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Ep 18 How Denial Holds You Back and Ways to Overcome It
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I'm diving deep into how denial is seriously holding you back. I get real and raw about my own experiences, like the aftermath of the Woolsey fire in Malibu, to show how denying our true feelings just keeps us stuck. We’ve all been there—society and our upbringing often push us to ignore our emotions, but it's time we face them head-on so we can truly heal.
In this episode, I break down why denial happens, especially if you grew up in a tough environment, and offer some practical tips on how to stop these patterns. This one's for you if you're looking to embrace your authentic self and finally move forward. Let's get real about how we feel and heal together!
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Misunderstood'
00:00:02
Speaker
Hello, beautiful souls. I'm so grateful that you're tuning in. Welcome to my podcast, Misunderstood, guiding highly sensitive people through an emotional dark age. I'm your host, Candice Van Dal, and I'm honored to embark on this transformative journey with you.
Sensitivity: Burden or Superpower?
00:00:17
Speaker
Have you ever felt like you didn't quite fit into the world around you or even your own family? Like your sensitivity was a burden rather than a gift. If so, you're not alone. And here's the truth. Your sensitivity is not a flaw. It's a superpower. It's what allows you to feel deeply, to connect with others on a profound level, and to access a higher realm of consciousness.
00:00:38
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And on this podcast, we're going to explore how to harness that power and use it to create a life of purpose, passion, and true confidence. Here in this sacred space, we honor your sensitivity as the gift it truly is. Get ready to embark on the journey of unapologetic emotional honesty and next level healing. Let's dive in together.
00:00:59
Speaker
Hello, everybody. Welcome back to Misunderstood, guiding highly sensitive people through an emotional dark age.
Denial as a Barrier to Healing
00:01:05
Speaker
I am your host, Candice Mandel, and today I want to dive into a massive topic. I add this topic into many of my other subjects, but let's just focus on this one thing today. Denial is holding you back. Denial.
00:01:23
Speaker
Now let's talk about what this means. If you know me and you know my work, then you know my tagline for the last, I don't know, 10, 12 years has been to get real about how you feel so you can heal. The reason I talk about this so much is oftentimes we have had a childhood and a society that makes us deny other people's reality, which then ultimately makes us deny our own truth because if we're seeing denial and we have to deny their reality,
00:01:52
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for us to fit in, then we're denying our authentic self. Think about it. So recently, as and probably all of you know, the LA fires have
Validation vs. Toxic Positivity
00:02:04
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been raging. And back in 2018, my house was in the Woolsey fire in Malibu.
00:02:10
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And that was life-changing. So a lot of people have been asking me lately, if you've seen my reels on Instagram, I've done a couple of them just, you know, cliff noting this, but a lot of people ask me what helped you during that time. And when I realized what helped me during that time, which I will share, I also realized what didn't.
00:02:29
Speaker
And it's all to do with denial. What helped me during that time was people checking in and saying, wow, this is really hard. We will get through this. What didn't help me is people that had a lot of toxic positivity. Oh, at least you're alive. Yeah, I know I'm alive. And I know I'm grateful for that. Oh, you'll rebuild. It'll be a rebirth. There's a time and a place for that. But when we deny the current reality, we can't come into full acceptance and healing of trauma.
00:03:00
Speaker
And so one of the things I wanna talk about around this topic of denial, keeping you stuck, holding you back is when we don't fully get real about how we feel and give it the time we need to in the moment because we feel guilty and we should be over it by now, that's all bullshit.
Emotional Bypassing and Trauma
00:03:19
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When we can be fully real, we can heal. When we don't and we bypass it and we scapegoat ourselves and we do all this because we don't wanna feel the pain of the negative emotion that is currently happening, you will probably come to me later in life if you're my client and say, why does this pattern keep you know reopening, reoccurring? Why am I having PTSD? Why is this trigger so big? And I say, probably because when you were younger and went through trauma, you didn't have the tools.
00:03:49
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and didn't have an emotionally mature adult to hold space for you. So you could hold space for these emotions. So we go into a natural form of denial. When we get older, we learn that being in those negative emotions didn't get us full acceptance. So then we do it again and we numb out and we deny reality.
00:04:14
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We have coping mechanisms. We numb out. We do the things. We escape. A lot of addiction is escaping. Escaping a negative experience you don't know how to handle because you don't know how to deal with the overwhelm. You're afraid of what these emotions are saying is real. You know what I mean? Now let's go into why big denial happens as a pattern. If you grew up with a narcissistic parent or an emotionally immature parent,
00:04:40
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Especially if you're highly sensitive or hypervigilant because of the situation, you have to understand that a lot of the feelings you're feeling that are being ignored or gaslit or told that you're wrong are things that the narcissistic parent is denying in themselves when they have denied their own trauma, which is what creates narcissism. When they've denied their own trauma, they need you to deny it too. And when you start acting out or speaking up on behalf of something you are feeling that they are in severe denial of,
00:05:09
Speaker
you get gaslit, you get scapegoated. You learn that it's either a choice of I deny my authentic feelings and I get to fit into the group, the tribe, or I own my authentic feelings and I get left out and I don't get to feel like I belong and I get to feel different and I get to be tossed out. It actually comes down to that choice.
00:05:33
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You can adopt the denial and have a shared reality, which we all need or else we feel alone. Or you can teach yourself how to not feel lonely by being on your own team and not
Honesty and Emotional Alignment
00:05:46
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denying it. Sometimes we have to deny things around certain people just to get through the day, but that doesn't mean you have to tell yourself a lie.
00:05:56
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We always have to be real about how we feel to stay aligned with self and guidance. When we start to deny emotions, we're also denying guidance. When we start to deny our feelings, we're also denying reality. It all goes together, right? So one of the things I was saying this week about the LA fires is And you know what? A lot of comments came in around, my therapist said that. My therapist said that. It's wrong. It's so wrong. And I'm like, it is wrong. The therapist that they were talking about tell you to jump right to forgiveness. ah No, absolutely wrong. It wouldn't be true to say, oh, I had all this trauma and I forgive. No, you absolutely don't forgive. You're lying. You're not being real about how you feel.
00:06:41
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People are trying to protect you from feeling bad. That is the worst thing you can do. Feeling bad is a natural, healthy thing. Identifying with that is not.
00:06:54
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What I mean is when you feel bad, it doesn't mean you are shamed and should feel the shame. You shouldn't believe what the emotion is saying, but you have to feel it to heal it. You have to feel it to let it go, to free it, to help it integrate into your beingness, to be back into the present moment. If you have a bunch of things in denial in your body, you're not present, part of using the past stuck back there, holding you back.
00:07:19
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The process is, this is the shit that happened to me. This is how I feel about it. I have many clients I'm helping out right now who have discovered they have narcissistic parents because if you find yourself in a toxic romantic romantic relationship or boss-client relationship or friendship, it's because you have unhealed trauma from childhood and it's playing out in relationships because relationships are your mirror to the parts of you that you are in denial of. So when we talk about this and people say,
00:07:48
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You know, I wanna go no contact, but I shouldn't, I should just get over it with so long ago. I say, well, you don't have to do either of the above, but what you do have to do is be real about your feelings today. You might be angry for a year, and that's valid. You might forgive them in five years, and that's okay. If you say, I'm so angry and my inner teen is coming out and raging, but I'm forgiving them, I've forgiven them, I say, bullshit, or you wouldn't have that rage. Forgiveness comes when you've made peace within.
00:08:16
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When you make peace with what within and what has happened, you see that you are free. And when you are free, then you can free others. Do not free others before you're free or you feel like a caged animal for something someone else did. It's like if someone does a criminal act to you and they don't get, you don't get the justice of them going to jail. Put them in jail until you feel better and then unlock the cage.
00:08:40
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You're gonna put yourself in jail and set them free. You're gonna be real pissed at yourself. You're gonna internalize that again. You have to be upset. You have to be sad. You have to grieve what you didn't get, what you did have and lost. You have to do that. If you do a bypass and go straight to forgiveness, you're completely lying to yourself. You're not validating yourself. You're not giving yourself justice that you need to feel peaceful.
00:09:09
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Think about living a life of injustice. That's what you're doing. So if you want to be free from these blocks, if you want to not be held back anymore, you have to stop being in denial.
00:09:25
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I love it when people tell me, oh, I look in the mirror all day and I say how lovely I am. I'm like, but you're fucking lying. Sorry about language. I get passionate. You're lying. You don't love yourself right now. One client was like, yeah, I know, but if I say it, I will. I go, no, if you say you're gaslighting yourself, lying to yourself, your inner child's never going to trust you.
00:09:44
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Truth is how we build self-trust. Look in the mirror and say, I don't love myself at all. In fact, some days I hate myself. I don't like my hair. I don't like that whatever the hell it is. Say it and I'm really upset about that. I wish that it was different and I'm going to do all I can to learn to love myself and now I don't, but I want to. Truth.
00:10:05
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your guidance will open up a little bit more, but you gotta be consistent with it. When I teach inner child work, I teach a daily consistent structured approach to healing so that you can build on the momentum of building trust. You don't trust someone that shows up and says, I'm Santa Claus, and then Santa Claus never comes back. You trust Christmas because Santa Claus comes every single Christmas.
00:10:24
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You gotta show up every single day in your truth, or at least try to. And then when you find that you're in denial and you're like, oh my gosh, oopsie, apologize to yourself and try better, say, actually, I said this, but the truth is this, nobody else is gonna hear ya. This is about you and you.
Inner Child Work and Growth
00:10:43
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One of the things that comes up a lot in my inner child healing classes is people say, you know, he, my little guy, she, my little girl, her, it,
00:10:54
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We, in the integration phase, this is what it looks like. When you first start inner child work, you're going to call your little one, he or she, you might call it it to start. Then you might adapt a little bit of familiarity and call it he or she, then it will be us because we're together. And then it will be me, I.
00:11:14
Speaker
I don't think about my inner child as separate from me anymore. I just know we're one because I got her back. I live for her. I listen to every dang thing that I hear and I'm honest about it. This is integration. People wonder like, how do you get wise? Where does the wisdom come from? Where's the clarity of emotion come from? It comes from being in truth. You might say, well, everyone has a different truth. Great. Figure out what yours is and be honest about it. Denial.
00:11:41
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is the number one thing that creates self-abandonment, that creates creates distance and unalignment. If you want to live a synchronistic, aligned life, you have to be honest. You have to be perfect. Everything doesn't have to go good all the time. That's a lie. It doesn't.
00:11:58
Speaker
Shit happens all the time, even in my own life. I had a a friend of mine said to me earlier today, she said, wow, I really look up to you for being able to share with your community during the fires and stuff, especially when you're going through your own personal stuff, because that's my friend and she knows. And I go, you know what? I just share my stuff out loud and it helps me too. I use what happens to me to fuel my purpose.
00:12:25
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That's the key, right? Pain turns into purpose. If you use it wisely by being honest. When I go through stuff, I don't tell my groups, my life's perfect. I'm like, I'm going through this, guys. And you know why they love it? Because I'm guiding them as I'm going through it.
00:12:41
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I'm guiding myself. I don't have like a catastrophe that happens in my life and I'm like, oh my God, I'm screwed. I say, well, can I get from this? How can I up level? How can I bring more of my power forward? How can I step back and become more wise instead of maybe ego? What is it that I can do? How is this serving me? I never think something's happening to me to hurt me or punish me because that's not how the universe works. That's how humans work.
00:13:10
Speaker
I don't ever think that. I always think, ooh, this is a challenge. It just happened recently. I had like five freaking things pop up. Dog issues, right? Business stuff came up. Personal stuff was coming up. A move coming up that has now become pretty complicated. And I was down for a day. I was like, what the absolute hell is this? And then I was like, oh.
00:13:33
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I'm being prepared. I swear, guys, the very next day after I knew that this was the case and I pledged this to my life, I woke up with an insight. I had a meeting with my with my um assistant.
00:13:48
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And I woke up and I was like, it was so funny. We were so on board with the same ideas for this meeting. And I designed this new structure for this year. And what I saw the possibilities of this structure being is everything I dreamed this year could be. And I was like, wow, every time I go through difficult challenges, hardship,
00:14:13
Speaker
I noticed that if I use it for my upliftment, and I know everything is always happening for me, not to me, and I know that I was born perfect for my purpose, and I know that I'm in complete alignment, even when things feel off.
00:14:24
Speaker
I know that if I wake up to the higher perspective in the difficult moment, which is the hardest thing to do and stop denying the moment but be fully in it, feel all of it, it goes away faster and the wisdom comes in. The clarity comes in when you can be real about how you feel in the moment and allow it to lift. And what I know is there's another level I'm being asked to go to, which is why the level of pain is so strong.
00:14:53
Speaker
So my message today is denial is what's holding you
Embracing Truth for Liberation
00:14:57
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back. And you have every single ability, capability to go towards the truth, especially if it scares you. I have a lot of things that scare me and I know that's where I have to go. Fear is false evidence appearing real. Well, the only way to find out that it's false evidence is get a little closer and check it out. Go face to face.
00:15:21
Speaker
When I lost my house in the fire, it was a very big fear. Losing everything that means something to you. Losing memories, a place. I lived in LA for 20 years. It's home. I had to move because I had nowhere to go after the fire. We had to move to another state. Long story. Another podcast. After that, my dog passes away. My soulmate. After that, I divorce. It was a complete ending to a paradigm.
00:15:51
Speaker
And little did I know, I remember all these people telling me, well, after the fire of the divorce, like literally walk through the fire, you're gonna be so much stronger. I'm like, I don't give a shit. I am strong enough. I like who I am right now. Well, let me tell you something. Who you are before really hard things doesn't go away. She just gets better. You just get more discerned. I remember a friend of mine after my divorce, I hadn't seen her for a while and I came back and she goes, if you get any stronger, I don't know what's gonna happen. I said, oh, I'll be getting stronger.
00:16:22
Speaker
You just integrate more and more. You just align more and more, guys. So my message is absolutely to go towards the thing you need to deny. The thing you think you need to deny. Go towards the thing you are denying. Go towards the thing. Why are you denying it? Because you're afraid. You don't want to see it. You don't know. You don't want it to be true. Whatever it is, go towards it.
00:16:43
Speaker
Let this be a permission slip to have the courage to go towards the thing you are in denial of. Even if it means losing certain things, even things that you are meant to be for you, you cannot lose. And things that are not meant to be for you, let them go.
Stay Connected
00:16:58
Speaker
Guys, don't forget to check out my Instagram. Say hi to me. I'm posting little reels on this every single day.
00:17:05
Speaker
ah Check my website for a bunch of things coming up. The Truth Room is going into a facelift this year. We are doing a whole new launch in February, so stay tuned for that. Don't forget to check out YouTube if you want to watch the video. Please share this with one person you think it could help. And I love you and thank you for being here. I'll see you next week.