"And I said to my heart, Shut be thy door to pain!" (from a poem by M. Clarkson)
We must talk about yet another very formidable wall that must come down in order for healing to take place. The wall is one we will call Denial. Denial can be one of the most difficult barriers of all to the healing process. When we have been trained to deny our pain, to deny our need, we find that getting the necessary help in order for healing to occur will be nearly impossible - often by our own doing, whether we realize this is happening or not.
We were created with needs - needs for fellowship, intimacy, purpose, usefulness, dignity, love, companionship, safety. Somehow, though, somewhere along the line, we came to believe that having need was bad, and/or was proof of our weakness, which somehow lessened our worth and robbed us of our dignity and personhood.
Unmet needs, however, will leave us desperate for some kind of relief, fast! We will literally be driven by what we perceive we need, even if it is to be thought of as "together" or "having everything under control" in our lives. Sadly, denial leaves us in the dark, so to speak, about what our true needs even are. Whether we admit them or not, though, our internal sense of unmet neediness, whether we admit to it or not, will leave us vulnerable and unprotected, even while we are in the process of vehemently denying that we have any need at all. It is simply not possible to have our needs taken care of while simultaneously denying them.
What causes such ambivalence in our feelings of having need and having the need to deny them all at once? It can often be traced to the well-fortified walls of denial surrounding us!
Denial is the saddest form of deception, and often is the very thing that allows evil to prevail. We deceive ourselves when we tell ourselves (and others) that we have need of nothing and no one, when we refuse to allow the very help that God would provide for us so that our needs can be met. Unfortunately, it takes a strong sense of our own personal identity to have the internal fortitude to admit to having needs, especially when our families and communities have taught us that this is clearly unacceptable. What we believe about ourselves and having those needs will be the determining factor in not only how those needs will be met but also whether we will allow them to be met at all.
