Sometimes hearing someone’s voice without seeing their image feels more intimate than seeing them in person or watching them on television.
Hearing Amity Bitzel describe the terror of surviving her father’s drunken rages…
…and then hearing him calmly deny her accounting of her childhood and mention horseback riding lessons and other privileges bestowed upon her startled me. I wasn’t there, and there is no tangible way for her to prove her case.
- I doubt he made up the horseback riding lessons.
- I doubt she made up the drunken rages.
Healing from the psychic wounds of child abuse is a theme I explored in my novel Dream Walking and a theme that Nancy Werlin nailed in her novel Rules of Survival and Dave Pelzer depicted in his brutal memoir The Lost Boy.
Denial Mined as a Theme
David L. Ulin’s Jan 31, 2013 LA Times review of Christa Wolf’s novel A City of Angels includes a conversation Wolf had with a psychologist about her own experience forgetting wartime events and quotes the psychologist as saying, “A person can forget anything. They need to, in fact. Don’t you know this line from Freud: We cannot live without forgetting,”
Radio is more a part of my life than TV or social media. I listen to the radio when I drive, when I cook, when I write, when I’m relaxing with my children, and sometimes when I write. National Public Radio, NPR, has become my connection to national and international events and more.
It is painful that NPR and PBS are under assault and federal funding that has already been designated for both for the next two years has been clawed back.
Achieving Denial
There are various ways to achieve denial.
- Blackout Drunk. When someone drinks so much alcohol that they achieve an exceptionally high blood alcohol level, it affects their brain function in such a way that they cannot remember what they experienced while they were “blackout drunk.”
- Pathological Liars. Pathological liars can achieve denial because sometimes they believe their lies.
- When traumatic events are so toxic, denial can help one survive them because it becomes safer to bury, deny, or suppress the traumatic event or events.
- Denial fuels addiction. Addicts deny that addiction is harming themselves or others.
Denial leads to conflict, and storytelling is all about conflict.