Made Well - Page Two - Understanding Denial

Denial means distance

I’m fine! Nothing’s wrong! I said I’m fine!

These are words I would hear when I would try to provoke Uwem to talk to me after we had just had a fight OR when I thought there was something wrong, but she wasn’t ready to talk.

Interestingly enough, my middle son says the same thing to me when he’s upset.

I told myself these things, but not about me, it was about my marriage as Uwem was telling me we needed counseling.

Or even better, words I shouted within myself, after have some months of sobriety, and my counselor just told me I had a relapse.

Do you see the pattern? Someone is trying to step into “making something better” but for whatever the reason, the other person is pushing back hard.

I’m fine. We’re fine. I said I’m fine. I’m good.

My counselor would say over and over, in a really cheese way, that intimacy was not sex, it was INTO-ME- YOU -SEE. Or to see into someone and get them - feel what they feel - understand how they came to where they are now.

Intimacy is scary place because we divulge secrets, hurts, insecurities that we’d rather just leave alone.

In the movie “Get Out”, the girlfriends mother, much to the unwanted gesture, hypnotizes the boyfriend, and makes him face painful means that he has worked hard to suppress. She forces it out of him.

To avoid this scenario, many of us create distance between us, the true us, and others. Now the distance is not malignant, it was meant to protect our true vulnerable self, from the unsafeness of other people.

But what distance, let’s call it what it is, what denial does is creates distance between

Who we promote and who we really are

Who we really are and others

Who we really are and God

But that’s not why we are here. That’s not what we are doing. Intimacy can’t be forced. It comes when people feel safe enough to go there. That’s why Made Well Ministries exist - to create the safe space for you to feel what you feel instead of burying it.

Burying it, that’s funny, because that’s exactly what happened to a book found by Hilkiah the high priest in another attempt to rebuild the temple of God, yet again degraded because God’s people drifted into idolatry once again. The book was buried because the people of God had chosen a different reality than they book suggested. That book was exactly where they wanted it to be. Lost.

Its like, every time Judah could have read the book, they passed it on the bookshelf. Every time their eye glanced at the book, they quickly changed the direction of their focus and kept on moving. There were moments that the book accidently fell off the shelf (hello, triggered!), but instead of reading the book, they just put it back on the shelf.

Jeremiah the prophet had been yelling in the streets that the people of Judah needed to return to God, but Judah didn’t want to hear it. Instead they said to themselves: Everything's alright.

Jeremiah 6:14 GW

They treat my people’s wounds as though they were not serious, saying, ‘Everything is alright! Everything is alright!’ But it’s not alright.

2 Kings 22:8 ESV

And Hilkiah the high priest said to Shaphan the secretary, “I have found the Book of the Law in the house of the Lord.” And Hilkiah gave the book to Shaphan, and he read it.

He had to pick up the book and read it.