A Doctorate In Denial

The best description I know about explaining the commonly used emotional coping mechanism called Denial is to break the word down. This acronym sums up the true meaning of this word beautifully and accurately in my experience.

DENIAL = Didn't Even No It's A Lie.

When someone is deep in the state of denial, they unaware they are living with a lie to themselves. They are emotionally blind to the fact that they are dishonouring their hearts truth.

People in the depths of denial are often aware they are unhappy and that something is not right ... but have not yet mastered the level of Emotional Fitness required to look at oneself with eyes of the heart, to hear themselves with the ears of their heart and to speak to themselves in the language of the heart, which is quite simply, the language of love. The skill of insight, just means the courage to be willing to learn how to look lovingly and gently inward and take emotional responsibility for our own life. For if we don't learn this skill ... how to go within .... quite frankly emotionally we will go without, and live in a state of emotional malnourishment.

These three monkeys can represent various meanings ascribed to the hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil proverb. They can either be associated with reminding us to be of good mind, speech and action mastering Emotional Fitness which is the act of refusing to allow fear into our lives. However, in the western world the phrase is often used to refer to those who deal with impropriety by looking the other way, refusing to acknowledge truth, or choosing ignorance and fear as a lifestyle.

Denial.... Aint just a river in Egypt!

Those who live in a state of denial are sometimes accused of being dishonest, bad or evil people. I prefer to remember the word evil is simply the word live spelled backwards. I find people lives move forward when they can focus on being as loving as they are able firstly toward themselves, and then it dominos out to those they are in relationship with. Life goes backwards when we focus on our fears. So when we can be honest enough to face our fears, we work our hearts muscles and our denial (often labelled as evil), like burning off physical fat, is transformed into love, truth and strength.

Those currently living deep in the depths of denial are not weak, immoral or bad people. They are simply emotionally unfit and uneducated and are doing their best to cope with not coping. The reason some people don't cope well in life, is often due to a lack of elders in their formative years to model and set an example of how to live a life of emotional responsibility, honesty, self love and maturity.

A Doctorate is an academic degree or professional degree that in most countries represents the highest level of formal study or research. I have been told by many international clinical leaders who have evaluated and endorsed my Emotional Fitness program, and by my own therapist ... that I have earned my Doctorate in Denial, and also my Masters in Self Sabotage. Having studied extensively and rigoursly at the University of Life.

My childhood as you are probably aware by now, like many people's, consisted of domestic violence, alcohol misuse and nine years of consistent sexual abuse by two male elders. This was then followed by nineteen years of my own self inflicted drug and alcohol addiction up until I hit age 33. Now I have reached the ripe old age of 47, I am proud to share that I have been clean and sober for just over 14 years. However day by day in order to stay clean, sober and as sane as I am able, I have had to face more and more of myself. My fears that fed my denial and protected me, helping me cope with not coping... had to be replaced with new life skills that focused on self respect and self love. It has felt like disinfectant on a wound at times and been painful as my heart has healed.

The hardest issues for a person who has been living in denial to face are those that include love, support and choice. They are the most confronting challenges to master.

In order to master and feel worthy of a wonderful life, the individual who has lived in denial needs to emotionally exercise, one day at a time, to the best of their ability the act of honesty. Self honesty, I believe is a muscle in the heart that needs to be worked daily. It is not an overnight job. It is a process. Increasing Emotional Fitness takes time, like improving physical fitness does.

It is always easy to see someone else in denial. Other people's marriages, relationships, destructive behaviours, parenting or career issues are as clear as day to us on the outside. We can see the solutions staring us in the face, and often wonder why they can't. But when you are immersed in denial, there is always a reason you are unable to see, and it always comes back to fear.

Denial, some of us grow to believe, is a wise way to protect our hearts from pain. Like a tortise or a snail has a shell providing them with a place to retreat when under attack. Our denial helps us feel safer and more protected. Those who live deeply in their denial as I did for many years usually have experienced a time in their past when they had no protection like the snail or tortise sticking their necks out way past the protection of their shell, and they were wounded ... severely. So the shell of denial around the heart is hard to surrender, all at once. We need safety and support before we can even contemplate exposing our heart again. Some people who never find this support, sadly never experience heartfelt love, and their beautiful hearts stay hidden away from themselves and others their whole lifetime.

It has been said many times that ignorance is bliss. You don't know what you don't know, when you don't know it. I honestly believed that happy marriages were nonexistent, that all men were bastards, that all women hated each other ... and that I was unworthy and quite frankly a virus and a burden to anyone that had to put up with me. I honestly believed this about myself and this world. 'The common denominator with all of these beliefs is a lack of love and a focus on fear and emotional malnourishment.

I did not know anyone in a happy marriage for the first three decades of my life. Honestly. I was enraged by what two male elders had done to me sexually, emotionally and physically when I was a little girl and I was deeply upset that my female elders had looked the other way or blamed me for being a difficult child, when it took place. I believed that it was because I didn't matter, that I was a nuisance, clumsy scatterbrain and someone to be tolerated. My shell of denial grew so thickly over my heart as I grew from child to young woman, like an obese child that is fed junk food. Under my shell were many thick layers of fatty fear that over the years kept getting thicker blocking off my heart from love.

To shed my denial was a process, and still is these days. I am a lot fitter and leaner emotionally but don't fool myself by denying that I could never go back. Going responsible for my emotional diet each day is now a lifestyle choice. Ensuring I don't seek out quick emotional fixes, like sugary and fatty fast food ... helps me maintain my emotional health and wellbeing.

I can pick up denial like picking up a drink or a drug when I am emotionally out of balance and let myself get too hungry, angry, lonely or tired, I retreat back into my shell and hide my heart from the world. So I need to remain emotionally responsible for my choices, relationships and emotional sobriety, every day, one day at a time.

As each year has passed and I look back at the year before. I am always astounded at how much I didn't know and how much there is to learn about myself and this world. So I now am committed to remaining teachable so that as they years continue to pass, that I get stronger and fitter at self honesty and emotional responsibility. Maybe eventually I will become a Grand Woman like beautiful Barb my hearts mother, and a Grand Mother like her mother Mary when I grow up.

In psychiatric terms, denial is often explained as a defense mechanism that denies painful thoughts. I use many different word pictures to help explain invisible emotions. Another visual to consider is that denial can also act like a tourniquet for a snake bite or firm bandaging for a deep cut. A bandage is a short term solution for a physical trauma until professional help arrives. Emotional denial works the same way. It is a way to emotionally immobilize a section of the heart so that the person does not do irreparable damage. But the problem is .... If professional support never arrives, the person's heart remains immobilized for the rest of their days.

Suffering a heart trauma is one thing. It is like the poison from a snake bite entering the blood system. Covering it and using a tourniquet to restrict the toxicity is wise short term. However if the entry wound also gets infected with puss and is never cleaned out, that becomes another problem in itself.

If the toxic emotional experience is never dealt with, the denial or the avoidance of the issue becomes like the infection. The person then has two issues to deal with down the track. One is the toxic experience, the second the infection due to the denial.

I notice that children who are traumatised in formative years, that soon after the event, are supported, believed and loved through the horrific ordeal, heal very well from the past trauma. But those who are not believed and ignored then have two issues to deal with later in life. One is the actual event, and the second the infectious denial to their self worth and their perceived value to others when rationalizing why they were neglected.

I often say drugs and alcohol did get me plastered and keep me blind, thank God, for many years, they truly sedated the pain of childhood trauma. I lived in adult years in a consistent state of dissatisfaction because nothing made me feel better at a heart level. When my sons were born I realized I was so fearful of their love and their purity and felt emotionally incompetent to be a worthy mother to them. They were the only reason I chose to get clean and sober. These days I choose it for myself, but back in 1995, I hated me, but loved them, and if it wasn't for them I would be dead today of that I am certain.

When I am running workshops for psychology interns who are looking to work in the field of trauma and addiction, I emphasise how drugs and alcohol keep a lot of people alive for a long time when they have no confidence to try other types of support. Yes tragically many, many die whilst on pause abusing substances, waiting for a time that feels safe to ask for help. Ironically asking for help is the scariest thing for many people. Often those elders who were assigned to help us out in childhood, turned the other way, not because they were bad people, but because denial is all they knew too. So many of us have no experience in asking for help being a constructive experience. For many it is just too painful to reach out and be re-abused for not being able to pick up your socks and soldier on.

Denial is not something one is consciously aware of. We cannot see our own denial, like a fish in a goldfish bowl cannot see the water they are in, or a snail and a tortise never get a birds eye view of how big their shell actually is. There is no other point of reference. We are often blind to our denial until after the event when we have climbed out of it.

Looking back at past lovers, jobs, destructive habits, body image issues and relationships we often wonder how we put up with it, how we did it to ourselves or saw anything attractive in that person, place or habit. Questions we are befuddled by when we reflect on past self destructive and situations that deny our truth, often sound something like:

Who was that person, was that really me?
I don't know what I was thinking back then?
I lost myself!
I gave my power away.
How could I have ever have been attracted to that person, they repulse me now?

Those deep in denial deserve respect like anyone else. Kicking their emotional crutches out from under them or ripping their shells off of their tender hearts flesh, without offering alternative support is simply cruel in my view.

Often parents of children who disclose childhood trauma in adult years resort to calling their child a liar; this is common and happens with many of my clients. This is the only coping mechanism the parent has at hand, to deny, deny, deny. The parent actually believes the child is lying, that is the tragedy. They will call the child melodramatic and minimize events, or may be so deep in their own denial that even though the parents heart is full of thunder, keeping up appearances and their ego intact, is their only form of coping.

If the caregivers or parents were able to emotionally support the child they would have done so years ago. So often they disown the child, character assassinate them and deny any emotional responsibility for their child's pain. The good news is, the child can find heart family and heal this wound in time.

When people stay in violent relationships it is often because they have normalized violence in some way. Often violence, denial and love have been laced up together somewhere in their past. So leaving violence also means leaving their source of love. I recall often being told after a beating that I was loved. And so when I was enduring the beating, I would disconnect from my physical body and reassure myself that when all of this was over, I would get the carrot at the end of it all, I would be told I was loved. So I assumed that violence was like the brussel sprouts of life. It was good for me but horrible to digest. Often when I was being beaten I was being told it was good for me, and it was hurting them more than me. Also the word violence was called discipline and normalized, and I was told I was a difficult child that deserved it. A child does not dare question their care givers if they are abusive until much, much later in life, if at all.

I remember a journalist who wrote a story about my first book back in 2001 in the Courier Mail in Brisbane. He was a lovely man who wanted a full page feature and photo. He spent over five hours interviewing me and was keen to run the story. Two weeks passed after the interview and the story did not run. So I phoned him and asked him what was wrong, had he changed his mind?

"No Cynthia, we are waiting for Domestic Violence Week to run your feature, it is a powerful story, thank you so much for being so honest with me" the tone of gratitude was sincere in his voice.

"Domestic Violence week? Why would you run it then, my story is not about domestic violence, it is about recovery from addiction, I don't understand?" I was puzzled and annoyed at being misrepresented.

"My God Cynthia, have you read your story? Do you know what Domestic Violence is? You are a copy book survivor, you have lived through horrific domestic violence on so many levels, sexual, emotional and physical, do you not understand that? He was being gentle with me now and probably detected through my silence I honestly ... did not understand that. I was breaking through a huge chunk of denial as he spoke.

I remember a lump forming in my throat, and hot tears filling my eyes. Feeling this reality, really physically hurt my heart. My chest hurt. I could not swallow. I felt a betrayal, I felt the denial melting off of my heart, it was an unattractive truth that was hard to digest back then.

It has been through the gentle leadership of lovely people like this gentleman, my therapist, Barb, her mum Mary and husband King Trev, my wise and beautiful sons, and my darling husband Mr. Delicious ...that have helped me continue to shed my layers of fatty denial from my once blocked heart.

So those people that you know in unhappy relationships, living destructive lifestyles and stuck in a state of dishonesty that you can clearly see, but they cannot .... I beg of you be gentle, respectful and as patient as you can.

Shame, finger pointing and throwing verbal stones at their thick shell of denial just feeds their fears and makes them retreat deeper into their hiding place. People don't face their denial until they feel safe, supported and loved. To love those deep in the unattractive state of denial is in my view the purest definition of tough love. To love those who are tough to love.

Many visitors to my blog sites are letting me know that they are hungry to read more blogs other than those on the home page. If you are inexperienced with using blog sites please let me offer you some guidance. Whilst on the home page if you click on any of the headings below you will find many more blogs, or scroll down to the base of the homepage, if you would like to start reading sequentially, from my first blog, start in December 2009 and go forward month by month.

I am hitting the home stretch with my next book child and hope to have my first manuscript draft finished this month. Thank you all so much for your comments and support and for subscribing to my blog site, I am truly grateful, you are inspiring me and keeping me connected to the outside word from my little writing cave here in Bris Vegas.

My Word Vitamins for today on denial are written by Richard Bach and help me remember that as long as I am facing my fears, I am keeping those fatty deposits of denial out of my emotional diet, from clogging my now much fitter and healthier heart.

The worst lies are the lies we tell ourselves. We live in denial of what we do, even what we think. We do this because we're afraid.