The Road from Lawyer to Psychologist

In 1974 I became a lawyer. Twenty-five years later I returned to school full time to become a psychologist. Being a lawyer was lucrative. It gave me status, a sense of importance, and a frequent rush of a job well done. Now I am a second year graduate student working toward a PhD in industrial/organizational psychology. I have no staff, no income, and no status. I have to make my own copies, do my own library research, and type my own papers. As often is the case, the change was triggered by a crisis.

In the summer of 1998, my daughter became seriously ill and spent six weeks in the intensive care unit of a local hospital. For much of that time we did not know if she would live or the extent to which she would be left with permanent damage. The event was shattering and incomprehensible. I felt like an aspirin tablet crushed into fine powder. I was no longer whole, only some residue of a former self. Eventually, my daughter recovered and the permanent impairment was minimal. My life and her life were drastically altered, however. The world shifted and priorities were reordered. Death was no longer an abstract concept on the horizon, but a reality that colors everyday life. The small daily pleasures are now the important ones. I am acutely aware that although we can plan and control much of our lives, we pass through a universe filled with a myriad of good and bad events, and it is just a matter of some chaotic happenstance as to which events will collide with us, sending us in new directions.

In hindsight, it was no surprise that when I returned to work, my legal practice no longer made sense. Buying and selling real estate, drafting contracts, and merging companies—it was all paperwork and money, and it just didn’t matter anymore. Negotiating, arguing, convincing, persuading—I didn’t want to waste my energy on issues that I didn’t believe in. I dealt with too many people who were elated just to get the best of the other. Forget the spirit of the law—the goal was to find a way to do what the client wanted. Weigh the odds of getting caught. Ask for forgiveness, rather than for permission. Litigation rarely concerned right and wrong, but mainly which side could put the best spin on an ambiguous situation, or hire the most jury-pleasing expert. I had always known it was a game, but now it wasn’t fun anymore. Life was too short for such nonsense.

In addition, my personal sense of right and wrong was being compromised. Somehow the gray area kept shifting and the line between right and wrong kept moving deeper and deeper into the gray area while I wasn’t looking. One night I dreamt that dark green, evil goo flowed down the corridors of the office. (Remember Ghostbusters?) I felt tainted by my identity as a lawyer and wanted out.

I spent many months trying to figure out what next. In college my strongest interest had

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been psychology. I had even applied to graduate school at the time, but for many pragmatic reasons I had been convinced to go to law school. Over the years I daydreamed about returning to school and becoming a psychologist. I was always more interested in why people acted the way they did, rather than shuffling papers and interpreting government regulations. But it always seemed preposterous to give up the money and the status. Now, it began to make sense, and the more I thought about it, the more appealing it became. My first thought was clinical psychology, but the extensive training and difficulty of establishing a private practice this late in my career path was not inviting. I wondered how I could combine my interest in psychology with my experience in the legal and business world.

As I became less of a participant and more of an observer of the interactions around me in my work, I began to notice interesting behavior. I observed employees and managers who reinterpreted core values and corporate policies to expedite their goals, participants who left meetings with completely different opinions about what was decided, a committee that spent an hour making a decision only to change the result 30 seconds after a differing opinion was expressed by a previously silent officer, the success of an employee depending upon the employee’s ability to comprehend and act within hidden agendas, and some employees who could survive and thrive in a difficult corporate culture and some who could not. So I decided to study how and why people function in organizations.

My husband, who agonized through the whole process with me, thought it was a great idea. I mentioned the possibility to a few friends and received nothing but encouragement. I had nothing to lose so I started studying for the GREs and sending off applications. I began looking forward to school and a new career. When my acceptance letter arrived, the sensation was overwhelming, almost a sense of rebirth. At work, the reactions ranged from those who thought I was crazy to those who wished they could do the same thing.

The first few weeks of school were rough. The shift from well-respected expert to neophyte student was difficult. Although I was a psychology major in college, my knowledge, to the extent I could remember any of it, was 30 years out of date. All of my professors were younger than I, and my classmates were the ages of my children. The thought of mastering statistical software packages that I had never heard of was terrifying. After the dust settled, however, I knew the decision had been right. I am doing exactly what I want to do and enjoying it immensely. School is a bridge from an old place to a new place. I don’t know where I will end up or what I might be doing a few years from now, but the journey is just fine.

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