How not to be helpful.
I hesitate to post this, and probably shouldn't. I'm not a counselor of anything other than "the law" and I always think lawyers who use that term in their letterheads are being pretentious. Having said that, the only thing lawyers really do is deal with people's problems, sometimes by creating problems for other people, so we do know something about it.
I've been in litigation for decades, and I think what that's taught me is that fighting sucks. People who like to fight, including lawyers who like that, also suck. Most people, including most lawyers, don't fit in that category, however.
Anyhow, with that caveat, I'm going to just put out some observational comments on how not to help people, and by that I mean people who are seeking our help as they have a close relationship. Some people deserve help, some don't, and a lot deserve a lot better help than that they get.
Before I get into that, however, the first thing I'd note is that if you've sought help from a whole bunch of people, and they all give you the same advice, maybe you are the problem. I've seen people who are flat out wrong with a legal problem ask a whole series of professionals, and then go down to their dog and cat, and get the same advance and be upset. They don't want real help, they want verification that their wacky view or bad plan is right. Sometimes they want verification for going after somebody they shouldn't.
Don't be that person.
Well, in offering advice, here goes.
1. Ridden like a rented mule.
Years ago, I had a friend who started off in the same line of work I did, but who temperamentally wasn't very suited for it. He'd married right out of law school, and he and his wife had a couple of children pretty quickly.
At some point, he began to burn out pretty badly. It was obvious. But his wife had achieved a status that she'd always hoped for in the process. Indeed, frankly, we'd been friend with both of them when they started out, but because he became quite financially successful, briefly, she reached the point of viewing us as being of inferior status and quit associating with us. He didn't.
Anyhow, you could see what was coming. He was having trouble, then a close friend of his died and it was life altering. He wanted out. Financially, he started declining.
I don't know what the conversations between the two of them were, but I have a suspicion. It was probably "you'll get over it" which amounted to "get back to work and stop complaining".
Well, ultimately he took up going to the gym a lot, she took up eating a lot, he met a woman at the gym. . . fill in blanks here. The couple split.
Now, I’m a Catholic and I don't advocate for divorce, and I'm not justifying what happened here, but the "shut up and plow on" response is really common from spouse to spouse. I've seen it from female to male and male to female. Men work themselves to deaths as their wives can't conceive of them doing anything else or simply won't allow them to.
Death may be the mildest of results here, actually. The failing party gets the blame, but often they were pushed into it. If somebody is saying "I can't go on", they probably really can't go on, and they need the other person's help.
Indeed, to add to this, I've witnessed the odd phenomenon of a spouse who was there for all of her friends and her siblings, but nearly totally unsympathetic to her husband under the situation described above, and not even all that sympathetic to at least one of her children's problems. There as well, the husband was sending out pretty clear signals that he was worn out beyond repair. He started to get sick, and the wife didn't even really react much to that. Eventually he had a bad fatigue related accident. The "I told you I needed help" wasn't well received.
2. Looking for a solution.
Closely related to this is this one, and this is a male/female thing.
More particularly, this is a male/female couple thing.
Something about the psychological makeup of women causes them to present problems to their spouses, boyfriends, and close friends that they don't want solved. This is so common that there are some well known jokes about it. Men don't work this way, usually. Actually women don't either, with men they know in a professional sense, even if they become friends with them, but then often coworker problem discussions are also of the "venting" nature.
If a man just wants to vent about a problem, but not have it solved, he'll just relate the problem to a stranger or somebody he barely knows, hence the classic stories about bartenders. When he tells a friend, however, or a spouse, he's looking for a solution.
Probably due to simple familiarity, the longer a couple has been together, the more likely a real solution is just going to be brushed off.
I've read lots of stories in legal journals about successful lawyers who entered some sort of deep crisis and then something horrible happened. Often a spouse is interviewed and gives a "there were no signs" teary comment.
Maybe, but I'll bet more often than not there were. Probably Joe Big Law had gone to his wife repeatedly with "look, honey, I need to do something here as I can't keep on like this", and the reply was "oh, you'll feel better. . . " at best. He didn't. Wife is distraught.
Well, she wasn't much help, quite often.
Offering no solution isn't being helpful. Flat out stating there's no solution definitely isn't helpful.
This also applies, however, to a lot of professional colleague advice.
A running story in the television series M*A*S*H was that, at the end of the day, the object of a field hospital was to get you patched up, and back into combat. That's pretty much the way professional assistance programs work as well. They're going to address your problems and get you back into the game.
Maybe the game is the problem.
3. It's all about me.
I've seen this repeatedly.
Somebody has a real problem, they go to their spouse or close friend, and that person quickly turns it into a discussion about their own, probably trivial problem. It works like this. "Honey, I've been shot, and I'm bleeding out", to which is replied, "Oh I know just what that's like, I stubbed my toe on a piece of furniture at work the other day, why I had told the janitor a thousand times that that needed to be moved, and I hate that furniture, it's Ikea and ".
No help at all.
I've actually had couples come with a legal problem where I have to shut one of them up as that person won't let the other talk about the problem. "The semi tractor exploded and. . . . " followed by sudden interruption and; "Bob is always so dramatic, it wasn't a big explosion, why just the other day I was at Walmart looking at the low, low prices and Mrs. Sepansky cut in front of me at the notion's isle, well I said to her. . . "
4. Lacking empathy
Most people are at least somewhat empathetic to others, but not all. Some simply lack it entirely.
There's been some studies that suggest this is genetic, but I somewhat doubt that. If it fully were, the genetic driver would be towards empathy. Indeed, an opposite speculation on this is that the world became more empathetic with the spread of Christianity, as Christians survived crises because of their empathy towards others, and others empathy towards them.
My guess is that this is a more developmental thing. Something's gone wrong. And I suspect that lacking empathy is something stepped into. Otherwise, quite frankly, the anti empathy genes would be weeded out, as people who lack empathy are hard to be around, while those who show it are sought out.
None of which takes away from the fact that some people just lack empathy.
In the excellent podcast Catholic Stuff You Should Know Fr. Michael O'Loughlin once observed that he'd remarked to a friend that he had his spouse to go to for sympathy. The friend laughed. He couldn't go to his spouse for sympathy. I suspect that's a lot more common than people suspect, and has a lot to do with the first item noted here. It's not so much that familiarity breeds contempt as the people have assumed certain roles at some time, and there's a lack of sympathy for not fully measuring up to them.
An aspect of this, I'd note, is that some people are so lacking in empathy towards somebody seeking help from them that the asker just stops. Indeed, the person lacking empathy not only lacks it, but is resentful about being asked for help. That actually punishes the person who needs the help.
That can really have a lasting negative impact. At best, the asker just learns that asking is pointless. But if the people are in a close relationship, that insertion of distance is corrosive. A person asking somebody they love for help, and not receiving any, and even getting dissed for it, will struggle with disappointment at a bare minimum, and that disappointment can turn to hate.
You see that all the time with married couples who once obviously loved each other, but their love turned to hate. There's a lot of things that can cause that, but one is a person seeking help and receiving instead rejection. The same comes up in parent child relationships. Children seek out legitimate help, but don't get it, learning that they apparently really weren't that important in the first place.
5. The wrong help.
Some seeking help seem to get it, but the help they get isn't real. Instead they receive validation, things akin to offering an alcoholic a drink.
This plays out widely in our modern society where some behaviors clearly recognized at one time as mental illnesses are now celebrated instead. People are asking for help in their actions, but instead are simply being told they're okay.
It's easy to undestand this, as its easy. Tough to give help is hard to receive help, and this tends to involve that.
6. The blender
Finally, I'd note, that a lot of these things get all blended together.
A person seeks help from the person who is supposed to be the closest person to them in the world, only to find that person has acclimated themselves to the role the help seeker occupies and doesn't want it changed. At the same time, the person sought out is providing help to family and friends at an epic charitable level. Back at home, however, it's "all about me".
Maybe that offers a clue to all of this.
7. The Wreck
8 Final thoughts.
I'll go back to what I noted at the start. You read all the time, or hear it directly, that after something horrible happens "he showed no signs". Often its from a close family member, probably a spouse. A big law partner takes his own life, a busy business person drinks too much, too often, and dies young, a beloved mother falls apart, a desperate "transgendered" person ends their own life.
There were no signs.
Oh, sure there were. People simply chose to ignore them.
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