Reading Terminal

Wow! Thank you all for replying so thoughtfully. I steeled myself for tumbleweeds.
I see a few threads here, and I feel challenged to explain why I want to do this, and taking that as an invitation to, I hope you'll indulge me. I promise I'll try not to bore you! I'll be honest and submit myself for inspection.
I chose law because I wanted to advocate for women and children who are emotionally abused. People have been telling me for years that I should be a psychologist, but I saw a lawyer as a sort of fighting psychologist, and in a position where I could do more practically than simply plugging my finger in the dyke. The law is very poorly equipped to remedy emotional abuse, if it is at all, and the law changes only from within. I believed I had to be participant to do so.
I was emotionally abused as a kid, and in the tragically typical fashion, I in turn emotionally abused people myself in my 20s. I saw two LCSWs and a PsyD after recognizing my problem, but I identified a real lack of knowledge in psychology about what that kind of trauma does to people. It usually took months to explain what had even happened to me (I didn't even know myself), and surprisingly even these clinicians were at first dismissive about how profound and insidious that abuse can be. To me, there was a lot more literature about narcissistic personality disorder itself than about what impact those people have on others, for example. I also didn't find real success in therapy until I sought out a doctor and asked him directly for psychoanalysis and to help me purposefully decompensate and get to a better place. This has certainly colored my perception that a master's alone might not equip me to help others in the way I'd like to. The notion that doctors are somehow better than LCSWs seemed validated.
I read a British study a long time ago about procrastination, and how they found that the best way to overcome it is to imagine yourself having completed the proposed task. We procrastinate to soothe stress, because putting off the task feels better than confronting it. But if you can imagine the task done, you've reframed the binary choice: now, starting feels better than procrastinating. I personally find this incredibly effective, almost like magic, and I love that psychological research could have true pragmatic value beyond just identifying characteristics of a disorder or seeing what treatment is most effective. 
Getting to the meat of questions surrounding abuse, why we passively accept abuse, and why the damage persists even after the abuse has ended is what I'm interested in doing. I know a lot of research has been done there, but I think there must be tools, like that procrastination trick, that can help people climb out of the hole abuse has placed them in so that they can actualize and get on with their life. With the perspective I have, I see people around me struggling in a similar way that I had (though not as severely since they weren't abused), where I avoided getting myself in order until I was into my 30s. I see it as "being afraid to think". I want to find practical solutions through research, not for consumption only by psychologists, but for everyone. What did people who self-actualized do? How do we make that solution persuasive to people who still refuse to self-actualize?
As for the law, I see it as broken because of the rise of professional admissions officers. Three hundred years ago, the legal tradition as we know it was born in dim, wooden rooms where exceptionally boring men in wigs carved out a philosophical space for themselves and outlined a set of virtues that created something beautiful and special. And for hundreds of years, that tradition was carried forward by similarly boring men in a space that really didn't permit getting rich or famous. It was very genuine, and we can all look back on old cases and people writing constitutions and see virtue because the only people involved in the law were themselves stale and principled. 
Today, the prestige schools - the holders of true legal wisdom - haven't increased the size of their classes in decades, even though the population has since exploded. To get in, one must become a sort of hyperachiever student, someone who is almost pathologically ambitious. That's the mark of a great person, sure, but those people aren't the people who shepherded the legal tradition into today. I think that since law schools select for hyperachievers, they're at the same time selecting for people who view obstacles as something to push out of their way, and in law, those obstacles are virtues themselves. 
An overwhelming majority of law school admissions officers are not lawyers, and I think that's alarming. This is a new problem, starting around 1980, and I think we can see its consequences in how politicized judicial appointments have become, the rise of BigLaw, or how law schools openly have political groups like the federalist society or american constitution society. Law schools are even developing deep political reputations as conservative or liberal. I'm just disgusted with it, and I realize how naive I was. It's not about justice at all anymore. I think the tradition is on life support.
I'm not sure I would truly describe my interest in psychology as "sudden", but the idea of actually persuing it is indeed new. Perhaps you'll all think of me as naive. But I'm certainly at a crossroads. I am not at all tied down by family or obligation, I would go anywhere. I don't need to go to a prestigious school. But I am, rightly it seems, intimidated by the competitiveness and I appreciate that some of you have tried to take a discouraging tone. Law school admissions is very numbers based (the LSAT is everything), and I see that I'm having a tough time letting that go.
Do I sound like someone who has a shot here?