I had a very interesting discovery the other day.
I had a friend make a joke on one of my posts that suggested I might have a diagnosis other than fibromyalgia. She’s suggested this particular diagnosis ad nauseam in the past. I didn’t take it well. I was upset and antsy and, after some prompting from another friend, I politely set a boundary of can we please not with this topic, and how it makes me feel.
And she apologised. She apologised, explained she had been trying to make a joke about how she could empathise with my experiences because she has the other diagnosis, and the injury I had experienced is one she could imagine herself doing. Then she apologised for missing the mark with the joke. And none of it was ‘I’m sorry you feel that way’ or anything like that, it was a true and genuine apology, taking responsibility for what she said and how that made me feel.
It was freeing in a way I cannot put into words. Suddenly I wasn’t offended by the joke, and I could feel her care and consideration for me. It increased my love and respect for her a thousandfold.
This is totally different to the friend I lost. During my diagnosis process for both fibromyalgia and trigeminal neuralgia, when the doctor and I were both pretty sure what I had but were doing the formalities, she would send me messages with all sorts of different things I could have. Constantly. I rarely mentioned any of my symptoms past ‘ow’. She never once asked about them. And she was saying ‘oh what about this? and this? you could have this!’ I repeatedly told her we were pretty confident it was fibromyalgia (or trigeminal neuralgia) and it felt like she was dismissing my knowledge and my doctor’s knowledge of the situation.
She never apologised. She would only say ‘I just don’t want you to have x because it’s chronic and it’s awful’. That is not a place of care. That is a place of control. Which pretty much summed up our whole relationship.
Because of my long history of being abused (right from infancy through to this latest ‘friend’), I have difficulty with identifying when people come from a place of care and love. It’s often only once I begin to establish a boundary, and they accept it and apologise for stepping on it that I can tell the difference.
It has started healing a little part of me that was very raw.
Walk to Wellness 