Do your friends understand your hearing loss?
As opposed to: do your friends understand that you have hearing loss?
Even though your pals might know you use hearing aids or have a cochlear implant, whether they truly ‘get it’ is another issue. I thought after decades of communication with my friends and closest family members (such as the Hearing Husband), that they deeply understood my challenges. Occasionally, it becomes evident that they do not. Otherwise, why would they leave me behind in a conversation? Why are they not perfect communicators in every conversation?
Uh, because they’re human and possibly imperfect? Perhaps because they don’t have hearing loss themselves?
Without the lived experience of a disability, the best we can expect from our friends is that they anticipate and adapt to what we need. But the organic flow of conversation, especially when there are more than two people involved, means there will be moments when others are faced away from us, resulting in speech we don’t understand and requiring the occasional pardon me, what did you say.
It’s not always easy to know how a person with hearing loss is coping. In addition to irritating background noise and poor lighting, they might be tired which impacts their ability to understand speech. The best of us will check in to see how our friend is doing.
In the chapter Friends Will Stay, Friends Will Go of our book Hear & Beyond: Live Skillfully with Hearing Loss, Shari Eberts and I wrote the following:
Just because your friends are nice people doesn’t mean they can handle your communication needs. One friend might be soft spoken, and despite your requests to speak up, she finds it difficult and feels like she is yelling. Stepping outside the comfort zone of lifelong behavior is not easy for most people.
The best friends in Gael’s life became and remain those who can deal with her constant requests for repeats and need to sit in the middle. Any friend who signs on for the long haul is a person who she can understand and who can understand her. Her friends accept her hearing loss as part of their communication landscape.
After saying something, one friend would immediately repeat it, just to avoid hearing Gael say pardon yet again. It made Gael laugh but also secretly irked her because it reminded her how much she asked people to repeat themselves in those pre-hearing aid days. When she got new hearing aids, she realized that her friends speak more loudly to her than to other people. She’s still not quite comfortable asking people to lower their voices – because they are bellowing to help her.
Whether hearing loss occurred before or after the start of a friendship may be a factor in how well the friendship thrives. When Shari first started telling her friends about her hearing loss, most of them had no real reaction. They didn’t care, which is nice, but they also didn’t do much to help her hear. Perhaps they tried for a few minutes and then fell back into their old speaking patterns.
Coaching your friends on communication best practices may change some of their behavior, but it may not permanently alter how they speak, especially as they will use their “natural” voice when they talk to other people. When you’ve been friends with someone for a long time, you have a history that’s not going to fall to pieces because of hearing loss. But if a communication partner cannot regularly make the needed changes, sadly, the friendship is likely to wane.
It helps to remember that hearing loss is our issue. Our friends have their own issues, which we (hopefully) respect and accommodate.
