Grappling with personal denial in a culture of avoidance
Complex personal behaviour, attitudes, beliefs and especially perceptions are extremely difficult to untangle, as are the manifold implications of the many intersections with a group, family, organization, political party, church, or even region and culture. Observing one’s actions, words, beliefs and attitudes, too, adds another layer of complexity to what is already an apparent infinite number of factors in any given moment.
What each person “sees” and considers important, at any given
moment, is coloured, from his/her perspective, by the mood, the history, the
ambience, the cognition and the multiple impulses that comprise a character or
personality. And from the ‘group’ perspective, there are the distinguishing
traits like structure, ethos, culture, leadership, belief system, values and
current curation of relevant size, trend lines, history and future probabilities.
Whether one’s gaze is on a single individual, or a specific
group, or on a specific set of circumstances, a case, a legislative bill, a
legal system, an educational system, there is also the tension between significant
individual parts/components and the whole. And while humans have a capacity to
make such discernments, we often fall into the trap of equating a highlighted “part”
as the “whole” of the person, or the case. In language, this is dubbed an
elision, when, for example, two sounds merge into a single sound. The language
of practical sense, ordinary street-speak, is predominantly an expression of
what has been noted, observed, with the occasional deduction or induction, in
order to sum up a set of observations. Such street-speak, however, customarily
pays little to no attention to those aspects of the person, the organization,
the negative, hidden, denied, avoided or repressed aspects of either the person
or the subject, whatever that might be.
We are swimming in oceans of objective data, themselves
increasingly starving for their own oxygen, both literally and metaphorically,
as we continue to dump dead things into that space. Some of the dead things, on
the literal level, include discarded plastics, drugs, and a wide range of
things for which we no longer have use. In the ocean of public discourse, too,
we are dumping many of the very defense mechanisms that individual humans
deploy in order to cope with strong, difficult, and perhaps even intolerable
feelings. There is a reasonable case to be made for the notion that we, both
individually and collectively, spend a good deal of our time over the decades
coming to terms (and the meaning of that phrase differs for each person) with
events, incidents, memories, traumas and tragedies that previously were psychically
insurmountable, or so we thought and believed.
Rightly or not, much of this space has been, and will continue
to untangle the unmistakable and intricate interaction between what the culture
is talking about and what the individual is facing, in the conviction that
these two ‘independent variables’ are not indeed, “independent” but rather
mutually inter-dependent. Who we are, as individuals, is necessarily a part of ‘all
that we have met’…we are reminded of this intimacy by Tennyson’s poem Ulysses:
I am a part of all that I have met
Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untravelled world whose margin fades
Forever and forever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make and end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!
And yet, for many, their experience is not ‘seen’ as a strong
arch, added to in strength and durability with the encounter of each new moment.
For many, experience is more like a never-ending storm, perhaps even a hurricane,
a tornado, an earth-quake, that seems to have slammed a door to the field of
hopes and dreams. And in the lives of many of those people, only a metaphoric
re-birth, a resurrection, a transformation, a new person, or a new challenge
offers the possibility that their cloud morphs into an “arch” or even a
telescope that can see sun and blue sky on a horizon previously laden in
darkness. The story of the life of Pfizer CEO, Albert Bourla, exhibits much of
this narrative, shared by so many whose families are survivors of the Holocaust.
His parents were Sephardic (originating from the Iberian Peninsula, modern
Spain and Portugal) Jews living in Thessolonika. Bourla told MSNBC’s Morning
Joe, today, that his mother used to say, over and over again to him, “Life is
good, sure we have suffered, but, look I have you and life is good!” He credits
her influence on him as helping him to the place where he is convicted of the
notion that none of us knows what we are capable of, unless and until we let go
of those limits we have accepted on our potential, both individually and collectively.
Thinking outside, the box, inside Pfizer, for example, in pursuit of the
COVID-19 vaccine meant two things: at least four levels of management were in
the room at all times when decisions were being made, so the structural
bureaucracy could not and would not impede progress, and refusal to accept
government funds meant that the Pfizer scientists would be uninfluenced or impeded
by government demands, another ‘outside-the-box” feature of the speed and the
success of the vaccine development story. Both Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’ and the
Bourla bio focus on the heroic person; however, similar and parallel stories
are accessible regardless of the level of education, achievement, wealth or
ethnic factors in lives everywhere.
The question, here, is how to begin the process of what might
be an impossible puzzle to solve: how for the purveyors of street-talk, for
example, to begin to include those influential background impulses that
continue to energize the moment, in the life of the individual, as well as in
the life of the family, the organization and the community. How, for example,
does a town whose history is intimately linked to a series of generations of
blue-collar, mining or industrial enterprises, in which workplace injuries,
stress and long-term health conditions continue to walk on those streets in
complete silence? Or, for example, how does a community whose experiences
include significant exposure to betrayal, in both the physical and the
inevitably emotional areas of life, engage in a collective process of grief,
share the pain by remembering its poignant scars, and begin to glimpse the ‘light’
of new awareness, new ways of ‘seeing’ not only the betrayal but the potential
(and usually undocumented and thereby ignored) pain of the perpetrator(s) of
the betrayal? How does a family who lost a loved one from lung cancer, for example,
begin to exercise the anger, the rage even, at those tobacco companies whose
advertising totally denied any responsibility for that disease as a result of their
cigarettes? How do those hundreds of thousands of families whose loved ones
perished from COVID-19, in substantial part because a president of the United States
was negligent in carrying out his duties of his office: not merely the legal
duties to uphold the constitution, but especially the moral and ethical duties and
responsibilities as a human being? How does a family of a loyal worker, dependent
on the income of that worker for survivor, for example, deal with not only the
loss of income, and the hope and security that came with that income, but also
the loss of dignity, community respect, and potential alienation not only of
the “redundant” worker but the school community of his/her children, the
neighbours, the social circle, and the prospect of trying to secure additional
work? The individuals who suffer at the ‘hands’ of the mega-corporations
(for-profit as well as not-for-profit), even if and when they made errors in
judgement, nevertheless, too often have been reduced to those errors, without a
passing glance to the whole person, or the responsibilities of the employer in
deploying that individual in untenable circumstances?
We are becoming, or perhaps already have become, a culture in
which microscopic attention to the “part” or the incident, or the event, or the
error in judgement, too often has been substituted for a full analysis of the
situation, as if we, collectively are prepared to comply with the determinants
of how our society works as established and imposed by those with excessive
power, excessive neurosis that demands their first priority is their own nest.
It is not merely the demise of the labour movement that we decry; it is also
the demise of corporate and governmental and organizational responsibility for
their part in the multiple crises we face as human beings. Denial of climate
change and global warming, just like the denial of cigarettes as the primary
cause of lung cancer, as well as secondary smoke-induced caners, continues to
face the world’s people and their governments, their corporations, their
universities and their hospitals. Denial of a process either of appeal or of conflict
resolution is the “power-down” answer to those details they have come to regard
as outside their sphere of influence, read, responsibility.
It is not only trump who has exhibited and championed this
kind of colonial attitude and behaviour, accompanied with and sustained by a
convention of social compliance in which the schools, the universities, the churches
and the social service agencies are both implicated and have to confront. We put
far too many people in prison, for reasons of social and cultural denial,
avoidance and other defense mechanisms too infrequently acknowledged.
For example, as polite, ‘fitting-in’ individuals, seeking to
avoid conflict and the pain it inflicts on all participants, we silently ‘go-along-to-get-along’…and
thereby permit the abuse of power while sabotaging ourselves and perpetuating
the abuse of power on others. Another of the ways by which we deflect strong
feelings of anger and anxiety is to displace those feelings onto others whom we
find to be non-threatening. Such deflection (displacement) inflicts unjust
anger on an unsuspecting innocent, too frequently one attempting to incarnate
and promote both peace and collaboration. So, in the process of displacement,
we have “avoided” how we really feel, while victimizing an innocent who is
trying to live a peaceful life of contribution. Some of us regress backwards,
when faced with strong and uncontainable emotions, and others rationalize the
situation, thereby pouring a veneer of denial over both our eyes/ears and the
situation itself, again permitting the ‘causative’ incident and person to
continue unimpeded, and unchallenged…both effectively becoming victims. For
many men, especially, sublimation, the redirecting of strong unsustainable
feelings into an object of an activity is another path denoting a defense
mechanism, a version of avoidance and denial, an escape from the full acknowledgement
of the legitimate feelings, as well as an avoidance of attempting a new pathway
to confront, without engaging in the same or similar behaviour as that which
precipitated those feelings in the first place. For those who are, or who see
themselves as accomplished ‘actors,’ another defence mechanism that might
appeal, in order to defend against unwanted and intolerable strong and deep and
justified feelings, is termed reaction formation, whereby an individual behaves
in precisely the opposite manner to those strong negative emotions, so that no
one will really ‘know’ and/or catch on to the truth of the situation that has taken
place.
There are other ways to explore the concept of denial. One
really insidious type in the denial of denial, whereby an individual simply
denies s/he is in denial. And then there is the denial of a cycle, in which a
pattern of power-down abuse has created a pattern or a cycle, which has become
so familiar that it has taken on a life of its own, supported, aided and abetted
by the denier. And, as mentioned previously, a denial of responsibility is the
one cited about the former U.S. president, along with multiple corporations, and
philanthropists whose political agenda is dedicated to the proposition that the
pursuit of profit reduces the societal goal of clean air, water and land to an
irritant, and worse, a potentially lethal prosecutor of ‘my’ personal and corporate
and philanthropic goals and objectives, so that the zero-sum game becomes the
driving force for his/her actions, beliefs, perceptions and values.’
Underlying all of the various defense mechanisms that individuals
deploy, however, is a culture reared and nurtured in dominant professions like
the law and medicine. In the legal definition of evidence, four types are
listed: real, demonstrative, documentary and testimonial. In the medical field,
a symptom is presented often in a complaint, while a signal is noted in a
sensation. A subjective expression, too, qualifies as a kind of symptom. The scientific
laboratory, too, is fully engaged in, and committed to the pursuit of evidence
that either supports or refutes a theory, or an experiment based, itself, on a
theory. So, in street-talk, as well as in self-talk, we all engage in a form of
imitation of one or other of the many paths by which we attempt to cope, and even
to confront whatever it is that might be ‘bothering’ us. And in a culture
seemingly ‘drugged’ with defense mechanisms, it will be increasingly difficult,
if not impossible, for many to break through the veil of denial, avoidance and psychic
‘paving’ that we have all consciously or unconsciously laid down on our own
path, and on the paths of our children and grandchildren.