This post is about being in denial about our life circumstances and some suggestions for acceptance.
Years ago, I went back to Portland, Maine, to visit my aging father, who had just moved into an assisted living center.
First, a bit about my Dad. After starting out in a privileged family, receiving a top-notch education, succeeding at some challenging executive jobs, surviving multiple marriages and raising four daughters, suffering from mental illness and diabetes, playing boogie woogie and Chopin on the piano, and finding true joy in baseball, a good scotch, and a well-played 18 holes of golf, my father had become a person whose life had narrowed to the corner of a room in an assisted living center. When I saw him sitting there, in a high-backed chair, watching one of his favorite old movies, I wondered how such a situation befalls human beings. After such a full life, how does the final act end up like this?
I had a hard time accepting his condition. Surely, he would just be in the center for a few weeks, I kept telling myself, and then things would go back to normal. He would move back to the home where he and my stepmother would return to the nice routine.
But after a few days, I began to accept that my father was never going to leave that place. The best that could happen would be for him to leave the medical portion of the facility and move into a small apartment on the assisted living side of the building. We were all hoping for this possibility, and my stepmother did an admiral job lobbying for it every chance she had.
While I fought my denial about what was happening to my father, I noticed that the one person who seemed to be the most accepting of his condition was my father himself. By being so willing to go with the flow, my father was helping all of us come to terms with his situation. When a weekend nurse came to see to his medications and, not knowing his case, asked him, “When do you go home, dear?” my father replied, “I’m never going to leave this place.” The finality of his statement made my stomach turn.
We all know the experience of denial: It’s what happens when we cannot face what is right in front of us. It’s the cloak we put over our heads when something is too difficult to face, the lie we tell when something is too painful to admit, and the overall attitude we have when we choose not to acknowledge the “elephant in the room.” It happens in our core relationships and within our extended families; we see it play out on a global scale with our politicians; and we experience it almost every day at work. Denial is so prevalent in our lives that it’s become remarkable when someone instead just accepts what is.
Next time you’re sitting in a meeting at work where everyone avoids the biggest issue, yet you can see it in their eyes—you know they know that you know that they know, but no one is talking about the truth—or you watch a parent or grandparent struggle with aging issues and you yourself refuse to accept their new circumstances, try mustering the courage to face the reality of the situation.
Take a lesson from my Dad. When you hear yourself telling stories of denial, just stop mid-sentence and decide not to continue. Ask yourself what you’re pretending not to know. See if you can live with the thing you are avoiding. Try telling yourself the truth and just accept the facts.
It also helps to look at what’s directly in front of you. We often bundle one negative thought with another and find ourselves entrapped by imaginary fears that aren’t true. Maybe we need to take one small step forward but we’ve bundled the thought of taking that initial step with all the things that can go wrong if we keep walking. So, we just choose to stop all together and find ourselves denying that we wanted to move forward in the first place.
Remarkably, I’ve found that when I’m able to face something, it’s often not nearly as scary as I thought it would be. There’s something in the process of denial that makes the monsters we’re avoiding seem twice as big and much more ferocious than they actually are. When we finally confront them, they’re really not so scary after all.
I learned many important lessons from my father. Seeing the futility of denial and the beauty of acceptance, is one of the best.
Kathleen