When Support Turns Conditional: What I Learned About Friendship During Trauma

When I went through something very intense not so long ago, I was of course shaken by it. But… what surprised me even more was the people around me.

I found that friends are often only briefly available when something like that happens. I wondered at the time: are they really friends?

There were also people who (implicitly) offered “help”, but not without a kind of “price” attached…
One man, for example, helped me with a few practical things in the first days after it happened, but quite quickly crossed personal boundaries.

Here I want to talk about Martha.
She was also someone who initially seemed helpful. In the end, that may not have been the case.

I met Martha at one of Yuki’s parties. That first encounter was quite characteristic. I had put on perfume (something I really enjoy — for me it completes an outfit). Martha noticed it. (Which, of course, is exactly what perfume is meant to do.)  “Are you wearing perfume?” she asked with visible disgust and a raised voice, in a tone that seemed to say: you are doing something very wrong.

She immediately put the items she had brought for the party — it was probably a potluck — back into her large linen tote bag.  “Then I’m leaving,” she said, quite ostentatiously.  I didn’t understand what was happening.  “I forgot to tell you that Martha is allergic to perfume,” Yuki explained, somewhat embarrassed. Yuki had informed everyone in the group chat, but I didn’t have WhatsApp at the time. So I had never seen the message. No problem, I had only sprayed the perfume on my clothes (not on my skin or hair), so I could easily go home and change. I lived nearby.

After the party, when the other guests had left, Martha and I helped Yuki with the enormous pile of dishes and cleaning up the kitchen. Martha confided in me that she was actually not allergic to perfume, but that she preferred not to be exposed to it because she believed it could disrupt your hormonal system.  That’s how we ended up talking about various topics that are often considered controversial. And we discovered that on a number of those subjects, we actually thought quite similarly.

Months later, out of the blue, Martha invited me for a walk in the park. And some time later, we met in a nearby café. In both cases, the meetings turned into conversations lasting several hours.  Because when you think slightly differently from many people around you, it can feel good to finally share that with someone who seems to be on a similar wavelength. 

But… there were also differences in perspective.  According to Martha, that was because I had not yet reached her level of understanding: “You just don’t see it yet.” And according to me, I simply saw things differently. But I didn’t really mind. I had a good time during those meetings. Apart from that, I had little contact with Martha.

Until that intense event happened…

I felt a strong need to talk about what I had experienced and what I was going through. While my friends quickly started looking for reasons or excuses to end the phone calls, Martha did listen.  I found her insights sharp and her advice relevant. So we started talking more often. Mostly via messaging apps, but we also met more frequently in person.

Gradually, the topic shifted from my own process of dealing with what had happened to what Martha called “geopolitics”.  Martha’s messages usually consisted of links to X (Twitter). At first, all I could really respond with was “interesting”. The topics were so controversial and so far outside my frame of reference that I simply didn’t know how else to respond.

After several weeks of receiving multiple links a day, I started to notice patterns in the information. It took time and effort, but because Martha had been there for me, I felt I should also be there for her. Slowly, I began forming my own opinion about the Twitter posts she shared, and I started expressing it as well.

However, I noticed this increasingly irritated her. One time, when I was visiting her, I asked her why she thought a particular controversial topic was the way she believed it to be. I received a very aggressive response, which did not answer my question, but instead:

“Just look at you, and your hair as well!”

I was shocked. Later I would come to recognise this as status restoration. I had actually wanted to ask, “What’s wrong with my hair?”, but I thought Martha might not be handling the wine very well, so I tried to soften the situation by saying:  “No, sorry, that was a misunderstanding, I now understand why you see it that way” .

Later, whenever I replied to her messages with something like “I see it differently”, I would again receive similarly aggressive responses. After a while, I started introducing my opinion — when it differed from hers — with phrases like: “You’re most likely right, but at first glance I think…” and I would end with: “…but that’s probably because I don’t know as much about this as you do” .
Only in that form did there seem to be room for disagreement.

Not only did Martha become increasingly irritated by my responses, she also became gradually discouraged in her drive to “enlighten” me: after all, I still “didn’t see it” the way she did. It was during that phase of my trauma processing that I began experiencing severe anxiety symptoms. And the increasingly submissive way I had to phrase my responses started to feel constricting. I suggested that it might be better to put the topic of “geopolitics” to rest for a while. Apparently we didn’t see eye to eye on that, and as far as I was concerned, that was fine.

Martha responded in a very “open-minded” way: of course, that was completely fine. After that, I hardly heard from her again.

Where I had initially assumed Martha was there for me without conditions, it turned out that there may have been some. During my period of trauma processing, I felt vulnerable and therefore small.
In hindsight, I wonder whether there was only space for me as long as I stayed small — allowing her to feel larger in comparison.

Is this something you recognise? How have you dealt with situations like that? I would be very curious to hear.
Featured in SATURDAYS with Diana "Are Friends Still Really Friends?" Read the issue → Photo: Sou Jest