Addiction and Denial
by the Editor
When EAP started, I had a theory that the group whose energies it was going to tap into most significantly was the one I myself belong to: middle class, middle aged, healthy, financially secure women whose children were grown and gone (well, okay, I’m not financially secure, and I never had children, but the basic principle of solidarity remains the same). I figured we were just about the scariest class in the world to anyone looking to keep an inequitable, hierarchical status quo in place: a whole bunch of women with nothing to lose, and the education to speak our minds clearly. I mean, I wouldn’t want to see a group like that coming at me in a bad mood. Would you?
I thought the most interesting part of the discussion on how to restore a model of partnership and equity to a society that’s long relied on one of domination of hierarchy was bound to come from these women. Women, after all, are not just comfortable with partnership arrangements, we thrive on them. And we’re an articulate bunch, too. But it turned out there was a catch. Women are articulate, all right. But only when we feel safe. And a lot of us only feel safe in private, not in any kind of public forum. Sometimes, if the repression has been internalized enough, not even then.
That was the key, that feeling safe thing. What has astonished me over the last almost two years of EAP is the incredible lack of safety that women feel about speaking their minds, in their own voice. What has further astonished me is how deeply the repression has been embedded. Much of it is self-repression. And all of it is based on fear. Fear of losing love and loved ones, mainly. Fear that if we speak our minds, we’ll be rejected and scorned.
Now the opposite of creativity is fear, so we may be seeing the tip of the answer here as to why so many commentators have rather smugly over the centuries remarked on the “superiority” of men’s creativity to women’s. Could it be because when men venture out past known boundaries, there are admiring women to watch them from the sidelines, and tend to them when the fall? But when women do, the men are at best busy with their own adventures, or, at worst, eager to push any competitor into the dust once she does fall?
I wonder.
Stephanie Sides addresses all of this, bravely, too, I think, in Addicted to Silence. All the time Stephanie has been contributing to EAP, I’ve been hoping she’d explore in more depth the answer to the question of why so many healthy, financially secure, well-educated women are so disengaged…so desperately unhappy with that disengagement…and so silent about that unhappiness. And she just starts to examine it here. Her conclusion that it’s the denial of circumstances, the denial of Reality –probably because of an intense fear that once we look at our Realities plainly in the light, we’ll be unable to do anything about them, and be left alone, stripped of even our illusions – that’s the main issue. And as any therapist will tell you, the hardest part of getting over any addiction is getting over denial. The hardest part to get over is the stubborn insistence that Nothing is Wrong. That stubbornness is what gives an addiction its incredible power.
Of course if you want to see a portrait of an addiction giddily, even triumphantly, clung to without any denial at all, read Mike Madrid’s hilarious The Completist . Now that’s a portrait of an addict turning his addiction to creative use. And when he or she does that – gets creative, doesn’t deny what’s going on, plunges into things eyes wide open – I think we stop calling that an addiction, and call it a passion, instead. It’s not disengaged, it’s engaged, even if the road to engagement is lined with big plastic statues of Bob’s Big Boy. And it’s the first step to ending an addiction to pretending everything is Just Fine. It’s the first step to finally, finally, finding one’s own voice. And then to using it. Because what the hell else is one’s own voice for?
Welcome back.