Or, maybe it's the truth and was given out of frustration.
I really and truly don't know, and have no way of knowing. But, your friend DOES sound like a pretty challenging client where it might be impossible to meet her expectations. After all, you have trouble meeting her expectations too.
Part of the reason I say that...... I'm a farrier. (I shoe horses and trim their feet, etc.) Over the years, I've had a few people try really hard to tell me how to do my job. I'm pretty good at my job, so that's annoying. But normally I listen, explain what I'm doing and why, and things move along. Once in a great while, someone persists to the point that I can't stand it. Then, I usually offer to lend them my tools, so they can do the job themselves. Sometimes that gets the point across. Sometimes it doesn't. If it doesn't, I leave. Job unfinished and also (usually) unpaid. It's worth it to get away from them. I generally don't return their calls in the future. Why would I?
I don't know that your friend is one of those people, but I can see the possibility so maybe the lawyer has her reasons. Meanwhile, I can see where the lawyer situation is going to make presenting her case a lot harder. I'm kind of surprised she needs her own lawyer though. Seems like the state should be prosecuting someone for stalking and assault & the victim shouldn't have to hire a lawyer.
Thank you for your supportive input, it's hugely appreciated and helps me keep going at this difficult time. I hope I can do the same for you or pay it forward on this forum going forward.
A little more context from me may help clarify the situation. As I've mentioned a couple of times on this thread, the country where I live has very different professional standards and norms of personal conduct to the Anglophone world. My friend is local. I have paternal heritage here and being here makes me feel closer to my deceased father who is buried here. That's why I tolerate some of the cultural discomfort, and there are comforts also. But being an isolated foreigner or immigrant here can be a mental health challenge for precisely cultural reasons, the behavioural norms are surprisingly different and it's one of the things I've had to become aware of in order to adjust.
I have dozens of examples of shocking unprofessionalism from people we would normally expect to be trustworthy. One anecdote. I once went to see a lawyer because I'd been sent a gigantic electricity bill (like four months local average wage), which the electricity firm said in a letter was based on their own mistake of having misread the meter readings for years. I handed the lawyer the letter, and he replied to me, without joking, that the size of the bill must be because I am running a brothel in my apartment. He added for good measure that my surname reminded him of a criminal he had heard of.
Red flagging right away, I calmly asked him to hand me back the letter. To which he screamed at me at the top of his voice, a massive tirade about why it is my obligation to trust him. I had to repeatedly ask him to hand me back the letter while he continued his rant at me. For us from Anglophone culture, this unbelievably bizarre behaviour would be considered emotional dysregulation at the very least.
Here, it is unsurprising, because about a third of the so-called professionals one meets are like this, from city hall to your local pharmacy. I have other anecdotes that are worse than this one. Imagine the mental health task of adjusting to that, as an isolated Anglophone foreigner accustomed to service providers understanding why customer service is in their personal interest.
Apparently state lawyers here are useless in criminal cases, which I can well believe, which is why she went private. Her lawyer found out the stalker is himself a lawyer. He has hired one of the best attorneys in the business for his defence (probably at friend price), who would probably destroy a free state attorney who doesn't care about his own job. Even in the US, the celebrity divorce lawyer James Sexton says: "There is nothing more expensive than a cheap lawyer."
My friend's lawyer was approached by the Opposing Counsel a couple of months ago with the offer to start talks about an out-of-court settlement. The way it works here is that her lawyer has a financial incentive to drag out the case as she charges by the hour, so settling would stop her income.
The lawyer contacted my friend to tell her she had unilaterally declined the offer, on the grounds that stalkers who have already attacked once are sexual predators with an addiction who need to be prosecuted in order to be stopped. My friend was indeed angry that her consent for declining settlement had not been requested by her lawyer. Her lawyer didn't take kindly to the complaint, and their relationship deteriorated.
When my friend explained that she doesn't have sufficient resources for all the additional hours the lawyer wants to charge top rate for, the lawyer resigned. I find the lawyer's conduct unethical, particularly after reading this:
What happens if an attorney fires their client?
Yes, my friend can be difficult, and that doesn't stop the world she is in being difficult.
It's reasonable to ask why I put up with my friend, if she can be so difficult. Again, I can illustrate it with an anecdote. Last week I took her for a cheap meal and during our very pleasant, funny, interesting conversation I mentioned I'd had a tough call with my mother.
"I could already see that, from the micro-expressions on your face," she said, with an affectionate and supportive smile.
Nobody else knows me like she does. We all need this bond, as you know. Sure, I have the option of going off and finding that bond with somebody else, and so can we all when the going gets tough. But when the bond is there, it is strong. And so the front of change is that we need to learn to adjust our selves to our environment, including setting boundaries and communicating effectively.
The time may come when yet another one of her melt-downs just goes too far, and I walk away. A step has already gone in that direction as I don't have her live with me any more. For the time being, she is my kindred spirit, my companion, the person who both attacks me and makes me laugh. We have 11 years of shared memories and amazing experiences of joy and wonder, an infinite number of hugs, smiles and laughs out loud. Because I am coming here to unravel problems, by focusing on them I may not have said these positive things enough.
Getting a little amateur psychoanalytical now, as I have told her myself, to some extent I experience my dead father in her. For me, he was just as affectionate and as dysregulated as she is. I chose not to live with him as a child, partly because of his dysregulation (which I put down to undiagnosed PTSD, carried over from being a child in an urban war zone witnessing starvation, killing and rape, and getting maimed in an explosion, as some of his earliest memories).
Personally my hunch is still that she may well have traits of a personality disorder such as borderline, and I am keeping self-care front of mind. Finding the right way to keep telling her that I can't rescue her and won't help her more than I can, is now my task. I doubt that I am getting the words right.
When she asked me for help again yesterday she reminded me about her abusive male boss firing her four years ago, her subsequent physical illness, her incapacity causing lack of income, her mother's relatively recent death, her father's spiralling debts and deteriorating mental health, her attacker and now her lawyer walking away from prosecuting him after sabotaging the out of court settlement.
When again yesterday she told me she needs help, I asked her what she wants from me. Her reply was basically that her previously lucrative career as a senior corporate manager is over and she needs someone tell her what to do about it because she urgently needs income, she is effectively bankrupt at age 42 with massive healthcare costs. I said I don't know her field, so I can't advise.
So she said she needs far more
dependability from me, and that could start with me finding her a new lawyer. I said, "I don't know what to tell you," and "that's not something I have the skills for," and "only you can solve the problem." She really didn't like that and took it as uncaring, self-interested abandonment. She may well have re-experienced her own family dynamics in that.
Trying to be self-aware, I think my tone was too blunt and uncaring at that point. I could have wrapped it up better with more kindness, sympathy and empathy. I would like to learn how to communicate this better, so all ideas welcome. But I said what I said.
