional distance where you remain the professional who is the objective helper. These are not your children. These are children who are in need of assistance and you are going to bring to bear all of your skills and ability and effort to help them. But you are going to be able to see the client, have the client leave your office and move on to the next file and not lay in bed that night thinking about that poor family, even though every once in a while it would happen anyway.

That's really helpful as a therapist. I learned those boundaries as a lawyer and they just overlaid over therapy really nicely. Because every client who's coming to me has some level of distress. And if I just let it all sink into my bones, I'll be done in two weeks. There won't be anything left of me. And then I'm no use to anyone.

Katya Valasek:

Despite everything you've gone through to leave law and move to a space where you're able to counsel lawyers through so many of their problems, your son wants to be a lawyer. How much of your story does he know and how do you reflect on your son's career aspirations?

Doron Gold:

Well, listen, I'm really careful not to bring bias to it, whether positive or negative. When I heard that he had interest in doing law and I think he's writing the LSAT this weekend, my inclination was do it for the right reasons. Do it because it really draws you in.

Something about it calls to you. Not because it's the most logical next thing. What else am I going to do?

So to me, because I see so many people in law who are unhappy because they got into it for the wrong reasons or they got into it for the right reasons, but it didn't turn out the way they expected, which is also true, it's not my place to protect him from his own inclination. He's going to live his life and he's going to learn the lessons he needs to learn. And I'm not going to wrap him in bubble wrap.

That said, if I can give advice, the advice is mainly do it because you really want it, because it calls to you, because it speaks to you. It seems interesting. Something in there in all the different areas of law and all the different types of things you see really calls to you and is interesting. And then see if that keeps pulling you in. Other than that, I'm trying as best I can to not guide because everyone's journey is their own and every individual is an individual. And I have too much baggage to bring to think I could possibly be unbiased.

Katya Valasek:

Do you think he's brought a different level of reflection than you had because of your career path?

Doron Gold:

Interesting question. Maybe. I'm not sure. I do think he probably has some awareness that don't just go be a lawyer and don't think about it. Be a lawyer smartly. Pay attention to certain things as you're lawyering so you make sure that you're well on your way through it. I think he's probably aware that that's something that I deal with a lot.