Narcissistic Rage: Not always a firestorm

If you have a narcissistic parent, you’ve experienced narcissistic rage. But because narcissists are as individual as anyone else, you may have experienced it without recognizing it for what is really is.

When someone says “rage” we tend to think of someone screaming and yelling and waving their arms and being loud and angry. We are probably also familiar with the quiet rage…the seething but controlled anger that manifests as clenched fists and jaws, giving the fear that the person could burst into some kind of physical fury at any moment.

But with narcissists there can be yet another kind of rage…the silent, subterranean rage that simmers, often for years, before being released…and the release can be in a long-planned and carefully executed manner.

What provokes a narcissist to rage? On the surface it may look like a lot of different things provoke a narcissist, but the fact is, only one thing does it: narcissistic injury.

Freud defined narcissistic injury as occurring when “…a narcissistic individual is confronted with a situation that counter-argues their firmly held beliefs about themselves.” Narcissist injury leads to narcissistic rage:  “This wound or blow that threatens their firmly held set of beliefs is likely to elicit a violent outburst of anger, known as narcissistic rage. The rage has a variety of forms and can be very mild or severely extreme.”

So what constitutes narcissistic injury? The short answer is “virtually anything.” This is the reason that living with a narcissist feels like walking on eggshells…you just never know when something you innocently do or say will set the narcissist off. That is because what is innocent and innocuous to you the narcissist may perceive as challenging or defiant or even intentionally attacking. Why that perception? Because whatever it was you did or said the narcissist finds it threatening to the delicately balanced house of grandiose cards she has built as her perception of herself.

You can know that certain things are guaranteed to set off your narcissist…you will have gained experience over time that certain behaviours or opinions or words will light the fuse. But there is always, always something else…something you don’t know about that will start things. You may think that always agreeing with the narcissist will guarantee peace but not only will this make you feel like a fraud, at some point the narcissist is liable to tip to it and say “Wait a minute…are you just humouring me, like I was some kind of senile old goat?” and then the rage game is on.

The narcissist will tell you that you have no one but yourself to blame for her rages because you provoke them with your contrariness, your defiance, your insensitivity, your cruelty. And for a long time, we may believe this because the fact is, you did do something the narcissist found provoking. But analysed from a greater distance, you have to acknowledge that the narcissist has no right to hold you, your feelings, your actions hostage to her perceptions, she has no right to deny you your autonomy by using rage and hurt feelings as a weapon to beat you into submission and back into control. You may have provoked the outburst, but you were no more in the wrong that the concentration camp inmate who, attempting to escape, provokes a guard into shooting at him.

Narcissistic rage, then is both a reaction on the part of the narcissist, and a tool used to control and manipulate others. I can remember saying to my brother “Don’t do that…it will make Mommy mad.” Mommy’s anger was a palpable, fearsome thing to be avoided at all costs and it was a weapon she consciously used “Are you trying to make me mad?” she would ask. Her rage was unpredictable in terms of what she would do with it, but predictable in its being a response to anyone doing anything that she did not like…and I mean anyone and anything.

Interestingly, her rage was often expressed differently, depending on who was the target. The more power a person had, the less overt and explosive her rage, and the more manipulative, subtle and vindictive…as if, by denying her a temper outburst, you earned a deeper, more lasting expression of her rage. When I was a child she would scream at me until her voice was raw, and hit me with anything handy until her rage was purged. This often left me sobbing and curled into a defensive little ball which, curiously, could act as yet another narcissistic injury: the reality that a beaten child will cry and cower away from her abuser was not acceptable to her and her response to my perfectly normal reaction would be to tell me to shut up or she would give me a real reason to cry. And any time I cringed or flinched in her presence was enough to set her off as she did not want other people to see it as it would give them the “wrong impression” of her.

She would not, however, use such overt means to rage at people who had more power than a child. She was capable of long-term planning and incredible spite. And, like so many other narcissists, she was glib and charming enough on the surface to convince others that her treachery was actually a good thing.

She would never rage at her mother or father…but she behaved in such a way, from her teens onward, as to cause a scandal in their tiny rural town such that the reputation of the entire family was damaged. Then, when it was clear that nobody found her cute or amusing anymore, just so shameful they didn’t want to soil their skirts by even walking past her on the streets, she packed up her children and moved 1000 miles away.

She had visions of an upper middle class lifestyle and convinced herself that the little Eichler-style house she nagged my father into buying was the first step on that ladder. So secure was her vision that she couldn’t see the impact of the dirt road, cesspool that backed up into the bathtub with high tides at the nearby bay, chronic cockroach infestation, lack of sidewalks or even trash collection tarnished the vision. No, the thing that brought down her property values and was the scourge of the neighbourhood was the next door neighbour who, as a war widow, had no husband to maintain the house and, as a nurse working night shift, kept “suspicious” hours. When NM’s demands that the woman spruce up her house and front yard fell on deaf ears, she took on a narcissistic rage that consumed her. In the end, NM convinced the neighbours that the woman’s job as a nurse was a convenient cover, that she was really a prostitute using the hours of her nursing job (where NM claims she stole drugs and was an addict) as a cover, that she beat and starved her children and kept a filthy, unsanitary house. The woman almost lost her job and custody of her children over NM’s accusations and ultimately sold her house and moved away. NM got what she wanted: a quiet English couple with a penchant for gardening bought the house and fixed it up. Throughout this campaign, NM’s family heard the towering rages about the woman next door, the woman who dared defy my NM and refuse to give her what she wanted. Superficially it was only a small thing…most lower middle class neighbourhoods have a shabby house or two, but NM took it as a personal affront that she lived next door to one (even though it was in that condition when NM bought our house) and the owner would not succumb to her demands to clean it up. Living next door to the shabby house damaged NM’s grandiose vision of herself living a genteel suburban lifestyle, which was her narcissistic injury, and she quite determinedly retaliated against the woman. Rather than go to the house and have a screaming fit in the woman’s face…which would make her the “bad guy” instead of the offending homeowner, NM undertook a campaign of undermining and sullying the woman’s reputation and creating an environment so hostile that the woman had to move away or lose her job and her children. That was one form of narcissistic rage at work.

“Symptoms of rage may be mild and non-violent, such as displaying visible irritation, vocal disagreement with the situation or head-shaking. More severe symptoms of narcissistic rage include outburst of physical violence, directed at both objects and people, and vocal outrage. In general, a person that frequently displays narcissistic rage symptoms is often labeled as selfish, spoiled and a sore loser by their peers. Unlike regular anger, narcissistic rage is unwarranted and is caused by neutral events that will not provoke reactions in non-narcissists. Persistent episodes of narcissistic rage may result in the perpetuation of rage cycles: patterns of rage behavior that frequently repeat day after day.”

The key to identifying a narcissistic rage is ascertaining if a non-narcissistic person would be outraged by the same thing that triggered the narcissist. If you tell your mother you are going on a two week vacation to Greece and she flips out, you are dealing with a narcissistic rage. A non-narcissist might ask a few practical questions like “do you have travel insurance?” and “has the political situation calmed down there?” whereas the narcissist could do anything from scream at you about wasting your money or traumatizing your dog by putting him in a kennel to inviting herself along to actively sabotaging your trip by falling “ill” or even causing something costly to happen to your house or your car so that you can’t afford to go. Narcissistic rage is not confined to temper outbursts and overt expressions of rage…narcissists are perfectly capable of the “slow burn” kind of rage that manifests in an extended period of retaliation, and that retaliation can be small and childish, like calling and hanging up the phone to big and devastating, like blackening your name among family, friends, and neighbours and making herself look like your victim.

It all starts with that narcissistic insult, that little injury that most people would not even perceive as an injury or insult. You have a choice of living your life walking on eggshells in an attempt to avoid causing that injury or you can decide that if you N gets his/her nose out of joint by something you do or say, that’s not your problem. If you decide you won’t be controlled by a narcissist’s tantrums or your own misplaced guilt, then you are prepared to set and enforce boundaries with your Ns, including getting restraining orders against them if nothing else works. You cannot control them but you can control yourself and what influences you allow in your life.

I read a line the other day that said when it comes to narcissists, you must weigh their influence on your life: if they bring you more joy than difficulty, then find ways to live with them but if they bring you more pain than joy, then you must let them go. It didn’t make exceptions for elderly narcissistic relatives or mothers or even narcissistic adult children: it simply said that if they bring you more pain than joy, then you must let them go.

Sounds like good advice to me.

Karma: what it is and what it isn’t

I see a lot of people invoking karma these days, from FaceBook memes that call on karma for vengeance to ACoNs in support groups expecting karma to punish their narcissistic parents. Their very invocation of karma tells me they have little or no idea what it is or how it works…and may not even like the whole concept, if they knew what it really was.

Karma isn’t sentient

According to my husband, who was born and raised a Hindu, karma is a force of nature, like gravity. Would you call on gravity to punish someone who hurt you? If that person fell off a porch and broke his ankle, would you think gravity consciously injured the person as payback for hurting you? Of course not…and that is the point with respect to karma…karma is no more sentient than gravity.

Karma isn’t cosmic vengeance

Because karma isn’t sentient, it can’t avenge you. It can wreak havoc on an individual, but not for the purpose of avenging wrong doing. There is, in fact, no vengeance in karma at all.

You create your own karma

Think of karma like a ledger sheet: you enter credits (“good” karma) and you enter debits (“bad” karma). When you have more credits than debits, your karma is good; when you have more debits than credits…when the unkind, thoughtless, and selfish thoughts you think, words you say, actions you do, are totted up and you have more of those than acts of selfless kindness, then your karma is bad.

You cannot manipulate your karma

You cannot consciously create good karma: to do a good deed because it is good for your karma is a selfish act. So doing a good deed in order to benefit from it yourself is an act that will bring you bad karma, not good. It is only by adopting a kind and generous way of thinking and living, by living your life doing good for others out of compassion for them, that you can create good karma for yourself. The moment selfish motives come into the picture, good karma goes out the window.

Karma works over multiple lifetimes

We sometimes think that the bad guy “got away with it” and that makes us feel angry…or even hopeless. We are anguished that our narcissistic parents continue to get away with hurting us, that the family sides with them, that you can get no justice or peace.

Mmmm…you may not like this but…if you are a true believer in karma, you know that the suffering and injustice you endure in this lifetime is probably your karma for your misdeeds in a previous lifetime. Karma depends on the concept of reincarnation: that if you think you got away with it in this lifetime—just wait until the next one. And, to make matters even more diabolical, you may be suffering punishment for a previous life’s misdeeds, but you aren’t allowed to know what you did so it is impossible for you to hunt down your victims, apologize, and obtain their forgiveness. Karma is immutable: you did bad in a previous life, now the scale will balance itself by life doing bad to you.

Karma often looks to be unjust

A lot of people have trouble with the concept of paying in this life for the sins of a previous one, saying it is not fair to be punished for something that occurred in a previous life, it is victimizing the innocent, but that completely misses the point. If you tripped and fell and went over a cliff, would anyone think gravity was being unfair or victimizing you? Of course not…everyone knows that gravity is not sentient, it is an indisputable force of nature. Those who invented the concept of karma, the Hindus, think of karma in much the same way as Westerners think of gravity.

Western people tend to think of the soul or “life force” as being an entity that, when the body dies, goes on to its “reward,” and that each newly born person comes with a brand new, untarnished soul that is all his own. At death, if the person has lived a virtuous life, the soul goes to Heaven where it is rewarded richly for eternity; if the person has not lived a virtuous life, the soul goes to Hell where it is punished for eternity. Hinduism believes the soul is reborn into subsequent bodies until the person learns the lessons necessary to move on to a higher plane of existence. That means your soul not only doesn’t go to Heaven or Hell, it comes back in another body, time and time again, until you learn to live a life sufficiently virtuous and selfless to move on to the next stage of existence.

And when your soul comes back in another body, the soul carries the sins of its previous incarnation. Those sins are not addressed as punishment: sins are the manifestation of the lessons you need to learn in order to move up and move out to a higher plane of existence. So, if you think that karma is punishment or vengeance, you are missing the point: the bad things that happen to us as a result of karma represent lessons we need to learn, humility we need to acquire, compassion we need to exercise. The more reluctant you are to learn this, the more serious the misfortune that can befall you.

A lot of Westerners tend to think of this as grossly unfair: what about the baby that is born with some devastating condition and dies soon after birth? What sin did he commit? What can he possibly learn from the experience? Western thought does not easily wrap itself around the idea that a newborn child can arrive not with a shiny new soul but with an old, battered one, a soul that carries the burdens…and rewards…of many lifetimes. The consciousness that resides in our brains, that makes up our minds, is not the consciousness of the soul.

Karma can strike at any time

Unlike Heaven and Hell, karma does not wait until you are dead to manifest itself. And, unlike gravity, it does not occur predictably and instantaneously when challenged. Sometimes an evil person appears to get away with his evil, but those who truly believe in karma (real karma, not the bastardized Western version of it) know that in a subsequent life, this evil-doer will reap the fruit of the seeds he has sown.

But sometimes karma is swift: it can occur almost instantaneously, it can occur within minutes, it can occur at just the right time for the victim to witness it. The man who has a heart attack while cheating on his wife…the bully who discovers the wimpy little guy he is picking on has a 3^rd degree blackbelt…the guy who gets knocked down by a speeding truck because his arrogance led him to carelessness. In many cases of irony, there is a hint of karma, a payback with an ironic twist.

Karma is there to teach you lessons.

Karma exists to teach you lessons, to help you better yourself, by giving you a taste of your own medicine. How better to learn compassion than to experience the lack of it from others? How do you handle that unpleasant experience? By being angry and resentful and even more mean-spirited than you were in your previous life? Or by learning compassion for others who are in the same situation…and even having compassion for the people who give you none because you know what their futures are going to be like? If you refuse to learn the lessons karma presents to you, then your next incarnation may have even more troubles than this one, until the lesson is learned.

Karma cannot be fooled

Karma has no consciousness. It does not choose to punish you harshly and me leniently. You create your karma, both now and in your past and future lives. You can have a superficially wonderful life with beauty and money and luxuries, and yet be fraught with anxiety and fear and emotional pain…might karma not be presenting you a lesson in counterbalance to a crushing envy you had in a previous life? You can’t fool karma any more than you can fool gravity: your thoughts and deeds in this life set the stage for your soul’s existence in the next.

What do I believe?

I am not a religious person, so religious concepts don’t mean much to me. Do I believe in karma? Not in the traditional religious sense, but I do believe that we create our own realities, for good or for ill, from the choices we make. When we treat people badly, we do not motivate others to treat us well. When we lie and cheat, when we allow the poor treatment of others to justify, in our minds, not being the best we can be, then we are creating for ourselves the blowback that others perceive as karma.

Many of us were badly treated as children and I do not believe we created that in previous incarnations or even our early lives. I do believe, however, that much of the anguish we endure as adults is as a result of choices we made as we left childhood and continue to make as adults. We choose to allow people to put us on the horns of dilemmas because we don’t want to make choices that might have repercussions…but we fail to realize that any choice we make will have consequences, intended or not. If we simply make different choices, we get a different life. Not necessarily better…life doesn’t come with guarantees of a happily ever after for any of us…but certainly different.

Karma, as perceived by the Westerner, is a very different concept from that of the people who originated it, the Hindus. Western thought is often imbued with the concepts of vengeance, punishment, and retribution whereas Eastern thought is more one of harmony and peacefulness. Karma is envisioned as a way of honing and fine-tuning one’s perceptions of the world and helping each person to gain the inner peace that leads to compassion, empathy, selflessness and, eventually, oneness with the Godhead.

Very different from the vengeful, punitive Western concept of karma, wouldn’t you say?

Overcoming Denial

Denial is probably the biggest obstacle to healing from the legacy of growing up with a narcissistic parent.

Why? Because you can’t fix something until you can identify what it really is and then come up with a solution that addresses it.

Think about it this way: if you have a door that is difficult to open or close, how do you fix it? You start by examining the door to see where it is sticking. If you find that the door is rubbing on the door frame, then you sand or plane the high area so it no longer sticks. But what happens if you either don’t look for the source or you just won’t see it? You can oil the hinges, change the lock, paint the door…but none of them will fix the door, will they? You can also choose to ignore it and put a kick plate on it so you don’t scuff it any more when you kick it to open it, but that doesn’t fix it, either, does it? You cannot fix the door until you see and acknowledge that a part of the door or the frame has become swollen…only then can you come up with a solution that actually works.

That is exactly how denial works: something is wrong in our lives but, for whatever reason, we refuse to address the real cause of it. We ignore it, we make excuses, we pretend it doesn’t exist, we blame other people, other things, ourselves…but we just won’t address the real source of our problem and, until we do, nothing can really be fixed.

Denial is a form of belief.

If you refuse to believe something that is true, you are in denial. It doesn’t matter how many other people believe the same or if you are the only one…if you refuse to belief something that is true, if you discount or argue against the truth of something, you are in denial.

Belief and reality are not necessarily the same thing. It is a logical fallacy (the “bandwagon fallacy,”  to be exact) to believe that just because a million others believe something, it must be true. You can be the only one who speaks against a false belief and that will make you the only one who is dealing with reality. This is an important concept to remember when the entire FOO closes ranks against you and asserts that you are the crazy one and your poor, heartbroken NM, is only hurting you because she loves you.

This concept, the idea that, because you believe it, it is real, is at the root of a lot of human difficulty, both in the macrocosm of the larger world and the microcosm of the family. Believing something doesn’t make it so…if it did, Santa and the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny would all be tangible realities. Conversely…and equally true…if you refuse to believe something, that doesn’t make it not so. So, you can deny that the earth is ovoid in shape, but that won’t change reality and make it flat.

Why do we engage in denial?

Because, simply put, the truth can hurt. And contemplating a painful truth provokes anxiety, especially if it is a truth we would rather not accept as real. Denial is a much more comfortable state…we feel like we understand and even have some control over our lives when we deny things we don’t fully grasp, things we don’t want to believe, things that satisfy whatever it is that we, personally, need in order to feel at peace. And, the nature of denial being what it is, we don’t really see our denial, we don’t acknowledge that we are quite literally lying to ourselves in order to satisfy an inner need.

So, if denial brings us a feeling of peace, what is wrong with it? Plenty…not the least of which is the fact that you pass it on to others as an acceptable way of living. If you are in a marriage in which your husband neglects you and cheats on you, but your denial prompts you to believe he is a wonderful husband and father, you will pass on to your sons the idea that a wonderful husband and father ignores his wife and cheats on her and you will pass on to your daughters that a wonderful husband will ignore her and cheat on her.

But denial has more subtle effects: somewhere, deep inside you, you know you are in denial. This knowledge can fester and cause you to have an undefined feeling of dissatisfaction because your conscious mind won’t acknowledge what is wrong, even though your subconscious does. If you have ever had an epiphany…one of those “AHA!” moments…and later said to yourself “Why didn’t I see that before?” you were experiencing the success of your subconscious breaking through your denial. You knew but you just refused to consciously acknowledge.

While you are mired in denial, all manner of bad things can go on in your life that you either refuse to acknowledge as bad or you find yourself frustrated and unable to effectively address. You can’t fix something if you can’t figure out what it is that actually needs fixing, and you can spend a lot of time, money, and angst pursuing solutions that never work simply because they don’t address the core issue because you are in denial about it.

So how do you overcome denial?

It’s not easy because you are not fighting some clearly defined enemy outside yourself, you are fighting yourself. Your fight is between your desire to be spared pain and your need to know truth…and if you are in denial, freedom from pain has won.

It involves changing thought processes and being willing to hear, acknowledge, and accept things we would rather not know or deal with. It means growing up and past the idea that hiding from the unpleasant is an acceptable alternative. It means embracing new ideas…and forcing ourselves to give up old ones. Most of all, it means learning how to do serious critical thinking and then make ourselves face the unpleasant realities that critical thinking gives us.

You may have heard that how we talk to ourselves can dictate how we feel about ourselves. That is called “self-talk” and there is a considerable body of literature to support its effectiveness. According to Ben Martin, Psy. D., most self-talk is negative. You can work to overcome negative self-talk by using several conscious methods and, what is most interesting is that not only does this work for overcoming negative self-talk, it is precisely the kind of technique you need to employ to overcome denial.

Dr. Martin’s recommendations for overcoming negative self talk are in blue, below, my comments in black.

1. Reality testing: first, before you can determine whether or not you are in denial about something, you have to do a “reality check.” Ask yourself the following:

  What is my evidence for and against my thinking? Try to take a step back and detach yourself a little: look at evidence as if it were happening to someone else.

  Are my thoughts factual, or are they just my interpretations? This can be a bit difficult, but with a dedication to honesty, you can determine if what you are thinking is true or simply what you want to be true.

  Am I jumping to negative conclusions? You might also be jumping to positive conclusion, too…giving an abuser a free pass because calling him or her on it would upset the balance of your life. Are you telling yourself that something that is truly terrible is “not that bad” so you can avoid confrontation or even the possibility that you might have to cut a person out of your life and go it alone?

  How can I find out if my thoughts are actually true? Depending on your situation, you could ask someone else for their observations, but if you are in a situation with narcissists and their flying monkeys, that’s not going to help you. Do you have a friend or acquaintance who is honest enough to give you the truth? Are you strong enough to willingly accept their observations without holding it against them? Can you Google it and find out an objective truth? Do you have a therapist or counsellor to discuss it with? (I recommend against religious counsellors like pastors because they can lack objectivity…for example, if your mother is being abusive to you, a pastor might simply counsel you to “honour your mother” because that is his religious belief…an objective person might ask you to explain why you believe your mother is being abusive and then help you determine if the behaviour you are having trouble with is, in fact, abusive.)

2. Look for alternative explanations: What are you telling yourself? That this is your fault? That it is wrong to turn your back on your mother because she is…gasp!...your mother?

  Are there any other ways that I could look at this situation? Try to look at things differently. Why do you feel guilty when she is the person behaving badly? Is it never ok to think bad things about your mother and her behaviour? Why? Why should she be exempt from the same standards of behaviour she expects of you…or that the society at large expects?

  What else could this mean? Could it mean that you’ve been wrong all this time? Could it mean that she has been wrong about you? Could it mean that you have allowed her to get away with behaving badly because you thought you had no other choice?

  If I were being positive, how would I perceive this situation? If you were being supportive of yourself, how would you perceive it? If a stranger walked in and observed your mother’s behaviour, how might that stranger perceive it? Why don’t you see it that way?

3. Putting it in perspective: One of the problems with being mired in an unpleasant situation is that we lose perspective. Every little thing can be seen as a big thing…and big things, because they can feel so threatening, can be minimized. Time to try to give things their real weight and don’t forget, even little things, if there are enough of them, can add up to a big one.

  Is this situation as bad as I am making out to be? Or, conversely, am I minimizing a really bad situation so that I can continue to live with it?

  What is the worst thing that could happen? How likely is it? And if that does happen, how bad will it truly be? After years of terrible marriages and relationships, I found and married a really nice guy. Nine years later, he died and I was devastated. I thought it was the worst thing that could ever happen to me…after a lifetime of crap relationships with abusive people, I had this great guy, only for him to die after only nine years of marriage. But, what I could not know at that time was that, while that door closed, another one opened…14 years after his death I am remarried to another truly nice guy and enjoying the highest standard of living I have ever known. Sometimes that which we fear most turns out to be only a stepping stone to even better things.

  What is the best thing that could happen? What have you been denying? If you stopped your denial, what is the best thing that could happen to you? Do you have an abusive spouse…someone who cheats on you, treats you disrespectfully, ignores you except when you get in his face? Do you think the best thing that could happen would be that he started treating you with love and respect? Really? Would you trust that to continue or would you expect him to revert to his old self when the mood took him? Think beyond the confines of your present life…wouldn’t the best thing be for you to be on your own and in a position to find and accept the attentions of a man who respects you and treats you respectfully from the outset? Or perhaps the best thing would be for you to stand up to your abusive husband and tell him you won’t accept his disrespect any more and if he can’t begin treating you respectfully, he’s going to have to find someone else to treat like a doormat. What would work for you?

  What is most likely to happen? What is the most likely outcome if you confront your denial and let it go? And what state of mind would you rather be in—your present one, which is what you get by keeping the denial going—or dealing with the fallout from stopping the denial, like kicking an unfaithful husband to the curb, setting some ground rules with your out-of-control teen, or honestly dealing with your mother’s abuses and setting some boundaries with her? I know, you don’t want to do that, but if that is your only alternative to denial…and you know how much pain that is bringing you…which do you choose?

  Is there anything good about this situation? Is there anything good about living in denial? Is it really allowing you to live peacefully, with no anxiety or physical or emotional health manifestations of suppressed pain and rage? Really?

  Will this matter in five years time? If you don’t stop the denial now, what will it be like in five years? Think back five years…do you have less anxiety, less emotional pain, are you less troubled than you were back then? So, what are the chances that it won’t get worse over the next five?

4. Using goal-directed thinking: I think it is important for you to be very clear on what you want: writing it down helps clarify your thinking. Do you want to stop living in denial and, whether it hurts or not, deal with reality head on? Do you want to step out of your comfort zone and actually put your head in charge of your life instead of your feelings?

  Is thinking this way helping me to feel good or to achieve my goals? Has denial helped you to feel good? Has it helped you to achieve your goals? What brings you to the place of wanting to end your denial at this time?

  What can I do that will help me solve the problem? Denial is a kind of thought disorder: you convince yourself of something that is not true, and then you fight to stay convinced. It is very similar to negative self-talk in which, instead of saying “Oops! Knocked over the glass! Gotta find a towel and clean it up!” you say “You stupid, clumsy, good-for-nothing bitch! You can’t do anything right!” to yourself. In denial you say “Oh, it wasn’t that bad…last time he actually broke my jaw, so these two black eyes aren’t that bad,” instead of saying to yourself “That was abuse and I am not going to put up with it ever again. Out you go and don’t come back.”

  In denial you talk yourself into believing something that isn’t true because acknowledging the truth puts you at some kind of risk. So, what is the risk? That you will be alone? Isn’t that better than a man who beats you. Does your denial say “He didn’t mean it”? Well, it is lying to you because at some point he gave himself permission to hit you. The same thing goes for emotional abuse, regardless of the source…your husband, your mother, your own kids…at some point they decided what they wanted was more important than respecting you and your feelings and your boundaries. How could they not mean it?

  The way you stop denial is simply make yourself stop. When you hear yourself saying “Oh, it wasn’t that bad…” or “She didn’t mean it,” or “She can’t help it,” stop yourself. Stop yourself mid-sentence or mid-thought and say, aloud if necessary, “Yes, it was that bad!” or “He knew it would hurt me if he cheated and he did it anyway!” or “She knows that not inviting me to Thanksgiving dinner hurt me and she didn’t care!” Stop the denial, stop the avoidance, make yourself acknowledge reality in all its ugly glory.

  Is there something I can learn from this situation, to help me do it better next time? What can you learn from denial? You can learn to hide from the truth, you can learn to be a doormat, you can learn to put your feelings on hold, to pretend, to put up a good front. But you can’t learn truth or how to be resilient or how to deal with adversity from it.

Some years ago Pam Tillis put out a song, “Queen of Denial” and some of the lyrics just might strike a chord in some of us:

Well I said, he had a lot of potential/He was only misunderstood
You know, he didn’t really mean to treat me so bad/He wanted to be good

And I swore one day I would tame him/Even though he loved to run hog wild

I knew he didn’t have any money/Yeah that’s why he couldn’t buy me a ring

and just because he bought himself a brand new pick-up truck/Really didn’t prove anything

And he never had to say he loved me/I could see it every time he smiled
Just call me Cleopatra everybody/Cause I’m the queen of denial

Oh queen of denial/Buyin’ all his alibis
Queen of denial/Floatin’ down a river of lies, yeah

Well I’m not gonna jump to conclusions/Or throw away this perfect romance
Even though I saw him dancin’ last night/With a girl in a leopard skin pants

Yeah, he’s probably stuck in traffic/And he’ll be here in a little while
Just call me Cleopatra everybody/Cause I’m the queen of denial

Reality isn’t always pretty, and too often it is not what we want. But if we don’t recognize it, acknowledge it, and deal with it, we can’t really live our lives authentically. Somewhere inside of us there is always this little kernel of awareness that keeps nagging at us, provoking anxiety, making us uncomfortable, at the lies we tell ourselves and even base our lives on.

For some of us, denial provokes enormous conflicts and pain, disrupting our lives and even setting us up for disaster. Denial allows us to remain in abusive situations when facing reality would make us take protective action. Denial may seem like a safe, protective, peaceful place to live, but it’s not real and refusal to deal with reality can have a devastating effect on our lives. I knew a woman, many years ago, whose mother was completely in denial about her being molested by her stepfather. Even when the girl got pregnant at the age of 12 and had to have an abortion, the mother continued to live in denial. Acknowledgement would mean she would have to accept that the man she married was a paedophile, it would mean she would be shamed publicly for allowing this to go on under her roof, it would mean she would become an unmarried woman again, it would mean she would lose both the prestige of being married and the income he supplied to the household. When she weighed the cost of giving up her denial against saving her preteen daughter from being raped several times a week by her own husband, she chose denial. When I met the woman she was in her early 30s, morbidly obese, and so paralyzed by depression it was only the paralysis that kept her from committing suicide. Denial can hurt you, it can hurt the people you love, it can set you up for disaster.

It’s not easy to get rid of denial. First you have to have at least a clue as to what you are in denial about. Then you have to ask yourself the hard questions and force yourself to supply honest answers. Once you have those answers, now you have to decide if you are going to change things or allow the status to remain quo. Overcoming denial can be the beginning of a major change in your life. Will today be the day you stop feeling helpless about your situation, confront denial, and take control of your life?