Denial, Truth, and Change
One thing they don't tell you about trauma work is how it expands your capacity for truth.
We walk through life with these blocks not only in our memories, but in our current-day perceptions. A certain type of one-sidedness or minimization of our stories. And then we have these patterns that we don't like, but they keep repeating.
We keep finding ourselves in situations.
We keep getting triggered.
We keep feeling afraid.
We keep losing hope.
We keep freezing up or finding ourselves in fights that some part of us knows we don't have to deal with.
So why are we?
I used to be a silver-linings, hopeless romantic kind of person. And I've spent my time in cynicism too. I don't recommend staying too long in either headspace because, speaking from experience, both are forms of denial.
I had no idea how in denial I was about certain aspects of who I am, what I've been through, what I've done as a result of what I've been through, my view of the world, and more - until I learned to sit with my truth. To sit with reality.
And when you sit with truth, you realize why it was so scary to face it to begin with.
Because it's not just the story you're facing. That's not even the scary part for a lot of us. The scary part is allowing all those feelings that came with the story to finally move through you.
The very feelings driving those triggers and patterns that you're finally ready to break.
But we know, instinctively, that now that we're integrating old stories and feelings, we're free to break them, though not without effort.
That's how it works.
Facing truth is one of the most liberating practices I've picked up. It's also one of the most painful and sometime disorienting practices I've picked up.
It requires us to go through so much more than what we expect. Even outside of the abandonment, shame, and other popular trauma-words we openly hand our therapists and coaches these days, we have to take a few extra steps we don't see coming.
Face a few more words we don't realize we're reckoning with.
Particularly, we walk through disappointment, through dissonance and disillusionment, through grief, before we can get to acceptance, and then - finally - change.
Accordingly, I still spend plenty of time in denial. I still have work to do on truth-telling. Not even telling others the truth. Telling myself.
We all do. At least all of us living under oppressive societal structures, anyway. All of us with a bunch of trauma under our belt both past and present. I think we have to.
This life we live, in this inhumane society, and all of this (mis)information being thrown at us, with all of these responsibilities and pressures that extend beyond reason - with expectations that we somehow know what we're doing even though literally none of us knows wtf we're doing....
All of this naturally exceeds our capacity for truth. Even when we don't consider specific traumas, old stories, old patterns holding our capacity hostage.
The bottom line is that we can only take so much truth at a time.
Some would argue that denial (and its close cousin, dissociation) is a healthy coping mechanism, considering:
"It is proposed that denial has the following functions during crises: denial protects the integrity of the self-concept by distorting reality in a self-enhancing way, promoting a sense of mastery and control; this in turn leads to lower levels of anxiety, which may enhance decision-making under conditions of stress. Psychological health appears to be contingent, at least in part, on an ability to see the world through 'rose-tinted glasses'. Health professionals should be aware, therefore, that whilst trying to promote psychological well-being we do not ask patients to be unrealistically realistic."
I agree with this sentiment.
Furthermore, denial isn't something that's easy to make choices about.
Meaning...
We don't accept reality until we're good and ready.
When we're equipped with the capacity, tools, the skills, and the support we need to internalize some new, updated stories, worldviews and self concepts.
Concepts and stories about family, love, relationship, right, wrong, good, evil, ourselves, and truth itself.
Many of these new beliefs feel as though they are designed to shatter our old worldviews and concepts. This is a common tussle.
This process requires us to face, grieve, and release the things we once identified with. Would bet our life-savings on. Would die for.
Changing your mind about whether carbs are good for you or not because you learned some new science is one thing.
Changing your truth is another thing entirely. This goes into the fabric of who we are, what keeps us safe, what makes us lovable, "good", and worthy of belonging.
This is where denial is the stickiest, and for good reason.
I think a lot of us don't understand how massive an ask this really is, stepping into reality. And that's why we're having such a hard time working with the denial we see in other people. Flabbergasted that they could keep being outside a reality we clearly see as evident.
I hate it too, but I also get it.
They fight so hard against the change because when this depth of truth is forced upon us before we're ready, we risk collapse. Psychological, social, and physical collapse, driven by a deep, pervading anguish from the dissonance and grief alone.
People stop functioning, or they start functioning in extreme ways. Sometimes risking the safety of themselves and people they care about. Sometimes dangerous ways. People snap. Fall ill. Have heart attacks.
That's why we fight to keep our denial. It protects us. Our identity. Our stability. Our health. Our place in community. Our perceived sanity. Our ability to function.
It protects a lot of things we simply aren't equipped to give up until we're prepared to give them up. And that preparation isn't light work. It's heavy work.
Especially when the people trying to "show us the light" are calling us ignorant in the same breath. Who's going to hold me when I abandon everything I know for what you're telling me? Who's going to hold me through that pain?
I'm not making excuses. I'm sharing reality. A reality I'm constantly aware of as a practitioner.
We all have some version of this.
"Eighty percent of a therapist's work is working with denial."
This is why it's important as practitioners to be tender with our clients and to go at the pace of their own truth.
Because there's a reason the denial is there. The body has a wisdom to it that we are ethically obligated to respect. Forcing it can cause more harm than good.
Our body knows what it's protecting us from even when we ourselves don't realize our denial is in the room with us.
As practitioners we can usually spot a locked door sessions before our clients are ready to acknowledge its existence.
Truth-facing is slow, patient work.
With that being said, denial is still something we need to learn to work with at a more conscious level. Not only because then we get to access reality and work with what is, but because this is where some level of choice finally enters the room.
We don't get to liberate ourselves if we're in denial about what oppresses us. Coming into reality is what gives us the choice to get free.
We can choose to be in denial about something we're not ready to face, as we gear up to face it. This is just a practice of patience as we work with the wisdom of our body.
But being stuck in denial can cause us more harm than good. Because a lot of the time, we can't adapt to reality without understanding what reality is to begin with.
It's important to recognize that sitting with truth is a prerequisite for genuine, embodied change and transformation. Liberation. Individually and collectively.
A lot of us want change and transformation, but are fighting to hold onto our denial right now.
For Example:
There are thousands of people right now shouting and reassuring that the executive orders Trump is pushing through can't go into effect. They're not constitutional. They're against the law. "He can't do that."
Even AOC posted this reassurance on her stories.
This reassurance rings out as reports of ICE picking up and deporting our neighbors - whether illegally in the country or not - surfaced.
ICE agents who were emboldened and empowered by someone who was not only allowed to run for office after being both impeached and convicted of various crimes, but also all-but-admitted that the election that put him in office was rigged in his favor.
The reassurance is "He can't. That's against the law." But they're not abiding by laws. Their entire strategy appears - very evidently - to be founded on how they can press the boundaries of law until it folds to appease them. They're working their way through and around the laws. And we're still claiming "they can't do that."
It's giving "He's just joking. He doesn't mean it."
It's giving that feeling I get when well-meaning white friends innocently say "the police can't take you to jail for XYZ" not realizing the laws they're talking about aren't here to protect me.
Black people have never had the privilege of being in denial about the frailty of American laws.
So, my love, if you have the capacity, look around you.
Not only are they showing us they can they get past laws and expectations of our constitution, but more terrifying is that they're showing us they are willing to.
This is an important thing to not be in denial about because if we keep denying what they're capable of and willing to do, we're not going to handle this situation for what it is.
We're going to handle it for what we wish it would be - that we're automatically protected by things that used to protect (some of) us. We don't get to note that the empire is falling and pretend it will protect us simultaneously. This is the dissonance of denial.
To alleviate the painful dissonance of denial, we have to accept the pain of reality.
In this case, the reality appears to me to be that the laws we cherish cannot protect us right now. It is we who are tasked with protecting our laws.
Notice how the pain of reality is a much more productive pain.
Let's bring it back to the kind of (lower-capacity) stuff we usually talk about here:
Like when we assume this person who talks a lot of shit about love and relationships not being for them will make an exception for us. We want that exception because we want a connected, close relationship with them. And they sound like they're joking and they say some other stuff too. So we give them the benefit of the doubt they did not ask for, and we try.
Then we find out later that what they said was how they really felt.
There's an important lesson to learn here.
Yes, we need to be tender with denial because not doing so will lead us to risking some huge pain. But being stuck in denial can often lead to the outcomes we mean to avoid. Because a function of denial can be that we don't even see ourselves walking right back into the pattern we're avoiding to begin with.
Then we wonder why history keeps repeating itself. Personally and societally.
We have some reality we still haven't reckoned with. Not fully.
Trauma healing, truth-facing and telling, denial, and change...
They all work the same at scale as they do at an individual level.
And this is also why the first step to collective liberation is for each of us to liberate ourselves. Specifically, one of the things I get the feeling we need to liberate ourselves from is being stuck in denial.
Signs of Denial
Harvard Med gives us a nice little bulleted list of patterns of behavior associated with denial:
- "minimize or justify problems, issues, or unhealthy behaviors
- avoid thinking about problems
- avoid taking responsibility for unhealthy behaviors, or blame them on someone else
- refuse to talk about certain issues, and get defensive when the subjects are brought up."
And while these are helpful signals, I have my own recipe for knowing when I'm experiencing denial.
Does This Truth Feel Whole?
You can feel yourself sitting in an extreme. And whenever we're sitting in an extreme, we're usually not sitting in the whole truth of a situation.
I'll tell you what I mean.
Denial isn't always a complete head-in-the-sand sort of situation. More common experiences of denial are when we rationalize or minimize the story to be more palatable. Easier to digest. Easier to hold our hope through (even if it's false hope, because we can't find true hope in the truth yet). Easier to hold our hate through (even if we feel it eating away at us).
I know I'm in denial about something - or missing something either way - when my truth feels one-sided.
When we're ignoring one side of the story for the other, that doesn't feel whole to me. We've stepped outside of reality.
Like when clients take complete blame for everything wrong in a relationship or a breakup. That's a one-sided truth. My job is to help them explore it.
And all I know in that moment is that they played a role and they are seeking to take accountability for that role. It's a matter of time before that client and I discover what the whole truth is.
What I also know, though, is that a whole relationship takes two. A breakup also takes two.
Two imperfect people, not one.
Denial will have us giving ourselves - or someone else - more power, blame, and responsibility than what's realistic, necessary, or healthy.
The whole truth usually falls somewhere around the area of:
"We both made mistakes. My role was XYZ and I believe that hurt her and us deeply. And I didn't know it and I didn't listen and I could have done better there.
And from where I'm sitting, I believe her role was ABC and that hurt me very deeply as well, and in turn hurt our relationship.
I can't make her make amends or change what she's done, but here's what I'm going to do with my side of the street. I know where my responsibility and my power actually is here, what's in my control, what isn't, and how I'm going to move forward with that."
This feels whole. Do you see that? Can you feel it?
There's no extreme side to take. No glossing over or gaslighting in either direction. No vilifying without humanizing. No victimizing without ownership and accountability.
No sensationalizing feelings but also no downplaying them.
Just plain truth.
We flip between all kinds of extremes when we're actively processing a painful experience and story. This is natural.
The feeling of betrayal comes up and clouds our vision - and now everyone is untrustworthy - including ourselves - until it moves through us and we reach a fuller truth.
Now we're remembering words and concepts like "misunderstanding".
The feeling of abandonment comes up and clouds our vision, and now everyone is leaving us or about to, until that feeling moves through us and we reach a fuller truth.
Now we're remembering words and concepts like "they're balancing multiple things. This wasn't about me."
The feeling of terror and helplessness comes up and clouds our vision. Now everything is a threat and we're out of our breadth until it moves through us and we reach a fuller truth.
Now we're remembering things like "Wait, I am capable." and "Community" and "ask for support".
No matter how we flip it, when we go through the agonizing swamp of these stories and land at acceptance of that story, the truth feels whole. It feels complete.
It feels like the stuff of embodied wisdom.
And because of that, we can actually use it.
Looking back at the "they can't do that, that's illegal" example:
My rebuttal isn't to say that they definitely will be able to accomplish all they set out to, but it is to acknowledge that there's evidence that they have, can, and they're willing to continue to accomplish what they can regardless of any laws and constitutions.
So instead of minimizing or dismissing this as something the system will successfully block - when we've seen evidence that this is far from guaranteed - we'll do better as individuals and as a collective to prepare for what could happen, since they're putting forth a great effort to make it happen with or without our collective consent.
And it's only by doing this that we'll organize and make our hopes of protecting our country a firm reality.
Anything else - in my eyes - would be considered neglect.
When someone tries to break into your house, you don't say "they can't get in, the doors are locked."
You recognize the assholes are willing to break a window and act accordingly.
Because you don't handle the reality of what's in front of you by ignoring it or being in denial about it.
You handle it by first gaining the capacity to acknowledge what the reality actually is...
Then making hopeful decisions from an informed, grounded, place.
Reflect
- What am I experiencing extreme interpretations of or stories about right now?
- How can I create a safe space for these feelings to move through me without trying to change them immediately?
- What do I think a whole or fuller truth might be, that will help me feel clear and empowered from a wiser, more grounded place?
Food for thought.
Rooting for you.
Rooting for us all.
Tori
P.S. If you want some extra support unpacking the truth of your traumas and relationships, so you can finally make the changes you need to make to your reality, check out my coaching offer below.
Tori Reid
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