Avoiding Issues by Trying to Ignore Them: Denial and the Thumb

One day, I was washing a window, which is an activity I don’t much care for.  I was in a big hurry to be done with it.  Suddenly, the window fell onto my thumb and I was stuck. For a moment, I went straight into denial, took the cloth from my trapped hand and continued to scrub with my free hand.  In my mind, I was hoping that the issue would resolve itself if I ignored it.  Obviously, it did not, and I eventually had to open the window and face the pain that was in my future.  Also, I had to accept that I wasn’t going to be done with the window washing as quickly as I’d hoped.

There are times when we are trucking along in life and then meet an obstacle which threatens to hamper our momentum.  We may wish to ignore the obstacle, but the fact remains that it is standing there in front of us.  Perhaps we meet someone new, and we jump into a relationship with that person.  It seems to be headed in a good direction, so we get attached.  Then, we come across a conflict, and we just want to ignore it because it was going so smoothly until now.  Usually, we want to ignore the conflict because we are afraid this means that the relationship will end, or isn’t what it seemed to be in the first place.

If we ignore the obstacle that is demanding our attention, it won’t go away.  We are going to have to deal with it at some point.  Even the best relationships involve conflict, and a good approach is to deal with it as soon as possible.  If I had left my thumb in the window for too long, I wouldn’t have been able to do much but clean the same area in front of me, and my injury would have gotten worse as the blood flow to my thumb was cut off.  If a conflict arises in a relationship and gets ignored, you are guaranteed that it will become more complicated as time goes by.  The sooner you address it, the sooner you can resume trucking.