The mechanism of denial

Whenever I socialize, if I happen to meet people who know what is going on with me, I get asked the same questions. Are you sure of what you remembered? No, I am not, I still doubt myself. Then how, why…? I deny the truth  - it’s how the mechanism of the denial works. It allows me to survive this – it has been at work for 20+ years, I can’t expect it to disintegrate in the matter of a few months. Don’t you think it’s a bad idea to go there and try to find out the truth? Why not leave it alone? Because it keeps running my life – no matter how hard I try. Only by facing it can I turn into myself.

I’ve been asked this question of “being sure” so many times, that I decided to explain the mechanism of denial and how it works. Freud was the first to coin the term by explaining it the rejection of the fact that is too uncomfortable to accept. The denial in child sexual abuse is something that is powerfully enforced – by the victim, by the perpetrator, and by the society – ESPECIALLY in incest cases. It is one thing when a child is being abused by an outsider – the child can run home for shelter and security. It is a completely different thing when a child is abused by the parent – there is nowhere to run for safety – the house is not safe, the closest person to the child is not safe. Yet the child loves this person and wants to be with him/her on a daily basis, or HAS to be with him/her. The child’s value system is being turned upside down, and the child, to function, to grow, to learn, and to enjoy life, simply denies the fact that any abuse ever happened. To get by. Because it is so unacceptable to the child, and because the perpetrator reinforces the message of “nothing happened”, the truth takes on a form of a story, a fantasy, a bad dream. I must have imagined it, the child thinks. It never happened, I made it all up. If the child happens to tell an adult, the universal reaction to this is also denial – no, it couldn’t be! Are you sure you are not making this up? This only reinforces the message again. The child might be confused as to what is true and what isn’t, but soon accepts that “nothing happened”. The logical becomes illogical, and vice versa. Denial is helpful to the child – it reduces the anxiety by the unconscious exclusion of the disturbing thoughts and feelings – in the case of incest, the anxiety caused by the opposite feelings of shame and pleasure, pain and closeness, love and hate, etc. Denial also allows the child to not be with what happened, to push it away, until the child is ready to face what it really was, which in my case took 20+ years. Unfortunately, if the abuse happens often, denial becomes a habit and, later, a way of life for the adult. To be able to break through the denial, one must overcome years of training and conditioning, and withstand her/his own internal denial system – the one that kept life in place, in order to survive.

To answer the second question I am being asked – why? Why go there? Why not just live on and think of happy things? Because it takes mental and physical energy to keep the denied experience in check, to keep it pushed way down, and because it takes energy to keep making decision based on the illogical thinking pattern that contradicts the logical. And because one who is in denial is essentially stuck at the level at which the child decided to deny – in my case, that was 5 years old. In other people’s cases it might be 4, 8, 10, any age. That means, fully functional adults are making their life decisions from the point of view of a child, stuck in the fantasy that is perceived as real, living in the reality that is not being perceived as true. I chose to break the pattern to see what my life really, is, what my family is really made of, who I truly am – and even though it hurts, I have never felt freer in my entire life. I am me, for the first time since I was 5. 

Comments

[RobertinSeattle]

For the deniers, my favorite line: Denial is NOT a river in Egypt!