Consequences From A Sick Leave And Alternative Therapies To Drown Out Negative Influences

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Consequences From A Sick Leave And Alternative Therapies To Drown Out Negative Influences
[00:00:00] I'm wondering if you can talk about going on short-term disability leave in big law. What are the career ramifications, risk/reward. I'm currently a first year at a V10. Overall the work hasn't been as bad as expected. I may even say I like it. The problem is, I was assaulted and I'd been diagnosed with PTSD and has made daily life a struggle. If I'm on a contentious call where I can hear an angry tone of voice, I disassociate and won't remember anything. I've lost hours of my day disassociating. My short term, working memory is shot. You get the picture.
My biggest concerns are getting denied leave and having all my personal business out there being gossiped about and getting a reputation as a slacker for trying to leave. Or, even if I am able to take leave, I still have some concerns about coming back and being gossiped about, ruining my reputation at this firm, and then not being able to lateral with a few months gap on your resume. Any advice?
Okay. I'm going to give you some advice.
The first thing is, I like to read. I listened to a lot of podcasts. And, the first thing is, in terms of what you're dealing with a PTSD, there are a lot of and again, I'm not making any recommendations, [00:01:00] but one thing I would read, Tim Ferriss is one of them.
Ferris, he talks about, mushrooms and, all these alternative therapies and then Joe Rogan, who has a podcast. And this, I understand, is absolutely crazy. Tim Ferriss and Joe Rogan talks about alternative things. And then, you have other common things which I do, which are things like, exercise, meditation and all those sorts of things. A lot of these problems that you may be experiencing from what happened to you, and, I don't know what kind of assault it was.
I certainly apologize but you should investigate everything you possibly can. I'm not going to recommend anyone on this call, do shrooms or what does he talk about? He talks about even things like, float tanks, DMT, all that stuff.
I was having a talk with my daughter this weekend. She's 14 and she's a very good student, she's actually a perfect student, but, at the same time, she's experiencing all these kinds of problems that a lot of girls, nerdy kids have when they turn 14, going into high school. And, what I told her is that, one of the big things is, the way that I [00:02:00] certainly try to live my life. And, this is for every attorney out there is, you need to empathize. And then, you have people like Tony Robbins, religion, prayer. So, you have all these ways of coping with things that come at you. Everybody out there is trying to drown out the negativity. This is actually very important. All around us, there are all these problems. Everyone has, you have PTSD, everyone has issues. Some people, get different diseases and do things. Everyone has issues with their mind, frankly. They're stressed. They're unable to cope with things. They have limits that they come up against very quickly.
Everyone is trying to deal with this. And, if you're thinking about ending the practice law, then this is also a good issue for you to think about because everyone's dealing with these things.
I'm going to answer your question in a second. But and then, new prescription. There are new alternatives, new therapies, which include ketamine. All sorts of things which I think you can actually get a prescription for. All sorts of different therapies and different things you can [00:03:00] do. Everyone is trying to drown out the negative that influences them. And so, you have to decide, how do you do that? Some people work all the time, I know people that do that.
Some people drink a lot of alcohol, too much. Some people will exercise too much. Some people will throw themselves into religion. Some people will become co-dependent on others. A significant percentage smoke pot and new drugs. What else is there? There's just so much. Therapy antidepressants, downers, uppers. Everyone's dealing with this and this really is the struggle. This is the struggle that everyone has and then other people will just throw themselves into social stuff, friends and so forth. Some people buy things. Just all forms of distraction.
I'm not going to get too much into it, but, everyone has all this negative stuff that's influencing them. And so, they try to do all these different things to get out of it.
What I would say to you is, the first thing, if you believe you have PTSD. You probably do. These [00:04:00] are ways that people cope, some are positive and some are negative.
So obviously, therapy's positive exercise can be positive. I would recommend listening to some of these things, about different things you can do with exercise and, meditation all these things.
Personally, in terms of how do I deal with it, how do I make myself productive? I'm able to be very productive and work very long hours and stuff. I do things like, I do yoga in the morning. I exercise every act. I do, float tank. I have a float tank at home. I do exercise, daily meditation, vitamins. I spend at least 30 minutes a day reviewing my girlfriend, so we talk every day. I do all sorts of stuff. And, this is just on a daily basis. And oh, I do journaling. You have to get these voices and when I say voices, negative things that are hurting you, you have to get them under control.
And, the only way to do that is to, set aside time on positive things. And, people that do these things typically do very well. You can't constantly do things.
And now, there [00:05:00] are therapies. The reason I bring this up is because I've read a lot of stuff recently and people just keep talking about all this stuff. Try and be experimental. A lot of it apparently does work. I'm not going to get on a live talk and tell someone to do drugs, but, a lot of this stuff is going very much mainstream. A lot of these things, I've read associated with curing PTSD.
So, that's the first thing. The next thing is, if you do take a leave, you're concerned here of people gossiping, getting a reputation as a slacker for trying to take a leave.
You don't need to say what the reason is why you're taking a leave. You, you can just say you have a health problem. You need to take a leave and do that. The problem with taking a leave is that once you do that, then you may not want to come back. I don't think you're going to be gossiped about and ruin your reputation at the firm.
I don't know. It depends on the firm you're working at. If it was me I would try to approach the problem in other ways. First, before taking the leave, see if there's a way to do that because a lot of times these problems can be taken care of by figuring out positive ways to do things.
I would read therapies [00:06:00] for PTSD, things that have been proven to cure PTSD and see what you can do to attack it. That would be my advice. If you do leave the practice of law, you're not necessarily going to ruin your reputation.
People are entitled to have problems, but some people may lose a little bit of confidence in you and stop giving you as much work. So, if there's a way for you to take care of it without doing that. That's what I would do.