How DENIAL Is QUIETLY RUINING You | Part 1 of Denial Decoded Series

Once you understand this concept, it is going to forever change how you deal with denial, whether you're trying to help yourself because you think you might be in denial about something, or you're trying to help someone else who you're worried is in denial about something. This is a real game changer. For those of you who are new here, welcome to Put the Shovel Down, the YouTube channel designed to help you understand the science and psychology of addiction so that you can get and stay 5 steps ahead of it. My name is Amber Hollingsworth. I've been helping people and families overcome addiction for 20+ years now, and I'm a firm believer that you are not powerless. You can beat addiction and you don't have to wait until you hit bottom. The key is to understand exactly what you're dealing with. Now, I know there's a lot of channels out there where people tell their stories, and I love those channels. They're great. There's nothing like a good underdog comeback story to warm your heart. But unfortunately, there is not enough information out there about the psychology of addiction, about the science of it, about how it really works and what to do to get on the other side of it. That's what we're all about here on Put the Shovel Down. All right, let's get into our topic. Okay, fancy psychological word alert. Here it comes. You ready? Cognitive dissonance. Now, some of you may already be familiar with this term, and if you are, this is going to be an easy train to jump on board with. If you're not familiar with the term, don't be scared off. It sounds fancy, but it's really not. In fact, I feel almost certain you are an expert in Just like I am. By the time we get to the end of this video, you're going to be like, oh yeah, I know what that is. I do that thing all the time. So cognitive dissonance, it's just a fancy word that means really squirmy, uncomfortable feeling that we get inside when our values and our beliefs don't line up with our behaviors and our actions. It's that really uncomfortable feeling we get when we hold 2 separate opposing thoughts at the same time and we can't seem to make sense of it. It's a squirmy kind of feeling. It's uncomfortable and it's more than just psychologically uncomfortable. It creates a physical uncomfortableness in our body. We have all experienced this before. In fact, as I was sitting down on the couch writing in this notebook right here about what I wanted to say in this video, I got a text from my husband and it created a lot of cognitive dissonance. Let me tell you about it. So my son just got out of school for summer break, and so him and my husband immediately took off to Tennessee to go on this Fishing trip, and I was super happy for them because they were going to get to visit family and go fishing, do outdoorsy, you know, guy stuff, which they love. They've been down there a few days and it's been raining pretty much every day. So I've been feeling kind of sad for them because I know they were all excited about going fishing with my husband's brother and nephew, which is right around my son's age. It was going to be this big, cool, fun thing. I got a text message from my husband right as I was doing these notes with a short little video in it. And the video is of his brother. I guess they had just come back from the fishing trip and he's taking these massive Catfish out of this thing in the boat or whatever, and he's throwing them into this cooler with ice. I mean, these things are massive. So he's picking up these catfish, he's throwing them in this cooler one by one. I mean, there's a bunch of them, and I can see these catfish like they're still alive. They're like squirming as he's throwing them in this cooler. The amount of uncomfortableness I got was, was big. Okay. I was feeling super squirmy because on one hand, I'm really excited for my husband and my son. And my brother-in-law, my nephew, because they got all these big fish and I know it was like a big, fun, exciting day. But on the other hand, that watching these fish squirm made me feel so uncomfortable inside because I'm like feeling sorry for these fish. It's hard for me to even watch. I know a lot of you, you're judging me right now, right? Some of you are judging me like, Amber, oh my gosh, it's fishing. Why are you being such a baby? And others of you are judging me like, oh well, maybe they shouldn't be doing that or whatever. I know you got your feelings about it, but that's not the point of this story. Okay? The point is, is this is cognitive dissonance. I was feeling super squirmy. In fact, I literally had to stop the video early. As the video's going on, I'm like watching the little red line go across and I was like, how much more? How much more? I can't take it. And I had to just stop it. Now, I sent a nice text to my husband because I was excited for them and I don't want to discourage them from doing this. And I also know That I'm being a little bit ridiculous because yeah, I eat fish. In fact, I eat meat. I haven't eaten catfish my whole life. I'm from Tennessee, so I know that in order to have fish or meat to eat, they have to be caught or hunted or whatever. Yeah, I get it. But that's what I mean when I say there's these 2 conflicting feelings, in this case about 10 conflicting feelings that make you feel really squirmy inside. Now that I've explained that, I bet if you think about it long enough, you can think of a time just today when you've experienced that because it's an everyday common experience for us. We all have it, but the feeling in and of itself, that's not what denial is. That is the thing that triggers the coping mechanisms that make up denial. Because when we have that tension and uneasiness inside, we naturally want to make that go away. And that's where all the other defense mechanisms start to come in. It's all the little psychological ways that we ease that tension and uncomfortableness. You know, we have this like every time we eat something unhealthy, but we've been telling ourselves that we're going to be on a health kick. We have this every time we choose to work an overtime shift and that makes us miss something important with our family. It's this conflict that we have inside. And of course we have it. We're pulled into a million different directions and the answers are not always black and white. And so we have to make sense of this conflict in order to make that feeling go away. There are a few different ways of doing that. And if you're like me, you probably use several of these defense mechanisms to deal with it. The first thing you could do to make that uneasiness go away is you could change your behavior. And sometimes it's kind of clear and easy how to do that. And sometimes it's not so clear and easy. Like for example, when it's like eat the healthy food or the unhealthy food, it's kind of clear that if you ate the healthy food, you'd probably feel less uneasy about it. But sometimes it's not even that clear about how to change our behavior to resolve the feelings. Luckily, there's a lot of other good defense mechanisms to come into play. Another thing you can do is just change the thought, and there's lots of ways to do that. For example, you can either rationalize your decision, you can minimize the consequences of your decision, and if those things aren't working, then you can just distract yourself. And if that's not working, you can go to another level and you can numb yourself. Or you could even seek outside reassurance. These are all just normal things that we all do to ease that discomfort. And for the most part, these are healthy defense mechanisms. But when it comes to addiction, things can get a little out of control. And the reason is when you have an addiction, your behaviors are in constant conflict with your value system. And so there's this never-ending need to ease this tension. And I'm not even talking about like the physical withdrawal symptom kind of tension. That's a whole nother thing. We got other videos about that. This is where denial comes from because when you have an addiction, you are constantly having to do this to the point that you create these entire narratives and storylines. You get to the point where you're delusional about the reality of your situation. Like your view on what's going on is so far off that other people want to take you by the shoulders and shake you into seeing the truth. Unfortunately, That just really doesn't work. I've been doing this work for a very long time, and no matter how many times I have seen denial in action, it still surprises me. In fact, sometimes it flat out shocks me to see it, even though I've seen it and heard it more times than I could possibly ever count. It's just surprising. Of course, it's easy to see from the outside. You don't need to have any kind of big fancy counselor psychology degrees to be able to look at someone else's problems from the outside and see exactly what they need to do. That's inherently But one of the reasons why I'm explaining this concept to you is because I want you to have empathy and understanding for it. I want you to relate to how you do this in your own life on an everyday basis, because having empathy for it and understanding of what it is, is going to help you make decisions about it much more effectively. For example, just recently I was working with this lady. She's a mom and a wife. She's trying to overcome a marijuana addiction. And when I first met with her, she had a million reasons why she was gung-ho and she was ready to deal with this problem. She was very able to tell me all the problems it was causing for herself, for her family, all the reasons why she needed to change it and wanted to change it. And for the first couple sessions, we were moving right along. We were on track. But on the third session, she started telling me how she was actually surprised about how easy it was to stop the marijuana. And she's been thinking about that, about how easy it was to stop. And then she realized that Her problem must have not been that bad. I mean, would she have really been that able to stop so easily if the problem had been that bad? And I could tell just from talking to her, even though she had been sort of coming out of denial for the 2 sessions before that, we were going back into denial in the 3rd session. Yes, denial is tricky and sneaky and is not a black or white issue. Like you're in denial or you're not. There are all these layers and levels and back and forth with it. And I want you to be able to recognize it when you see it. So let's talk about some big, giant warning signs of denial and how you're actually going to hear people verbalize them out loud. I'm going to read you a big list, and if I say one that you've either said before or heard someone else say before, I want you to put a little hands up emoji in the comments below as if you're raising your hand as in, yeah, I've heard that one before. Let's start with the classic, it's not that bad. This is a minimizing technique. To say, yeah, I probably shouldn't drink. I probably shouldn't do X, Y, or Z, but it's not that bad. Or here's another one. I still do lots of other good things. Yeah, I drink too much sometimes, but I'm a good dad, or I'm a good wife, or I'm a good provider, or I always make sure there's dinner on the table. I always make sure everybody else has their needs met. This is that defense mechanism. This is that rationalization way of Saying, yeah, it's a problem over here, but it's not that bad. It's okay because I have all these other things. You see how that thought makes us feel a little better about the situation, but also brings us a little further from the truth of the situation? How about, here's another one. I don't get violent. It's not like I get intoxicated and then get abusive to everyone in the house. Or I don't do it every day. Yeah, I probably do it too much when I do it, but it's not like I'm doing it every day. Or she's always so negative. It doesn't matter what I do. She's always critical. Or he always worries about everything. He makes a big deal about it. This is a way of putting it on another person, and it's a way of focusing, distracting yourself from what's going on with you to focusing on what's the problem going on with someone else. Or here's another one. What about when you say or tell yourself, it's my only me time. I do everything for everyone else. This glass of wine at the end of the day, that's my me time. Everyone deserves some me time. Or here's another one. It doesn't happen that often. Every single one of these examples I'm giving you, I hear all the time. These are the super common ones. And this whole, it doesn't happen that often thing. I hear this one a lot, and I hear this frequently from people who drink or use pretty regularly, but they feel like the bad things that happen don't happen that often. They'll tell me about a few incidences where they did something really stupid, like maybe they got a DUI, maybe they were intoxicated and they missed like an important family event, whatever it is. And they'll say, yeah, but you know, it doesn't happen that often. Even though they may drink or get intoxicated often, they're Kind of minimizing it by saying these really bad moments, they're not really that common. Another way of easing that tension is to say, well, I do it because I do it because I have really bad anxiety. I do it because I have trauma in my history. I do it because I'm exhausted at the end of the day at work. I do it because I think too much and it's nonstop and it's the only way to calm those thoughts. Or another version of that is everyone does it. It's not that big of a deal. Again, it's another minimizing technique. Here's another one for you. You're going to die from something. You might as well die happy. So this happens when we know whatever we're doing is really unhealthy and it's causing health problems and it's not good for us, and maybe it's even going to cause us to die prematurely. Sometimes we ease the uncomfortableness by telling ourselves we won't let it happen again. Like we won't go MIA or we won't drink that much again, or we won't do that one really bad thing when we drink too much again, or we won't let ourselves get angry. All these different ways which we convince ourselves that we're going to keep the substance or the addiction in check, but we're going to somehow keep it under control and it's going to be different. Now, a different variation of denial is when you hear someone say something like, well, it's just who I am. I've always been this way, or I'm a screw-up, something like that. This may look like you are being honest with yourself about the situation, but in reality, that's not what's happening here. It's actually just another way of letting yourself off the hook from dealing with the situation. Now, why is this important to know? It's important to know because if this is you doing this, you can catch yourself doing it and maybe get a little bit more honest with yourself. But it's especially important to know if you're trying to help someone else who you think is struggling with some kind of addiction and who's in denial about it, whether it's your friend, your family member, or maybe you're an addiction counselor or you're a peer support specialist or you're a sponsor and you're trying to help someone. Here's what's not going to work. If you follow your instincts and you try to force someone to see the truth faster. And you do that by trying to turn up the heat per se and make them see how they're behaving badly. They're making wrong choices. They're doing wrong things. They're screwing up their life. They're screwing up other people's life. And guess what happens when you increase the volume on the cognitive dissonance? You increase the amount of denial defense mechanisms that are in play. So inadvertently you're interacting with this other person in a way that maybe isn't all that helpful. Now, there's going to be a part 2 to this video where I talk to you about how do you Sidestep these defense mechanisms? How do you help someone come out of denial? It's actually the core concepts and premise for our Invisible Intervention program. In our part 2 of this, we're going to be delving into the science and psychology and the philosophies behind why those techniques work and how you need to approach a person who's in denial. Because chances are the way you've been doing it, not that effective. For example, if you've been trying to Force someone who's in denial to go to like 12-step meetings or any other kind of meetings, then what's going to happen is they're going to go to those meetings and they're going to be scanning purposefully and listening for how all these other people are way worse than they are, thereby making the denial even worse. Or maybe you're trying to send them to a counselor when they don't think they have a problem or when they're not decided that they want to do something about it. You know what they're going to do? They're going to go and they're going to tell that counselor the story in such a way they're going to leave out really important details and they're going to get that counselor on with their thinking. And the counselor's not going to mean to, but it's highly possible that they could be making it even worse because they're not getting the whole story. And I can assure you that one of the things they're going to do if you're pushing on them is go to other people, other friends, other family members to seek reassurance. And they're going to do the thing where they don't tell the whole story and other people are going to be validating their point of view and the way they see it. So you got to be really careful about how you approach these situations. I want you to think of it like little tripwires out there on the ground that if you don't know exactly where they are, you're going to accidentally set off one of those landmines. Now, like I said, there's going to be a part 2, so make sure you check out part 2 of this video series if you want to know how to sidestep those tripwires. And in the meantime, I have a free download quick start guide called Say This, Not That. It's going to help get you started down the road of how to interact with someone who's struggling with an addiction In a way that's not going to make things worse. I'll put the link to that in the description below, and I'll see you in part 2.