When reality is too painful to admit, we may well block it out of our consciousness. To come to grips with this "denial" may be the most torturous experience of our life. The introductory article to the problem of denial is linked in the left column along with other related articles.
April Fools' Joke
On April 1, 2002, a strange email arrived in my inbox. It came from my husband, and seeing that he was sitting only a few feet away from me, I asked him what it contained. He told me that he had not sent me anything. I responded that the first line reads "Hi sweetheart."
He got instantly excited, jumped up and told me that it was a mistake, chased me from my computer and deleted it. This unexpected eratic behavior gave me the first alarm message of my marriage. As soon as he got up from my computer, I checked the one and only item in the "Recently Deleted Email" folder. Here it is:
Subj: Phone Call
Date: 4/1/2002 19:36:51 CST
Hi sweetheart,
I will be going out for a while in about an hour. I can use my Primus phone card to call. If we do not connect at that time, I will be with you online on AIM at 9:00 p.m. your time or earlier.
Your telephone call and our ensuing conversation were totally ignored. I suggest you can call any time. If I am not alone when you call, we can at least communicate an arrangement for another mode/time. I am switching the answerer to toll-saver (4 rings before answer). If you don't get a response in two rings, just hang up. In the event that there is a degree of urgency, phone my cell phone, again anytime. If I don't answer, leave a message there.
Whichever way, my love, we shall be together this evening.
My love is for you alone, my darling.
Orion **************
Wake-up Call
That email woke me out of my denial. It was not so much the fact that my husband was having an affair which stopped me cold but the fact that he was ridiculing this unsuspecting idiot wife of his who did not even catch on when he talked to his lover right under her nose.
After my husband went to sleep, it took me exactly 15 minutes to ascertain the identity and address of the woman. All I needed was a phone bill and the Internet White Pages search on Excite.com.
It took a few more sleepless nights to piece together the evidence of thirteen years of infidelity from letters, restaurant receipts, taped telephone conversations, and chat transcripts which my would-be Casanova had carefully saved for me and left within easy reach, some of them within a couple of feet of my desk. It appeared that he wanted me to find them, if not consciously, then at least subconsciously.
Knowledge without Comprehension
After two sessions of marriage counseling, the realization hit me suddenly that I had been watching the signs of infidelity throughout my marriage. I had seen and heard proof many times over. Friends who had witnessed his illicit encounters had been trying to warn me gently. I had also overheard his exploits ridiculed by waitresses who were not aware that I was within earshot.
Nothing had registered. Why not? It was too painful for me to admit that I was being treated like a fool. So I defended my husband to my friends, and they finally gave up trying to help.
He had also convinced me that I had become frigid. Whenever he rejected my attempts at closeness, I would cry myself to sleep, but it did not occur to me that a frigid wife would not have felt sexual desires for her husband.
The Moral of the Story
Many times we see people who appear to be unable to comprehend what is going on in their lives. Until it happened to me, I believed that these people are in denial all right, but I had no idea what the word denial means. It does not mean that the person is pretending not to know. It means that she actually does not know, just like I did not know, at least not consciously.
How can we help people in denial? There is no easy answer to this question, but I wish that someone had taken me by the scruff of the neck and brought me to my senses. I could have saved myself unspeakable problems which now appear unconquerable. I could have put an end to being taken for a fool, saving my self-esteem. No, it was not kind of my friends to let me continue in denial, because sooner or later I had to wake up, realizing that I had lost my self-respect.
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