What Hurts Me And You Don’t See – Emotional Denial

Building and being part of a  relationship  is not easy. It’s like a puzzle where we need to fit corners with gaps, fears with needs, desires with frustrations. However, it is an adventure that deserves to be lived at any age and at any time, because it nourishes us, builds us up and, at the same time, makes us learn as people.

If we did a survey to find out what is the aspect that most concerns or causes couples to distance themselves, we would have as an answer, without any doubt, the incomprehension ,  “you don’t understand me”  or “you don’t see that it hurts me ”.

Maybe it’s true that  “men are from Mars and women are from Venus”,  who knows, but the interesting thing is that, in many of these behaviors, there actually hides a clear “emotional denial”.  That is, there are people who realize that something is missing, that something is happening and, however, choose not to see, to turn away, not to speak…

Emotional denial is a defense mechanism by which we avoid recognizing that there is a problem. Let’s talk about this today, about this aspect so common in our love relationships .

Emotional denial and the mask that hides the problem

Emotional denial  can manifest itself in many different ways. Let’s look at some very clear examples:

Case 1

Let’s think of a woman who, daily, feels asphyxiated by her  unhappiness. However, she refuses to acknowledge such a feeling. She lives with a partner who loves her and has lived with her for several years, however, there are certain aspects that were once insignificant but have now become huge black holes. He is an ironic man, who tends to ridicule his wife and despise her, both in public and at home, he does it as if it were a joke, but his self-esteem has dropped  incredibly.

However, she tells herself that her partner doesn’t do these things with bad intentions, that she knows he loves her, that this is just his way of being, that there is no harm. This would undoubtedly be a place for doubts of a very clear type of emotional denial. She herself justifies her partner’s behavior, denying the reality of the problem, her unhappiness, her low self-esteem and her humiliation.

Case 2

In this second case, we have a young woman who stopped feeling the attraction she felt at the beginning of her relationship. You don’t feel like a dreamer anymore, you don’t have fun with your partner. However, he doesn’t dare expose such a feeling to his partner and hopes that he’ll figure it out on his own.

But what happens? Your partner knows perfectly well that something is going on, but prefers not to see the problem and to hide it as if he hadn’t noticed. He opts for emotional denial so as not to show the fact that he has to face the situation.

As you can see, the dimension of emotional denial, or “Nothing is happening,”  is actually a very recurrent defense mechanism when we talk about relationships; it is a clear example of insecurity and immaturity, where many personal fears are hidden. 

How to Confront Emotional Denial

We can all practice  emotional denial, or see how our partner habitually uses it to avoid facing certain things. How can we dissolve or make this very frustrating defense mechanism disappear?

Take these aspects into account:

1. Understand, first of all, that  denial is a defense mechanism, that is, its purpose is to protect us, to put a blindfold on, but in the long run this ends up hurting us.

2. If your partner is the one who does this, make him realize that turning a blind eye to the evidence is not going to make things any better. However, keep in mind that  it will not be easy for your partner to admit that he practices denial daily in his life. You will encounter a lot of opposition.

3. You must use confrontation. Faced with  a denial, offer evidence. “ Don’t you realize that behaving like this hurts me? Can’t you see that if you continue along this path, you will take me away from you?”. Every action has a consequence, even more in love relationships, where a balance of forces and inversions is always necessary. If one offers more than the other, or if there is one who always loses, the relationship will deteriorate every day.

4. To confront emotional denial,  we will go through the same process as mourning. In other words, first there will be misunderstanding, then anger, but little by little, the problem will take over in its entirety, and then face it with full force. With courage.

The problems are worth facing.