HELP ME! HE'S DRIVING ME NUTS!

Have you ever had the experience of wanting to strangle the life out of the opposing attorney in your case? 

 

In the alternative, have you ever stood in a courtroom listening to the opposing attorney and experienced flashes of pure rage? 

 

I have. 

 

The fact is I've been in some pretty difficult situations in my life, but nothing can equal the difficulty of putting up with attorneys who lie, manipulate, and deceive on an hourly basis all day long, causing harm and damage, particularly to the ones I love. 

 

Because as we all know, our lawsuits in family court often mean life and death to our children, let alone ourselves.  That's when the Momma bear in us can rise up, ready to rip the heads off those disgusting attorney's in defense of our children. 

 

Unfortunately, it is exhausting to maintain that level of emotional intensity.  It can destroy your mental and physical health, pumping stress hormones into your body and causing damage to your heart and destroying parts of your brain.  So none of us can afford to be that way for very long. 

 

Of course, these attorneys know this, and so they carry on with these kinds of tactics as one of their primary approaches to destroying our defenses.  It is as if the attorney acts as a team of guerrilla warriors, shooting away at the troops  (us!) from invisible perches in the trees, taking out the enemy (us!) one by one. 

 

It is a war of attrition that not too many of us are equipped to handle, particularly since so many of us are taking care of our children, trying to protect them and ourselves from the damage of a high conflict divorce. 

 

I am currently dealing with this in a legal matter I am involved in right now. 

 

I am supposed to obtain medical information in regard to one of my children. 

 

At first the opposing attorney said that I should be given this information--that indeed I had a right to it. 

 

Yet, when I formally asked for the medical information, he refused to provide it acting like to was the most intrusive demand ever made of him. 

 

When I finally obtained authorizations from the court to obtain the medical information, this attorney then sent me a series of medical release documents that were clearly defective and unusable. 

 

When I confronted him, he told me that I was wrong and that the documents were perfectly fine.  He told me repeatedly that he had used the documents on many occasions and that they had always led to successful results. 

 

He was clearly lying. 

 

Sorting all of this out and explaining the problems and how I recommended solving them took hours of my time as I formulated letters and emails that I felt would appear well before the court should I eventually have to submit a complaint about what was going on. 

 

After insisting that I deserved to receive the medical information, then moving on to provide me with flawed releases, this attorney then progressed to denying I had a legal right to see the medical information after all. 

 

I'm like, wait a minute, didn't you just say several times last week that I could see that information? 

 

What happened? 

 

Thus, in the course of trying to collect the medical information I needed to prepare for court I got jerked around in so many different directions, it was hard to know where I was. 

 

Still, no sooner have I gotten used to the discussion on how I don't have a right to the information, the attorney switched to how he now thinks I do have the right and adds to this new insight additional vicious and nasty commentary on how he believes that I am a person of poor character who is abusing the legal system. 

 

People like you and me, faced with this kind of vicious abuse respond with anger and indignation--how dare this immoral attorney accuse us in this way.  The injustice of it all, the wrongdoing, just wrenches us apart.  The lies are frustrating and outrageous, the obvious adopting and rejecting moral standards and court rules at a whim, seems to be more than we can stand. 

 

It is only after years of being in this environment that litigants in high conflict divorces come to understand that such behavior is little more than a high stakes performance.  It is meaningless. 

 

Nothing the attorney has to say matters. 

 

The only reason the attorney indulges in this behavior is to get you all worked up, to get you all rattled, to wear you out emotionally and physically, so that you are defeated well before you set  foot in the courtroom for trial! 

 

In these situations, I've heard friends say, "Well, the opposing attorney believes that I do not have that legal right." 

 

They don't want to hear the truth, which is, the opposing attorney doesn't believe a Goddamn thing.  The attorney only believes what is convenient for him at the moment. 

 

If it is convenient for him to shift ground a second later, he will quickly shift. 

 

Nothing an attorney ever has to say is grounded in conviction; it is simply grounded upon what suits him at the time.  

 

This means that you should never let yourself get into a state simply because an attorney has made a provocative remark.  If there is anything you need to learn as a litigant in a high conflict divorce, it is to have a very, very thick skin. 

 

You need to listen to the most ridiculous, twisted, stupid, convoluted statements, learn how to screen out your perfectly understandable emotional response of outrage, and find a way to hit back in an intelligent way that has impact without harming yourself. 

 

Don't allow these idiot attorneys to press your hot buttons or trigger a trauma response.  Learn to respond dispassionately and with reason.  Don't get angry. Get even, by continuing to launch a defense that shuts the opposing attorney down at every turn.

There will continue to be times when the opposing attorney will actually sucker you again or get under your skin, but don't get down on yourself about that.  It only goes to prove that you continue to be human whereas the opposing attorney turned into stone a long time ago.

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