208. Stages Of Denial

Hello, hello, my amazing, beautiful listeners. Welcome. Thank you for joining me today.

Before I get into what I'm sharing with you on this episode, I just want to take a second and acknowledge something. If you are listening to this podcast, chances are you are in the middle of something really hard, just coming out of it, or trying to make sense of what your life looked like before you even got here.

And wherever you are in that, I just want you to know that I see you. And this space is for you.

What Today's Episode Is

Today I'm doing something a little different. I'm airing a video I created called Stages of Denial: Denial, Awareness, and the Courage to See Things as They Really Are.

I want to share it here because I honestly believe this is one of the most important conversations we can have — not just while you're still in the relationship trying to figure out what's real, but after you leave too. And especially during and after divorce.

When you are going through divorce, or even years after, we can still be in denial. Denial about the severity of what we experienced. Denial about the impact it had on us. And sometimes even denial about our own healing — telling ourselves we should be further along than we are.

I hear that one a lot.

The content in this video really does meet you wherever you are right now.

A Resource That Goes Alongside This

I also want to make sure you know about something I created that goes hand in hand with what you're about to hear. I have a free video series called Am I in an Abusive Relationship? and it walks you through the eight domains of the relationship — the physical, sexual, financial, spiritual, emotional, relational, psychological, and coercive control.

It's designed to help you gain real language for what you have lived.

Because one of the most disorienting things about coming out of an unhealthy relationship is that you have felt something for a very long time before you had words to describe it. And having that language changes everything. It helps you stop second-guessing yourself. It helps you own your story. It helps you walk taller into the courtroom, into the therapist's office, into the hard conversations with family.

Being able to articulate your experience can give you back confidence in your own lived story.

Alongside the video series, I have a full relationship assessment you can take. I really do encourage you to take it — even if you're out of the relationship and still grappling with what happened. You can find both at amiewoolsey.com, and the links will be in the show notes.

I also want to remind everyone about my free monthly support group. It's a live Q&A I do the first Thursday of every month, 6PM Central Time. Free registration, link in the show notes.

So without further ado, here is the video: Stages of Denial.

Becoming Aware Is Genuinely Hard

I want to start by naming something I wholeheartedly relate to. Becoming aware of the reality of what's happening in your relationship is genuinely hard. It takes time to wrap your head around it. And there are stages to that — stages of healing, stages of denial — and understanding both might be one of the most important things you do for yourself right now.

Judith Herman, one of the most respected voices in trauma research, wrote that the conflict between the will to deny horrible traumatic events and the will to proclaim them out loud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma.

I love that she named it that. A conflict. Not a failure.

The internal war that many of you are experiencing right now — of knowing and not knowing — is not a character flaw. It is the very nature of what trauma does to us.

Awareness and Acceptance

When we start to see things as they really are — rather than what we've been told they are, led to believe they are, or what we desperately want them to be — the next step toward healing is acceptance. Not approval. Not condoning anything. Just accepting reality for what it is.

Because that is the only place from which we can actually change things.

Before lasting action can happen, acceptance has to come first. And it needs to come without the self-judgment, shame, or blame that I think a lot of us pile on. If you find yourself stuck there, I want to invite you to work with someone one-on-one. And if you are stuck — of course you are. This is hard. Give yourself a lot of grace.

Something else worth naming: there can be this place where we're trying so hard to be forgiving, Christlike, peaceable — and in that effort, we keep allowing unhealthy behavior. That often comes from a misunderstanding of what forgiveness and being peaceable actually mean. That's a conversation for another day, but it is worth holding.

Rather than continuing to put our coins in a ride that just keeps going around and around, we can arrive at awareness with acceptance. And that can look like boundaries. Maybe some space. Separation, whether in-house or out. Or if you choose, divorce.

You can still hold space for someone's humanity while also deciding that they are not someone you can share a life with in a relationship.

When you are no longer able to live within your own value system and in integrity, it might be time to consider what your next step is.

Why Denial Happens

Many people find it really difficult to acknowledge current or past abuse because of thoughts like: I should have known better. I asked for this by not speaking up. I chose to marry them. What I experienced really wasn't that bad because someone else had it much worse. It's not like it was physical.

If you're in that comparing mode, I want to gently point you toward the video series on the different domains of abuse.

Other times, we repress what happened and what's happening — hoping that if we don't look at it directly, or if we just hold on tightly enough, it will pass. They'll change. It'll stop impacting us.

What we do know is this: emotional pain from these dynamics, when it goes unacknowledged, continues to shape your life in quiet, invisible ways. To the point where it slowly erodes you — erases your shape — until you're invisible even to yourself.

And as you begin to acknowledge what's happened to you, the impact, the reality of the dynamics, and you start to find language to describe them — you start to get your power back. Not all at once. But in very real ways. You start to take shape again in your life and in your relationships.

The Tilted House

Here's an analogy I come back to often.

Think about a house you grew up in that leaned slightly to the left. The foundation had a tilt, so everything in that house had a slight tilt too. Every door stuck a little. Every picture hung just a little crooked. And over time you stopped noticing. It was just home.

It wasn't until you visited someone else's house that the thought landed: wait, floors aren't supposed to slope like that.

But you can't blame someone for not knowing the floor was uneven when they never had another floor to compare it to. Awareness doesn't always come from paying closer attention to the same environment. Sometimes it only comes when something outside of it gives you a different reference point.

That's not a failure of perception. That's just what happens when uneven has been your normal for long enough.

And for many of you, that uneven started long before this relationship did.

How Abusers Use Denial Differently

Denial works differently depending on which side of the relationship you're on.

An abuser uses denial to shift blame and minimize the severity of their behaviors — often denying that anything happened at all. This leaves survivors feeling angry, confused, like they're losing their grip on reality.

Lundy Bancroft, who spent years working directly with abusive men, said it plainly: if the man is abusive, of course he's going to deny it — partly to protect himself, and partly because his perceptions are distorted. If he were ready to accept responsibility for his actions, he wouldn't be abusive.

That is worth sitting with for a moment.

His denial is not evidence that your perception is wrong. In many ways, it is confirmation of the problem itself.

Current research describes denial, minimization, justification, rationalization, and blaming as common patterns among those who commit intimate partner abuse — patterns that protect their sense of identity while also serving a very specific purpose in the relationship.

None of this excuses the behavior. And none of it makes what you're experiencing any less real.

Why We Stay in Denial

Most often because denial protects us from discomfort. It's a form of avoidance. A way of not having to fully live in what is real.

The brain is actually wired for this. It's one of our first protective responses. Denial helps us manage physical and emotional pain, fear, shame, conflict. My three-year-old granddaughter is already learning that denial keeps her out of trouble. We learn it very, very early.

The challenge is that while it feels safer in the short term, living there long term causes more harm than the discomfort it was trying to protect you from.

Think of it like a dimmer switch. Nobody just turns the lights off all at once. It's slow — almost imperceptibly slow. Today it's a little darker than it was a year ago. But you adjusted to last month's lighting, so this month still feels normal. You keep adapting, trusting your eyes.

By the time the room is genuinely dark, you've worked so hard to adjust that you've convinced yourself you can still see just fine. And when someone from the outside walks in and says, oh my gosh, it's so dark in here — your first instinct is to wonder if something is wrong with their eyes.

That does not say anything negative about you. That is you surviving an environment that changed so gradually your nervous system kept pace with every shift.

The Four Degrees of Denial

Denial doesn't look the same for everyone, and it doesn't always feel like lying to yourself. Here are the four degrees I most commonly see:

The first is simply not acknowledging that a problem exists at all.

The second is minimizing or rationalizing. It wasn't that bad. At least it wasn't this. Someone else has it worse. Everyone argues. Marriage is hard. He was just stressed. He had a lot of childhood trauma.

The third is acknowledging that something happened, but not recognizing the impact it's had on you — or on your children.

And the fourth is knowing the impact and still being unwilling to reach for help.

Most survivors live in that third place. They don't fully grasp what these destructive dynamics have taken from them, or what it's taken from their children. And that gap is often what sets the stage for PTSD or complex PTSD long after leaving. If the full truth were faced, they'd be far more likely to seek support — which is exactly why that level of awareness is so hard to reach while still inside it.

Trauma Bonding and What Research Tells Us

Evan Stark, whose work on coercive control has fundamentally changed how abuse is understood, describes the survivor as becoming captive in an unreal world created by the abuser — entrapped in a world of confusion, contradiction, and fear.

When that is the world you've been living in, denial is not stubbornness. It's a rational adaptation to an environment specifically designed to make your reality hard to see.

Current research on trauma bonding tells us that the constant cycle of fear, relief, and emotional pain keeps the nervous system on high alert. Survivors may suppress or downplay recognition of abuse when the person causing harm is also someone they emotionally or financially depend on — because full awareness would feel like a threat to their sense of security.

This doesn't mean you're weak. The women I work with in these situations are among the strongest, most independent, most intellectually capable people I've ever met. This is your nervous system doing exactly what it was built to do.

The Quieter Forms of Denial

Omission is one of the quieter ones. It's when we leave out the hard parts of our story — even just to ourselves. It contributes to the memory loss that's actually really common among abuse survivors.

I did this myself. When my ex-husband came at my head with his fist and ended up hitting the door behind me and breaking his hand, I made up a different story — one I told my kids and my family. It was easy to do. He praised me for it. And I have real memory loss around certain events because I told myself the softer version for so long that I stopped trusting my own gut.

Compliance is another one — going along with what we don't actually want, pretending things are fine when they aren't. It keeps us from having to face what's real.

Intellectualizing is one I see a lot. It feels like processing, which is the tricky part. But it's often thinking about a situation in order to avoid feeling it. The body holds the truth that the mind is working overtime to manage.

And then there's hopelessness. While it feels different from denial, it functions the same way. When we believe there is no other option, nowhere to go, that things will never change, or that leaving would make it worse — that keeps us just as stuck. And it's not coincidentally exactly where an abuser benefits from us staying.

The Pattern Researchers Found

There's a well-known study that analyzed recorded phone calls between men charged with felony domestic violence and their female partners — partners who ultimately dropped the charges.

What researchers found was a predictable pattern every single time. The abuser minimized what happened. He emphasized his own loneliness and suffering. He took on the role of the one who was hurting, and sympathy was extended. The language shifted to us against the world — us against the police, the detectives, the law. And the charges were dropped.

That pattern moved through five distinct stages: an initial moment where the survivor held her ground, then minimization and emotional appeals from the abuser, then declarations of love and shared isolation, then the ask, and then compliance.

I don't share this to create shame if you've been here or if you're recognizing yourself in it. I share it because when we know the pattern — when we can see it happening in real time and name it — that is the beginning of not being moved by it.

Where to Start

Start with the body.

Notice what happens physically before difficult conversations. Notice what happens during them. Notice what's happening in your body after. Get a journal — I've had clients call it their reality check journal — and start writing down what you're noticing.

Notice what your body does when your partner comes home. Does your chest tighten? Does your breathing change? Does your body start quickly making everything perfect?

That's information.

Your body has been tracking the truth of your situation even when your mind has been working hard to make it all manageable. So we start by listening to the body.

The next step is leaning into what that information is telling you — without judgment, shame, or blame. And I want to add: a lot of times when clients start leaning into this, the brain immediately goes to big decisions. Let's leave the D-word out of it for right now. We're just gathering information.

As you notice what your body is signaling and start to see the patterns, lean into the emotions that come with it rather than running from them. Anxiety, fear, sadness — those are not dangerous. They don't need to be moralized. They're not good or bad, right or wrong. They're energy. And when we resist them, we're holding a ball under water. Push it down long enough and it explodes.

When we make space for those emotions and let them move through, we start to return to ourselves. We start to take shape again.

If this feels really hard or impossible, work one-on-one with someone. Learning how to actually feel your feelings — not just think about them — is one of the most important investments you can make in yourself right now. This is actually where real movement begins.

Acceptance Without Shame

With acceptance, the goal is to move without self-judgment or shame. You did not choose this. And beginning to see reality clearly is not the same thing as having failed to see it sooner.

Seeing it now is everything.

When the big emotions come as you see things more clearly, you will likely step into grief. That's appropriate. That's right. That makes sense. No one wants this to be their story. And grieving for what you hoped for, what you were promised, what you believed was possible — that is not you being weak or foolish or expecting too much. That is the beginning of living in what is real.

Get curious rather than judgmental with yourself. Healing really is possible. It begins every time with one small step — right now, in seeing things as they really are.

A Moment to Sit With You

I just want to sit with you for a second after all of that, because I know it may have been a lot to take in. Some of it may have felt relieving — like finally having a name for something you've been carrying. Some of it may have stirred up emotions you weren't expecting today.

Both of those responses make complete sense. Give yourself some grace to process it.

What I want you to walk away with is this: seeing things clearly is not the same as having failed to see them sooner. Awareness is not a reason to be hard on yourself. It is the bravest step toward building something completely different.

If what you heard today is resonating and you want to go deeper, check out the free video series Am I in an Abusive Relationship? or take the full assessment. The links will be in the show notes. No pressure, no timeline. It'll be there when you're ready.

No matter what has happened, you are still the chooser in your life. And you get to create the life you want. Because you can.

Take care, everybody.

Stages of Denial Video: https://amiewoolsey.com/am-i-in-an-abusive-relationship

Amie Woolsey is a certified somatic healing practitioner, specializing in betrayal trauma, abuse and divorce. She works with women navigating betrayal trauma, high conflict divorce, and the long road of rebuilding. Learn more at  amiewoolsey.com.