LIVING IN DENIAL

Fr Jim Cogley

Living in Denial is a very lonely place where there is a population of only one. It is the place of isolation, where, as the word suggests, I Don’t Even Know I Am Lying, either to myself or to those around me. It is a strongly defended space of not wanting to see, to know or to feel the reality of emotional pain. Usually before I am ready to allow anyone to break through the castle walls of my defenses, I will have had to suffer quite a lot and be at the place of deep awareness knowing that my life is a total mess and its all of my own making.

Denial creates the illusion of being in charge in so far as I can block out the memory of a painful event or misappropriate behavior and send it to the unconscious. However, I cannot block emotional energy and that will continue to influence how I think, feel, behave and react. It will continue to undermine the quality of my life to the point where I no longer have a life but only an existence. The emotional weight of repressed emotion is carried in the body and this may be expressing what I am not saying when it becomes unwell. Because it takes energy to keep energy repressed, I will feel depleted, stressed, anxious, perhaps depressed and likely have sleep difficulties.

In a time of trauma Denial can protect us from the truth but it cannot change the truth. It can become not just a way of life but a way of blocking out life. My father dies suddenly when I was still a child. I was too young to process what had happened so I went into denial for many years and it was only as a young adult that I revisited that time in my life and consciously let go of my dad. Fo all of us denial provides a temporary coping mechanism when an emotional onslaught is too overwhelming to handle. Many children from a very young age have to develop this in order to survive a dysfunctional home situation. The problem is that something that served us well in early life becomes a major problem when we become adults because we continue to use it to avoid our emotions.

I would have a concern that in today’s world very little negative emotions are being transformed. The reason for this is because our mobile phone is ever present and whenever there is even a hint of emotional discomfort this is sure to be our first port of call. This is compounded by the fact that it is so socially acceptable and used in the same way by everyone. So in waiting rooms, buses, trains very few will engage in any kind of meaningful conversation, everyone will be glued to their phone. Slowly the art of normal conversation is being eroded before our eyes and is now becoming glaringly obvious in third level colleges where vast number of students are suffering from social phobia and unable to engage with their fellow students.

Denial is endemic and practiced in a myriad of ways, most of which we are unaware of. Some of the more common ones are are:  Addictions, social media, TV busyness, sport, romance, religion, success, people pleasing, aggression, minding, talking, silence, shopping, money, appearance, exercise, health, travel, personal opinions, needing to be right, blaming, victimhood. The reality is that denial is endemic and practiced by the masses of which we are a part. It is important to become aware of where we practice it and how it can play a huge role in our lives.

Living in denial means we bury issues alive and in doing so we deny a part of ourselves. It is our past that continues to influence our present and in all sorts of ways. We over-react to something said or done in a manner that is disproportionate. Memories that we thought we had firmly locked away can come flooding back. An issue that we thought we had buried for many years can suddenly resurrect itself with the realization that what we thought was well and truly dead is very much alive. Even our ability to take honest feedback can be so coloured by the past that all we can hear is not feedback but criticism. The bottom line is that what we refuse to face grows stronger in the shadows.