the friends you need to let go...

Recently I blogged about starting a therapy for my Lupus called EMDR. The basis is that trauma lives in the physical body, not the mind. Well, that knowledge is like new to me and I immediately related it to Lupus. Stress and trauma are huge triggers for auto immune disorders so I quickly thought that this could be the ticket for me to a better grip on my condition. And I was correct. But it took a detour I never saw coming!
 EMDR is giving me amazing results. It is not easy to go through and that tells me that it is real. If it was easy then I think it wouldn't be real. To cover major ground quickly here I thought it was most important to be treated for some rather bad situation trauma suffered in 2008 while living in Honolulu. But from the first intro session my therapist grasped that we needed to go waaayyyyyy back in my life. And we did.

So let us go to the friends we have. I have had many friends that it was actually not a friendship at all. It was just a knowing them. I thought it was friendship just because I did know them. But, now I have reclassified that after learning what a friendship actually entails. Most of the people I knew in my life just were not stacking up to be my friends.
My Friendships are now based from the timeline of beginning EMDR therapy. The friends I have now all occurred during this new treatment--which is on going--and the old people I knew are being re looked at. The people in my life I now call my friends all have similar characteristics about them that the old known people seem to be lacking. I got it figured out now that I am 60 freak'n years old! So great for me, but what about you?
If you have Lupus you are dealing with so much. Constant pain is one that really sucks. Living in a body that is not the one you use to know and that you seem to not be in control of is alarming and scary. So you want and truly need the people in your life to be your friends.
Now you may have already weeded out a few friends; the ones that could care less about your illness and tell you that you're faking it. Yeah, well OK. They are not friends. Recognizing those not so true friends usually occurs before the actual SLE Lupus diagnosis, when you are scared and sick and reaching out and trying to understand just what is going wrong with your body. But you are not able to dump them. You just suck down their comments and go on. Am I right?
And that is fine. You have a lot going on. Let's not fret over it. But, consider this. If you think of a conversation or an event that you had with a friend and it gives you a physical pain in your chest or body...? that is trauma.
My example is a known friend that I have that never lets me have it. By this I mean she asks how I am, knowing I am stricken with Lupus, and I tell her maybe I am like this way or that and she then says that "oh, we all feel that way it is just our age". Hymph. I make a statement and she then takes my feelings and says they are not true. If I say something I am going through due to my Fibromyalgia she claims that everyone has that problem. She never lets me say "oh I feel this due to my illness.." she just strips it away and I end up feeling like I was trapped into a conversation that is really unimportant to her even though she asked me how I was. And she does it every time! So why am I doing this?
Now I say" It is complicated" and leave it at that. Most people really do not want to know how you really are they are just practicing having a conversation with you and a real friend will actually stop and listen.
Now you have to figure out your 'friends'. You are worth having real friends in your life if you are dealing with Lupus. And that trauma pain I spoke of? Well, in my EMDR therapy I made it go away. Yep! I can think of those people or events in my life and I do not feel that pain in my body! It has been released. Cool yeah?
I now have the tools to recognise and have better friends and have better support for myself.