We’re all masters of denial when facing painful truths in our lives

By David McElroy · December 8, 2017

I’m a master of denial. For one reason or another, I’ve become accustomed to disappointments over the last decade or so. Maybe longer. Denial has become my way of dealing with things I didn’t think I could control.

I was reminded of that again Friday evening when I unintentionally recorded some video of myself from the side. My MacBook was recording and Lucy wanted to jump into my lap for attention. I turned to let her jump up while she happily licked my face. I thought the video of her might be cute. But then I looked at it.

I know I need to shed some weight right now, but I walk around in denial about it most of the time. I’m about 25 pounds less than the worst I’d let myself get — maybe 35 pounds now that I think about it — but I still need to get rid of about 80 pounds of excess fat.

When I looked at that video of Lucy and me, every one of those 80 pounds seemed to be visible — and every one of them seemed to be taunting me.

There was a time when my reaction to such a realization was to scream at myself. On the inside, at least. But I’ve realized that’s counterproductive. Self-loathing only makes the problem worse.

The frustrating thing about denial is that it all stems from the fear of not being good enough and the terror that someone won’t love us if we can’t fix a problem. This quickly becomes counterproductive because the denial that allows us to avoid the fear also makes it easier to pretend the problem doesn’t exist — which makes it easier to allow the problem to continue.

People who don’t deal with a weight issue assume that the problem is about food. It’s not.

If you have an issue with eating too much and becoming overweight, the food is merely a delivery mechanism for the self-soothing “drug” you’re using to take the place of whatever you need to fill your unfilled emotional needs. It’s not rocket science once you finally understand that, but until you get it — and especially if this isn’t one of your issues — you focus on plan after plan to force yourself to eat differently.

I know the things I need and I know from experience which changes in my life change the way I eat. You would think knowing that would be enough to change my behavior, but it doesn’t work that way.

Here’s the weird thing.

I seem to be most aware of this problem — the most able to see through my fog of denial — when I’m poised at a watershed moment in my life. Those are the moments when you can clearly see two very different paths and you know that one simple decision will set in motion a chain of events that will leave you in one of two entirely different places. (To oversimplify it, the term comes from the point in terrain where the water on land flows one way here and in an entirely different direction starting a few inches away.)

When I’m at my most unhealthy, I can’t even look at the things about which I’m in denial. But when I’m at one of those moments when things could go one of two (or more) different ways, I start seeing clearly which things will change depending on which way I go. In a way that’s hard to explain, I’m at one of those moments lately.

I turn to denial when things hurt me the most. It’s easy to face reality about things that don’t hurt. But some things take a long time to accept, because they cut to the core of our emotional needs.

It hurts to accept that someone you want to love will never change and become emotionally healthy enough to be in your life.

It hurts to accept that someone you love will never love you enough to choose you.

It hurts to accept that you will never be good enough or successful enough or talented enough for everyone to love you.

It hurts to accept that a relationship will never been what you wanted it to be — and others will see you as a failure when you do something about it.

It hurts to accept that you will never be exactly what you hoped to become — that you will never become good enough to win the love of the people you don’t even realizing you’re still trying to win.

The list could go on. The specifics differ for all of us — and how we handle them differs in just as many ways.

Some people turn to alcohol and other recreational drugs. Some people turn to hedonistic forms of sex. Others turn to gambling or a thousand other things. Some people become addicted to making other people believe they’re successful. I turn to the drug called sugar.

The last time I thought I’d found love — about three years ago — I suddenly quit eating badly and I quickly started shedding excess weight. When that ended, the craving returned and the problem returned. Since then, there have been short times when I’ve been able to keep it under control for short periods of time through sheer willpower, but that’s something that will never last.

The only thing that really changes things for me is having the love and emotional security to begin making changes in my life that I know I need to make.

It’s not difficult to know what to do. The process isn’t a secret. It doesn’t require a special diet. But everything — for me, at least — hinges on the elusive elixir called love.

At this particular watershed moment, I could go one of several different directions. One thing that keeps appealing to me is to just delete every public presence I have in the world and to move somewhere far away without explaining where I’m going or why. Another direction is to stay where I am and live a more conventional life long enough to become wealthy — and then decide where to go. There are others. I don’t know what all my options are, but I know something has to change.

When I’m in denial, I allow things to drag along without change. When I allow myself glimpses of the realities I deny, I know that I have to make massive change. That’s why denial is so dangerous to me.

There’s a part of me that likes denial. I can pretend I’m going to have who and what I need. I can pretend that people love me and understand me. I can pretend all sorts of things.

But denial keeps me from changing reality. It’s not healthy. It leads to continued stagnation. It leads to even more hurt when the inevitable tortured hopes end up shattered.

I can’t promise myself that I’ll end the denial right now. I don’t know how to force it. I’ve tried that and it doesn’t work. I just know that I have to step away from it completely if I’m ever to have any of the things I need — and it’s in these moments of painful reality that I have some chance of changing things that need to be changed.

The idea of doing that is scary, though, because it means giving up on people and plans that are still painfully alive and very real in my heart.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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