I spent many years travelling the world with a backpack. In an old market place somewhere in the Middle East I came across what was to become one of my favourite slogans. It was on a t-shirt: Denial is not a river in Egypt.”
I know you have probably seen this slogan on bumper bar stickers, walled graffiti and Facebook posts, but it is worthy of a re-visit no matter how many times you have seen it and smiled.
Swiss psychiatrist Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, in her 1969 work, On Death and Dying, outlined five stages of grief for people facing death or the death of a loved one. She proposed that often the first stage was denial.
I recently received a sharp reminder about this. In my early years as a high school teacher, I had the joy of working with a colleague named Gary Finch. “Finchy” taught science and was popular. He was one of the fittest and most sporty blokes I have ever met, and his movie- star looks caused heads to turn everywhere.
A few years into my backpacking period I managed to have Finchy employed as one of my staff running a teen village at Blue Star Camp in North Carolina. Again, he was a hit with everyone: a great summer camp counsellor, great jock and all round great bloke.
After summer camp in 1987, Finchy travelled onto Canada where he met his future wife. A decade later my wife and I visited the Finches and their two children in Toronto. He was still the larger-than-life athletic bloke living life with a smile.
Recently I was presenting at a conference on the Gold Coast in Australia and I received a message from a mutual friend that Finchy had died. There were no details at that stage, just that he was dead.
My first and sudden response was one of disbelief. I just couldn’t comprehend it. My brain, heart, and tear ducts all said the same thing, “It must be a mistake.” How could Finchy possibly be dead?
With a few calls and emails and lots of shaking my head, I learned some details. When it emerged that his death had not been by a car accident or such, my disbelief/ denial bells rang loud. How could such a fit, athletic, superman like Finchy have died? It didn’t ring true.
The death notices started to appear on a funeral web site and it became evident that his death was due to a brain tumour. Another layer of disbelief/denial then kicked in. Finchy was a man of sharp mind, how on Earth could that happen?
As I called mutual friends and mates of Finchy’s, each person responded with the same sense of disbelief/denial. “Can’t be. I was only talking on the phone with him a month ago. Are you sure?”
Gradually I recalled my Middle Eastern market t-shirt and the work of Kubler-Ross. Denial wasn’t a river in Egypt; it was a first reaction to devastating news.
Maybe the Disbelief/Denial Response is one that is meant to be.
On hearing news we might need to disbelieve before we seek further information – confirmation. When Jon Bon Jovi was reported dead on Facebook posts, it was kind of smart to read with a sense of disbelief and then go and seek further information before confirmation (or not).
The “formula” may be:
• Hear news
• Check source(s)
• Seek more information
• Confirm
• Or deny
However, it seems that a lot of times we don’t do the clarifying. We deny and leave it at that. Or accept without checking and then spread the gossip.
To deny/accept without checking and researching may be part of our brain’s way of making quick binary decisions:
• Good/Bad
• Right/Wrong
• Agree/Disagree
• Black/white
• Yes/No
• All/Nothing
• On/Off
• Always/Never
We do this rather than thinking in a spectrum of possibilities and nuances. Perhaps this explains the following:
My mate’s marriage broke up, and he said, “I didn’t see it coming” where as all onlookers thought it obvious.
I didn’t do it, it wasn’t me; I did not have sexual relations with that woman.
A CEO facing a culture of mismanagement and deceit said he failed to notice any signs.
Two characters in Ernest Hemmingway’s The Sun Also Rises having a conversation. One character asks “How did you go bankrupt?” The other answers “Gradually, then suddenly.”
Being smart – traveling to wisdom – means being aware that sometimes our default brain pattern, our default emotional position, can be denial. It doesn’t have to become the river we always swim in, it might just be the river we dip in and then swim through. There is another shore to stand on and look at things from a different perspective.