I didn’t use to understand the importance of denial in the grief process.
Oh, I labeled it and judged it.
I wondered why some parents stayed in it for so long.
But I didn’t consider denial to be a necessary, valuable and healthy part of grieving until I was evaluating a preschool child with severe autism and significant delays.
The parent had initiated the referral and appeared to be in complete agreement with the test results. The rating scales matched the skills that I observed. I judged this parent to be grounded in reality…until she brought up the child’s future at the end of the initial IEP meeting and mentioned driving, going away to college and marriage.
I didn’t know what to say.
What just happened to reality?
I had never worked with a parent who was so accurate about her child’s developmental levels and yet so unaware of what those levels meant for the future. The comments about life activities did not match the diagnoses that the parent had just easily accepted.
Then it hit me.
The parent did not have the background or the experience to know what those issues meant for her child’s future. She did not know what she had lost.
Denial, for me, changed at that moment. I stopped seeing denial a conscious refusal to accept reality and started seeing it as an unconscious unawareness of the unknown.
The parent did not know what she didn’t know.
And that was okay.
She would get there one day in her own time and in her own way… but not that day.
Elizabeth Kubler-Ross wrote, “Denial helps us to pace our feelings of grief. There is a grace in denial. It is nature’s way of letting in only as much as we can handle.”
Sometimes all that a parent can handle is the present reality.
And sometimes a parent can’t even handle that.
And that is okay.
Dr. Ken Moses explained, “Denial buys the time needed to blunt the initial impact of the shattered dream, to discover the inner strengths needed to confront what has really happened, and to find the people and resources needed to deal with a crisis for which one could not be prepared.”
It is okay for parents to be in denial.
It is normal for parents to experience denial repeatedly.
Denial is a necessary, valuable and healthy part of grieving.