No ill will but you could be making your sick friends feel worse

“Oh, you’ve just had your thyroid removed? I’m so glad you’re feeling better.”

Venturing out just days post-op, I hightailed it to my favourite almond-chai haunt and soon found myself in a pleasant chat with an old acquaintance.

She continued: “My sister had her thyroid out. She used to be absolutely tiny, but now she’s huge.”

Think before you blab.Credit:

Well, that took a turn, didn’t it? Indeed, but not an unexpected one. The latest stats reveal that we make up almost 50 per cent of the Australian population, but despite being virtually surrounded by sickies like me, the healthy among us seem to lose all sense of decorum when confronted with the task of talking about it. So, if you’re willing, I’ll take you through three of the ways this can manifest, and we’ll see if we can’t sort this out together.

OK, let’s dive in with the spiciest group – the one our friend from above fits comfortably into – The Accidental Fear Monger.

I’m talking about the bizarre and seemingly uncontrollable human impulse to volunteer examples of potentially adverse outcomes when speaking with the pregnant, the newly diagnosed or presently suffering. To be clear, these are distinct categories – pregnancy is not a pathology. It is, however, an immense physiological undertaking, and one of the strongest magnets for these mystifying remarks.

My pregnancy was marred with sickness, but my growing belly worked as a lure for detailed retellings of traumatising births and stories of distant relatives who had experienced pregnancy loss. Similarly, it’s not uncommon for cancer patients to be told about someone’s great-uncle who died from the same cancer, followed by an aside such as: “Well at least you don’t have to worry about washing your hair!”

Here’s the thing, people experiencing pregnancy or serious illness have already imagined the worst outcomes, believe me. They don’t need anyone confirming their worst fears or suggesting new ones.

This brings me to category two: The Backhanded Supporter.

Perhaps you’ve heard of “negging”, the term problematically popularised by Neil Strauss in his utterly cursed book about pick-up artist culture, The Game. It involves veiling something negative with a thin layer of praise to wobble someone’s confidence, in the hope it will lower their dating standards. Well, allow me to introduce you to the little-known yet astoundingly common phenomenon that I will term “medical negging”.

This one tends to crop up when the person has lost weight. And while it infuriates me that our culture simply can’t let go of the idea that we can accurately assess someone’s health simply by looking at them, it can be an innocent enough mistake.

But, if upon learning that weight loss was an unintended side effect of significant sickness, you come out with, “Well, at least the chemo made you lose weight!” … oof, I’m not sure I can help you.

Finally, our last category is the Reality Denier.

Here, I’m of course talking about toxic positivity. You know those catch-ups where the eyes glaze over at any mention of struggle or sickness? Predictably the friend will come out with something to the effect of, “buck up, it’s not so bad” or – my personal favourite – “just think positive”.

And sure, gratitude can be life-changing, confidence-building has its place, and acceptance is a beautiful thing, but so is anger. So is grief. And so is fear. Like joy, these stickier feelings are all a part of the everyday experience of being chronically ill, and wishing them away doesn’t change that.

In her book Emotional Agility, Susan David – a psychologist from Harvard Medical School – highlights our culture’s tendency to suppress negative emotions in place of gratitude or forced positivity. She argues this often leads to a feeling of erasure and the invalidation of our true reality.

I know I feel more connected to those around me who aren’t afraid to call the hairy stuff hairy and let the tears flow when they may. These are the same people whose company I reliably leave with stomach cramps from laughing too hard.

OK, we’ve been on quite a journey together, and if you’re left feeling a bit miffed at the suggestion that your well-meaning words might have landed somewhere closer to offensive, even when every inch of you intended the opposite, fair enough! It’s hard to talk about hard stuff, and we get that. I’m certainly not going to hold it against my friend at the cafe who put her foot in it. It may well be that she walked away thinking, “Why the bloody hell did I say that?” But if you can play a part in making a person who’s “going through it” feel less alone, that’s a pretty beautiful thing.

So, let’s go forth and feel it all. Let’s be glorious three-dimensional masters of human emotion and please, for god’s sake, let’s all promise to delete “positive vibes only” from our vocabularies and our lock screens.

Hannah Vanderheide is a freelance writer and actor.

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