A very angry friend once said to me “Is the word ‘encouragement’ even in your vocabulary?”
I was floored.
I thought that had been what I was doing but it wasn’t what she was hearing.
I reeled and took years to rally.
But rally I did and I eventually became grateful for the lesson she taught me.
She’d asked me to keep encouraging her so I spoke into her life with more directness than usual. To me, encouragement is about moving forward – to her it meant being buoyed up. To me this meant I would try to help her see budding issues and to know what to do and why it mattered in the bud stage but to her it felt like condemnation. To her, she was struggling to stay afloat and all I did was add weights to her ankles. Amazingly we stayed friends though I always felt we moved cautiously around each other just in case the other one might bite.
I was bemused by the difference between what I’d intended and how she felt about it – for years. The day the penny dropped was the day someone else tossed ME a well-intentioned iron ankle weight on a day that I was drowning.
I rang the first friend to apologise that day. Ten years late yet I couldn’t
have understood it any sooner.
I read recently that communication is not just a two way street. It is at least a four way street. Not only what each person says, but how each other hears. That anyone stays in relationship with anyone is somewhat of a miracle.