Denial and Other Escapes Part II

*Trigger warning: This article contains references to severe psychological harm against humans.

The Boil-Down: It is a natural but unrefined human tendency not to want to think about unpleasant realities. Extreme circumstances, such as a death or other event which would require us to face severe attachment grief or other loss, can prompt anyone's mind into involuntary denial. And people who have not made a conscious effort to heal their internal selves and regularly test ego strength can spend their entire lives unaware of even smaller painful realities--which will poison them and those around them. Narcissistic gravity can play a major role in various types of this grief avoidance.

The Details: The tasks of recovery via trauma therapy, especially moving into Phase III, are described well by marriage and family therapist, speaker and author Darlene Lancer. Her book articulates four tasks of moving beyond codependency: 1) building self-awareness; 2) healing the relationship with oneself; 3) healing relationships with others; and 4) expanding one's relationship to the world (Lancer, 2016). What I assert here is that spouses of alcoholics (for whom Lancer's work is chiefly designed) are only one subgroup of all the people in the universe who have chosen denial (or for whom denial has been chosen by more powerful narcissists in their networks). "Not me" is a powerful, popular and poisonous embryonic defense mechanism for individuals with undeveloped egos living in heavily narcissistic social subsystems. "That sort of bad thing does not happen to me...not in my family, not in my community, not in my church/fraternity/company/political party. My behavior does not function to hate, harm, or enable anyone."

One of the most egregious, obnoxious and/or obtuse examples of spoken denial are the words "I'm not racist," placed directly following blatantly racist or culturally ignorant commentary. "Those damn Mexicans are taking all the white people's jobs....I'm not racist, I'm just saying." In cases like those, the speaker could be residing anywhere on a narcissistic continuum, from severe sociopathy on one end, to just not wanting to rock the fraternal boat just left of center. The results are the same: the speaker does not grow her awareness of her own cultural ignorance, and the triangulated group of which she is a member maintains its unhealthy homeostasis.

In my family, it was customary to absolve ourselves of disordered eating at family gatherings with various tactics, including denial. "We didn't eat that badly. Cheesecake is good for you....fried rice is healthy, right?" We also used other tactics, such as the justification of minimization: "It's not that bad; we only eat this way at Thanksgiving." Justifying what amounted to chronic toxic eating prolonged the recovery of myself and other family members from binge eating, obesity, and bulimia. After the rest of us had proficiently recovered from such justified toxic thinking, my father held onto it and died nearly two hundred pounds overweight. What was he trying to avoid? Sufficiently grieving his violent sexual abuse victimization at age four, the tragic death of his young sister, coerced prepubescent incest with older cousins, and his lifetime of anxiety-ridden, narcissistic control over those of us in his intimate space. Avoidant humans are often avoiding more than just unpleasant stimuli as part of basic hedonism. It is common (and still unhealthy) to avoid self-awareness, and therefore traumatic grief.

Groups of disconnected men also use denial and justification tactics to stay unaware of their own emotions and the way their abuses of power hurt others--not just enemies, but those they claim to care about, like their own sons. Under the guise of the myth of raising their sons to be "tough"--a groupthink phenomenon born out of generation upon generation of unresolved locus of control shifts from familial and cultural trauma--triangulated groups of fathers convince themselves they are socializing their boys the right way. A growing mountain of clinical research argues otherwise; in the past fifty years little has changed in the disconnected way boys have been raised, and it's wreaking havoc on our society. It shows traditional masculine values as "inimical to good health" (Real, 2016). Indeed, many fathers express a fear that if they let their sons develop "soft" and in touch with their feelings, the sons might grow up to be gay (a homophobic falsehood unsupported by any sound research...ever).

Thousands of hours of interviewing convicted male sex offenders led me to unequivocally conclude that most such men (often, but not always, pedophiles) had fully convinced themselves they had done no harm to their victims--some as young as infants. Other inmates who had racked up countless casualties around them as a result of their narcissistic misogyny, found other defense mechanisms for their behavior. These included blaming the victim ("the bitch had it coming," or "if you don't want to be 'muscle-fucked' (sic), don't piss me off"). Others insisted they could not handle the high stress of their lives and had to cope by acting out; many asserted that they were enriching the lives of their victims by teaching them about sex or teaching them how to be strong and take pain. Any tactical combinations that result in the transfer of shame or responsibility from the powerful perp to the less powerful victim is projection (I'm not bad or to blame, you are) (Puskar, 2021). While most readers might readily identify this latter subgroup of denial and justifications as self-centered excrement, we may wonder about the former subgroup, the ones who want their boys to grow up to be strong, masculine men--fathers who also characteristically despise sex offenders and sex offenses.

But despite their heroic stance against rapists and pedophiles, rigidly masculine men have something frightening in common with sex offenders. What these emotionally disconnected fathers teach their sons leads to non-relational sexuality. That is, the boys will almost invariably grow up to regard females not as equals, but as subjects to be manipulated, as conquests to be won. They will not emotionally connect with their feminine counterparts and will therefore not respect or value their humanity. This is because such men are not in touch with themselves, not even aware of their own vulnerable emotions, not "able" (their senses of self are too weak and undeveloped due to their own habitual choices) to carry responsibility for their own errors. These men, raised by fathers (and complicit mothers) who want them to be tough and in control, will lack a self-control which can be garnered only by having an acute awareness of self, and an open willingness to admit their wrongs, carry their own accountability and grow. They will be threatened by women in any power capacity (e.g. as colleagues or bosses in the work force); the default tendency will be to sexualize such women, reducing them to the value of their sex characteristics, and trumpeting that women don't "belong" or can't compete with men in such capacities. This outgrowth of patriarchal hegemony (the predominance of one group over others, in this case, males with power) shares its kind of thinking with paraphilic offenders. In the book Men and Sex, the authors (Levant & Brooks) give one of the earlier descriptions of the non-relational approach to sexuality, specifying that within their theory, men who sexualize females non-relationally are only one degree of separation away from rapists and child molesters in their cognitive paradigms. If groups of good ol' boys weren't quite as good as they are at covering their own surreptitious tracks, we would see with more empirical clarity how much date rape, attack rape, gang rape, and pedophilia exists in the world. And we would more clearly understand that sex trafficking statistics remain so high because narcissistic men in denial and in use of other defense mechanisms are patronizing human slavery at a staggering rate. The main customers of sex traffickers are middle-aged, middle class white males, which ironically are demographically the same people paid by our tax dollars to stop sex trafficking.

In articulating the way his Trauma Model accounts for avoidance tactics like denial, Colin Ross borrowed a Freudian/object relations concept known as the borderline intrapsychic structure. In this example of the human mind's avoidance of the pain of attachment grief, Ross describes a "not knowing" kind of thinking. People who operate under this defense mechanism don't want to be aware of the insufferable aspects of reality which they have split off from themselves and their attachment figures, so they repress the information. Repression is not the same concept as dissociation, although many medical, mental health and other educated professionals tend to interchange the terms and will discredit or attack traumatic memories in those with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) as "false" or "so-called repressed" memories. Most theories, however, label memories in DID clients as "dissociated," not repressed. In comparing these concepts, I think of dissociated memories as contained in locked closets--a sort of mental structure which doesn't allow immediate access, but which is designed to be unlocked and opened under properly prepared circumstances. Dissociated memories were always meant to be freed at some point and integrated into the self; the following observation is pure conjecture, but when I treat those recovering from DID it's as though the survivor's ego (at least the part known as the internal self-helper) always knew the containment was temporary and integration was survivable.

With repression, the painful information seems buried in a basement crawl space under the "house" with no door or staircase. The repressive person's sense of self is perceived as so fragile, and/or degree of triangulation with attachment figures is so full of communication taboos, that acknowledging the locked-away pain is untenable, so the method of disintegration is designed to be permanent. People who never go to therapy or never stay in therapy long enough to change are very likely to be utilizing the defense mechanism of repression, and the associated borderline intrapsychic structure (which is not related to borderline personality disorder) means they will avoid acknowledging the skeletons in the crawl space by denying, projecting, justifying, drinking, drugging, blaming, and explaining it away.

The meandering narrative above is offered to the reader to state that denial and other defense mechanisms function to take us not toward growth and accountability, but in the opposite direction. The first time a child declares "no!" is at approximately age two. At that stage of development, the sense of self within the mind is not equipped to independently accept accountability, because the child's growing brain is still heavily dependent on attachments to parents and other figures. The two year-old's ego is not strong enough to control his own will. Human development revisits this challenge in adolescence, after years of practicing strongly encouraged accountability under the structure of parents, teachers, and similar authority figures. The teenaged human can model self-accountability, but not based upon an independently cultivated set of moral values; these are borrowed from attachment figures or reference groups (such as the peer group). And there is a drive to practice independence from adult attachment figures, which contributes to an adolescent's defensive tendency to resist or even reject the assertions of authority figures who want him to be accountable for his actions.

Children who are not required to accept "no" from authority suffer from false empowerment, which Terry Real emphasizes is a form of child abuse (Real, 2018). False empowerment leads to a kind of narcissism in which the child believes he does not have to accept "no" while others do. When such children are confronted by authority figures who try to insist that they be accountable, they get good at using defense mechanisms like the ones mentioned above; these children will become adolescents who are habitually avoidant of responsibility; their senses of self never develop the "muscle" needed to shoulder accountability, nor the skill of seeing other people's humanity and caring for them. Similar to victims of pervasive abuse and neglect who carry low self-esteem and deny that bad things are true, kids with false empowerment become adults with infantile ego strength. Habitual denial, projection, and justification have made their psyches too flabby to function accountably and empathically; moreover, deep down both kinds of people may believe a myth that they'd never be able to hold themselves accountable--the pain of the truth would crush them. They become pathologically narcissistic members of their family and social groups, occupying permanent positions of perp, self-made victim, or enabler/rescuer in the triangles of their lives, poisoning those around them with their self-centered existences. This toxic living makes all manner of destructive habits possible, from decades of alcoholic codependence, to squandering or hoarding of resources like money, to human rights atrocities like rape and torture. Just look around you, and you will notice all the aforementioned mechanisms of grief avoidance, from denial, justification and minimization, to repressive unawareness, to false empowerment.

What You Can Do: The information given in this article can be used to identify ways that you, and those around you, may be neglecting the self, failing to grow, avoiding grief, or even harming others. Identify the toxins in your life, be they from alcoholism, racism, secret harm, parenting crises, or groups of people otherwise behaving badly with decision-making driven by groupthink. The first step toward removing these toxins from your life is awareness; the second is the opposite of denial--acceptance that these toxins are a force in your life, and that they will continue to poison your surroundings until you take action against them. (I invite you to explore Darlene Lancer's four tasks, listed above.)

*The concept of denial and other concepts to follow will be used in the Eyes Wide Open project to help the reader to identify the impact of previously "invisible" forces upon individuals and groups, see past related human tactics, and gain a more effective understanding of events in the family, the government and other institutions, in the media and in politics.