The theme song for many goes, "say it isn't so." Saying it isn't so is not making it not so. Yet so often we deny our problems and actually accept denial as one of the ways to solve them. How many times have you heard, "leave it alone and it will go away"? I even knew an otherwise bright executive who consciously ignored such things as oil leaking from his car for, he said, it would probably correct itself. By denying the problem he delayed the solution—and also increased the damage.
Delay is a form of denial. Once a young man of exceptional education and family connections asked me to lunch so we could discuss his business future. When I asked what he was doing he said he was looking for the "right opportunity." He was early thirties and full of things he might do but none he had done. I thought a shock would be helpful so I told him "you have a great deal of potential——in fact, you have all you ever have had for certainly you have used none of it." One of his peers later described him to me as "a Rolls Royce with a loose steering gear." This sounds unkind, but he could be helped mightily by having his denial by delay pointed out clearly.
So many health problems are denied by delay, cancer goes undiagnosed for fear and so it is denied until too late. A friend's wife went to famed Mayo Clinic to visit a doctor friend of mine. He did not know of her real symptoms for she didn't tell him, she said in her defense, "if they are so good, then I must not have anything serious or they would have found it." Secretly I told the doctor and they recalled her and were very helpful in her problem. The greatest hurt in denying a problem is our inattention to solving it.
Often I am amused though scared when I see a person cross the street without looking toward the oncoming cars. You can sense the person feels if the cars aren't noticed they won't get hit. A young widow told me how shocked she was when her husband died for she had been denying even the possibility that he might die. She called it faith but she knows it was truly denial. It was too big a problem to handle and so she simply denied it.
Some intellectual problems we handle by denying them. Once I was talking with a well-known talk show host recognized for his intellectuality but liberal view of life.
When I asked if he believed in "original sin" he replied, "that would be an awful thought." Can we escape a fact by calling it a thought or thereby hope to escape the reality we want to deny?
Diplomacy is one way we delay and deny our political problems. With cosmetics we deny the aging problem. I must admit that I love that poetry which suggests "grow old along with me, the best is yet to be." Even in death we dress the corpse so well "he looks better than he did when he was alive." Even our vocabulary teaches us much about our desire for denial. For example, our installment credit is called convenience, not debt. We call change progress and deny the trend in which we are going. The "new" becomes automatically better than the old, particularly the "old fashioned." We have developed a vocabulary of denial to shield us from unpleasant facts.
Often we are tempted to deny relational problems. Marriage clinics tell us how many couples come having no real communication with each other, yet denying their problem. Parents and children take refuge in the silent denial. Recently a friend was telling me about a couple who had lost a daughter and for two years they kept her clothes laid out on the bed as if she were going to school, for they couldn't face the fact that she had died.
We are told the second step in overcoming grief is denial. It is all right to let people deny for a short time, because we don't want to rush them into objective evaluation until they have a chance to gain their equilibrium, but they can't stay in the denial step and remain emotionally healthy. I saw a bumper sticker the other day that read, "denial is not a river in Egypt." It is a short term fix for a long term problem. It is a place to move through on the way to health.
