“The Demons of
Denial”
by Alfred H. Ells, M.C.
I would like to
introduce myself. My background is primarily as a marriage and
family therapist. I have
also been the Clinical Director of Christian Alcohol and Drug Abuse
Treatment Facility and a research biochemist. One of the pains of having
a child who is drug-addicted or lost or in any kind of difficulty is
directly related to how much of yourself you put into that child.
How much of your hopes, dreams and expectations are with that
child? When I listen to others’ stories about their children, I
realize each child is a gift from God. There is a lot of investment in
our children and, therefore, an awful lot of pain.
For me to have a son
was one of the greatest things that God could ever do for me.
I come from a family of six boys and two girls.
Much of what I did in my early life involved sports. My son was always athletic. He received a scholarship to run
cross-country in college and we all had high hopes. He wasn’t in
college very long before he quit cross-country because he said the coach
was biased against the guys’ team and liked the girls’ team better.
So he decided to take a couple of courses and get a job, but it took him
a long time to get a job. He
would work a little then he’d lose the job.
Then it would take him a while to get another job.
We became more aware of how irresponsible he was acting and how
he frequently procrastinated on doing routine, simple things.
I kept thinking he was just a little lost right now.
It was a difficult transition for him.
My wife was very good about tracking details. She noticed he was staying up all night, sleeping all day and
missing work. She kept
saying that he was not doing what he ought to do and that it greatly
bothered her. I made
excuses for him. So, there was this growing tension in the family.
One of the big values
in my family is “work.” If
you don’t work, then that’s a problem.
Maybe it goes back to roots and ancestors who did difficult and
dangerous work in the Arizona mines.
All families have rules, whether spoken or unspoken.
In my family, if you didn’t work you weren’t worth having.
So I expected my kids to work.
My son had a hard time holding onto jobs.
During one period of time, he wouldn’t come home at night or he
would stay up all night. He didn’t seem to be holding a job down.
Finally, I told him, “If you don’t get a job, you will have
to leave the house.” Now,
even to say that caused me pain. This
was the son that I had comforted as a baby, gone hunting with and so
enjoyed. But I finally came
to the point of knowing that I needed to set boundaries and expectations
and stick to them.
So, he began getting
up, leaving early in the morning and then coming home in the evening.
But something was wrong. One
morning as I was praying, I got this sense that something was horribly
wrong. I didn’t understand it. I
finished praying, got my briefcase and left the house. As I was driving
down the road, I had an inner sense that he hadn’t gone to work that
day and that he hadn’t been going to work and that he didn’t really
have a job, but rather was getting up in the morning, leaving, then
hiding. So, I drove around
the block and went over to the backside of a house where one of his
friends lived. There was his Jeep parked right by the back fence. He had gotten up, put on his work clothes, grabbed his
toolbox, hopped into his Jeep, drove around the corner, gone into his
friend’s house and had fallen asleep.
He didn’t have a job.
I knocked on the door,
went into the house, woke him up, and said, “Son, that’s it. You
must leave our house.” I had come to the end of my rope. I knew I had
to tell him to leave. I
told him that as long as he was going to be irresponsible, he couldn’t
live with us. I told him he
could come home on Sundays for dinner and to let us know how he was
doing. I still didn’t realize that he was doing drugs.
I couldn’t see my own denial.
He left. We didn’t
see him again for a long time. We
kept getting reports that people had seen him with cut-offs, barefoot,
with pockmarks on his face; that he was running with a crowd that was
heavy into drugs. For nine
months, he really turned himself over to his drug abuse, doing crystal
meth and marijuana. We
later learned that he had been doing marijuana for years and crystal
meth for many months before getting kicked out of our house.
What astounds me about
all of this is that I am still catching little remembrances and pieces
of thought and wondering why didn’t I catch on back then to what was
going on. To me, the
biggest thing that I kicked him out of the house for was being
irresponsible, not working and lying.
It somehow never came into my mind that I had a son who was doing
drugs, and he was doing them so substantially that he had been addicted
for a long time.
Another thing that
astounds me is that I had worked as a clinical director of a drug and
rehab program for 3½ years. I
used to lecture on alcohol and drug abuse.
I used to lecture on denial and how addiction worked.
And, yet, in my home, I failed to really understand what was
going on.
It’s interesting.
When I kicked my son out of the house, it broke my heart.
Susan says it brought her great relief, because some of the
insanity stopped. I wonder
if that is not the bind we are caught in. Something needs to stop the craziness, but at the same time
your heart is breaking while it is all happening.
There is no good answer either way.
Even though there was relief, now there was great worry and pain.
“Where is he? What is he doing? Is
he running the streets?” No
one knew where he lived. We
didn’t hear from him for months and months. On Thanksgiving he
wasn’t home. And it was one of the loneliest Christmases we had ever
spent. We have
three other children. All
of us were getting together and saying, “Where is Matthew?
Where is our son, our brother?” It still hurts.
Those were hard days.
Characteristics of
denial
Let me read you a
description of denial:
“Something
isn’t right, but you can’t figure it out.
You may have a vague idea what the problem is or see the symptoms
clearly. Others may even be pointing it out to you in very specific
terms. You care deeply about the person who seems hopelessly entangled
in refusing what you know is reality.
You usually interpret his or her rejection of truth as
stubbornness, stupidity, rebellion or insanity. (Oftentimes we thought
he was acting up just against us. He
was punishing us. It felt
that way.) You’re upset, angry and confused. You think ‘what’s the
matter with him/her? ’You take his/her refusal to change personally as
a rejection of your clear vision and willingness to help. (No matter
what you do you can’t fix the problem.
Nothing you say seems to fit and he doesn’t seem to hear or
change.) You just want the problem to go away - - - the person to
straighten up.”
When
you are thinking those thoughts that is really what denial is.
Denial by Webster’s definition is a disowning or disavowal
of reality. Denial is Not
letting yourself know what reality is, lying to yourself.
There
was something in me that didn’t want to know that my son had a drug
problem. This was the one that I had loved and sacrificed for. I
didn’t want to hear that he had a drug problem. Susan was less in
denial than I; she somehow saw it more clearly than I.
That is one of the things that I have noticed about denial: some
people in some situations seem more susceptible to denial than others.
Some of these differences are based on personalities and some of it is
based on family dynamics. But
understanding why some deny more than others is another lecture for the
future. Denial is a short-circuiting of our awareness of things too
disturbing to know.
One of the questions
you may ask is:
Why do we deny?
Back in 1969, Elisabeth
Kubler-Ross in her book On Death and Dying was the first
author who on a large scale had published information about the death
process; the stages people go through when they suffer loss.
She talked about denial being the first stage of anticipated
loss. Her original
definition has been refined as follows: Denial is the normal, natural
instinctive response to trauma, loss or shock, a conscious or
unconscious defense that all of us use to avoid, reduce or prevent
anxiety when we are threatened.
To even think that my
son was on drugs was a threatening, painful thing, a thing that
diminished the dreams, hopes and expectations I had for him. Denial is a
built-in mechanism that operates to screen out devastating information
and to prevent us from becoming overloaded.
Denial helps keep us from becoming emotionally overloaded.
It has a dampening effect. It
naturally helps us absorb something special and to do it slowly.
My
wife’s mom passed away last week at 79.
Now you would think that at age 79 we should have expected her
passing. The truth of the matter is, not at all. My wife’s grandmother lived to be 100 years old and it
seemed like Sue’s mom and all of her sisters were all going to live to
be over 100 years old. So,
to have Grandma die, even though she died graciously in her sleep, was
so unexpected that for the first three or four days last week I kept
saying, “I can’t believe it.”
Have you ever had something happen like that where you just
couldn’t believe it? That’s
denial. That’s that
mechanism in us that wants to dampen the dreaded experience, not fully
accept it, not fully embrace it and say yes, “It’s true.” We all have some of that “I can’t believe it” in us.
What
do we deny?
o
We normally tend to deny how bad it is and what is
really going on.
We don’t want to know
all the details because they are just too painful.
I’m not just talking about the first moment.
I’m talking about throughout the whole experience of knowing
that someone you love is living a life of pain, addiction, loss or
grief. All along the way we
don’t want to know. There’s something within us that doesn’t want to have to
see fully or embrace those facts and that pain. I didn’t want the
pain. I had many pressures going on in my life at that time and facing
my son’s drug use was just one more very painful pressure that I
didn’t need.
o
We have feelings of pain, guilt, anger and fear.
How
many times have you told yourself, “I don’t want to go there.
It’s too painful. I
don’t want to think about it.”
Or, “I don’t want to feel guilty.”
Anytime someone that we love or invest in goes wrong, one of the
first questions we ask somewhere in the process is, “What did I do
wrong?” Sometimes we
don’t want to ask the question period.
We even deny that we do feel that way, so we don’t have to deal
with it. We deny feelings
of anger and fear. I was so
scared for him when he was on the streets.
People do all kinds of insane things, especially with crystal
meth. They freak out when
they get wired and do weird things like shooting
people. They live in
a sub-culture with other people who are just as insane. It is a painful
place to be as a parent. So
you worry and fear a lot and don’t often admit the truth to yourself
or others.
o
Our child made this decision. We didn’t. He/She is
responsible for it.
There
is something inside of you that wants to deny that your child really
made the decision willfully to abuse drugs or alcohol.
He/She made the first decision, the first time, to use or abuse.
He/She also made that same decision many other times before it became so
powerful that it controlled his/her life. I didn’t make the decision
to abuse drugs, my son did. Yet, something deep inside of me as a parent
wanted to protect my son too much from his decision and therefore to
take the responsibility for his drug abuse.
o
Only they can truly fix their problem.
That
is a reality that we want to deny.
You know why? Because
most of us are “fixers.” People
don’t go into ministry unless they want to help other people.
If you can’t help your own kid, then how hard is that?
How difficult is that? If
you can’t fix him/her, then it is like something is not working inside
you. You especially want to
fix the problem when you care about him/her more than he/she cares about
himself. And you also want
to fix it when you look at your own imperfections and failures as a
parent. But since I didn’t cause it, I can’t fix it!
o
Parents sometimes contribute to the problem.
Contribution is
different from causation. We
didn’t cause our sons and daughters to use or abuse drugs.
That was their choice. However,
since there is no such thing as a perfect parent, we have contributed. Sometimes our contribution is very small and mainly present
in how we react to their addiction by giving too much blame and shame
and not enough honest loving help.
Other times, it is our own weaknesses that cause pain in them
that they then choose to medicate with drugs and/or alcohol.
It is always good to take the beam out of our own eye before we
take the speck out of someone else’s eye.
Doing so helps us help them the right way.
But remember, contribution is different from causation.
o
Others (especially siblings) know the issues.
Our other children knew
what was going on long before we did.
At the time, however, Sue and I were going through some deep
battles in our ministry. The time and attention we had to give the ministry detracted
from time given our children. The
result was that we were not as connected to them as we needed to be.
The kids didn’t want to burden us anymore.
The connection was not there for the honesty needed.
Others also saw the signs we were missing.
Three reasons why we
(clergy) are likely to deny problems in our children’s lives.
o
It’s normal . . . parents have their own worth and
ego invested in their children.
“Look
how cute my child/grandchild is!”
We are all invested in our children as a reflection of us. We all want those we love to do well. I have prayed and prayed and prayed for the lives and futures
of all my children. Part of
me doesn’t want to focus on their weaknesses.
I would rather tell others how great they are or how well they
are doing. Children can,
and usually are, a source of pride.
As clergy we especially don’t want others to know how bad off
our children might be since it could or would reflect on us.
o
We are ministers of the Good News. Therefore
expectations of self and others are higher.
Barna
Research Group said, “73% of surveyed Americans expect clergy
to live up to higher standards of moral and ethical conduct than they
expect of self or others.” We
all know this. The Scripture makes references to how we are to be examples
to the flock. Paul Robbins, CEO of Christianity Today
states, “Pastors remain the spiritual vanguard for the Kingdom of God.
There is no higher calling.” This
makes the expectations very high for us and our children to perform.
The
greater the expectations, the greater the resistance to acknowledge
failure. One of
the reasons is that there is more shame. We think we should know better
or be better! When you are expected to be so perfect, there is more shame
in being imperfect. I
didn’t think my children could do drugs without my knowing about it
and seeing the results.
o
Because we have so many ministry battles to fight, we
end up neglecting our spouses and children and don’t want to face one
more pressure, stress or failure.
We are too busy
“being about our Father’s business.”
Some believe old myths, such as, “If I take care of God’s
business, He will take care of my wife and children.”
Fuller
Institute of Church Growth 1991 Survey of Pastors:
-
75%
reported a significant stress-related crisis at least once a month
in their ministry.
-
40%
reported a serious conflict with a parishioner at least once a
month.
-
37%
confessed having been involved in inappropriate sexual behavior with
someone in the church.
-
33%
said that being in ministry was an outright hazard to their family.
Focus
on the Family 1998 Survey:
-
80%
of pastors are discouraged or are dealing with depression.
-
40%
of pastors are suffering from burnout, frantic schedules and
unrealistic expectations.
-
47%
of spouses are suffering from burnout, frantic schedules and
unrealistic expectations.
-
1500
pastors leave their assignments each month due to moral failure,
spiritual burnout or contention within their congregation.
-
84%
of clergy spouses are discouraged or dealing with depression.
When
you are fighting that many battles and you are trying just to survive,
somebody pays the price. When
my son went through his battle with drugs, it came at a time when I was
fighting a real battle, a battle that even ended up on the front page of
the newspapers. That battle took so much concentration and energy that I
missed things. I didn’t
have that extra energy to invest so that I could have either heard
better, seen better or known better. My days of difficulty caused me to
neglect my family and therefore be in denial about what was truly going
on in my son’s life.
What
to do with denial: Three principles
o
Talk a lot about what is happening.
The
more you share with trusted or safe people, the more you hear yourself,
the more it congeals, the more things click.
“Silence is not golden. It’s
destructive.” Find a safe friend or counselor and share both thoughts
and feelings. The
Fuller Institute study reported that 70% of pastors do not have
someone they consider a close friend.
Clergy are one of the most isolated groups of people there is.
Therefore, talk even and especially when it’s painful or
conflictory.
o
Admit to and face your shame.
It’s embarrassing. I
felt embarrassed to have a son in that position when I am supposed to
represent God to people. Shame is the enemy and you are only as sick as
your secrets and shame.
Shame makes you hide,
not face reality, and lie to yourself and others. Remember Adam and Even
in the garden? Remember: courage and confession are answers to shame.
o
Mourn, but not as others who have no hope!
To truly mourn means to
bare the anguish of your soul in words to God over:
what is wrong, what you’ve lost, and what your child is doing.
Sometimes this mourning includes tears.
I cried a lot. When
my son left the house, every single day in my prayer time I mourned and
grieved for my son. I prayed and prayed and prayed.
I prayed my heart’s anguish.
I prayed every thought I had.
I shared all of my pain. I reminded God of all the promises that
had been stored up for his life. I
asked God to help me find him, to drag him home, to do anything.
My son had a black
Jeep. Every time I saw a black Jeep, I would feel the pain. Then I would
pray and mourn. One day when I was praying for him, I prayed until all of a
sudden the burden lifted. One
month later he showed up on a Sunday night, with tears in his eyes,
saying he had quit using drugs a month ago and wanted to come home. I attribute that to the goodness of God. Not all drug abusers
come home. I am very grateful my son did.
Matthew 5:4 says,
“Blessed are those who mourn for they shall be comforted.”
I believe that one of the biggest things we can do is to cry and
cry out to God. There is a
difference between crying to ourselves or crying to Him. When you cry, cry
out to the Lord. Do not
mourn your pain by yourself. I
believe that He hears and He answers.
He brought my son home. He will comfort you
(2 Corinthians 1:4), He will guide you (Psalm 32:8), and He will
hear you.
My son is working now.
He is still not where we want him to be, but I tell you, he is a
lot better off than where he was. And
I am less in denial about who he is and what he and I both need.
“Those who sow in
tears shall reap with joyful shouting!” (Psalm 126:5)
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