Adult children: the secrets of dysfunctional families

PART III 
WHAT HAPPENS TO ME?
"Some say that we are different people at different periods of our lives,
changing not through effort of will, which is a brave affair, but in the
easy course of nature every ten years or so ... I think one remains the
same person throughout, merely passing as it were in these lapses of time
from one room to another, but all in the same house. If we unlock the
rooms of the far past we can peer in and see ourselves, busily occupied in
beginning to become you and me." 
J.M. Barrie, from the Dedication 
to his first edition of Peter Pan

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10 
The Denial
''I don't need any help. I can overcome this myself."
"Marital problems? We don't have any marital problems. George
has just been so tired lately from too much stress."
"But I'm not a ..."
"We didn't have any alcoholism in our family. Well, Grandma liked
her brandy now and then, but ..."
Martin Short, one of the creative stars of NBC's Saturday Night
Live, portrayed the epitome of defensiveness and denial in one of
the characters that he developed for that show.
Recovering alcoholics have uproarious laughs when one of their
fellows recalls acting seriously the way that Short acted in jest.
"I know that. Everybody knows that. It's so silly that you would
think that I didn't know that. I'm not getting defensive. It's you
who're getting defensive. I'm nor defensive!'
Denial is one of the ways that we protect ourselves from a reality
that is too painful for us to let into our conscious minds. It serves a
healthy purpose as well as an unhealthy one, depending upon how
we use it. When we suffer a catastrophic loss, it is appropriate for
us to go into a state of denial for a while. It's as if a protective
shield goes up, which we can later let down little by little as our
egos are able to make sense out of the tragedy. This is what we do
when

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Page 102
someone close to us dies, when we lose a job, when our house
burns to the ground or when we are informed that we have a
terminal illness. As our psychic wounds begin to heal, we let more
and more of the reality become real, until one day we are ready to
go on with the rest of our lives.
In dysfunctional systems the catastrophe that hits us is a continuous
one and denial becomes a way of life, rather than a protective
measure to be used only in extreme circumstances. The pain of
living in a dysfunctional system is akin to slow torture as opposed
to dying an instantaneous death. Day-by-day, year-by-year, decade-
by-decade, we crawl deeper and deeper into a shell of denial,
defensiveness, isolation and emptiness that is fueled by our shame
and embarrassment at the thought of anyone ever finding out what
is really going on inside of us. That is the nature of dysfunctional
systems they are closed and implosive, ever more self-destructive.
In that sense, they are just like malignant tumors in the body.
Denial is very tricky to spot sometimes, too. We know many people
who have actually quit drinking or using cocaine entirely, and yet
who are still in almost complete denial about their disease. We
know of others who can clearly state that they are work addicted or
drug addicted or relationship addicted, and yet continue to fuel and
practice their addiction.
They say, "I'm not in denial. I know I'm an alcoholic. How can I be
in denial?"
Well, take a look around you! Open your eyes! Look at the trail of
destruction you continue to leave in your path. Look at the empty,
desperate relationships. Look at the spouses and children and

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friends who are struggling painfully with the way that you treat
them. They love you but they hate you. They want to be with you
but they are terrified of you. They are becoming addicts of one sort
or another themselves.
We Are All In Denial
We can buy a new house, have another child, move to a new city,
switch from whiskey to beer or try any number of other pointless,
useless tricks to "make things right", but until we admit that things
are not the way we fantasize them, nothing gets better. And all of
us in the addictive system do it, not just the one at whom we are all
pointing our fingers.

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Page 103
Mom may be the "Identified Addict" who is hooked on Valium; but
if you've been in the system for any length of time, you're some
kind of an addict as well. Addiction breeds addiction. We make
excuses for the self-destructive addictions of our loved ones
because underneath it all, we are struggling with the same
problems. It's simply a lot safer to point our fingers at someone
else.
What's more, we learned our denial way back in childhood and
brought it with us into adulthood, which is why we wound up with
a cocaine addict or a sex addict or a TV junkie in the first place.