PATHOLOGICAL

So why would someone choose to not be personally responsible? Why would someone expend so much energy denying what’s right in front of them and ignoring their instinct that’s going off like a three-alarm fire?

The truth is actually appallingly simple -- avoiding inconvenience, preserving the status quo.   The examples go from masochistic dysfunction, when it involves only an adult who makes the decision to stay because the relationship with their abuser provides them with some sort of status or financial security.  To heinous and pathological, as with Sandusky’s wife.

How hard did she have to work at looking the other way, ignoring her gut, so that she wouldn’t have to be inconvenienced with the upheaval to her life, if she did the right thing and turned her husband in?  A lot.  She would have to work really hard at denial -- so hard in fact for it to become a pathology, for it to become a disease.  An illness that alters a human’s natural reaction to reality.  This does not absolve her from taking responsibility however, because I believe that in some tiny part of her she was aware of what was going on, if she didn’t know the details, she knew it wasn’t good and she knew there were vulnerable children involved -- and she did NOTHING.

How many stories are out there where kids have enough courage to tell their mother (or father) that there is abuse and yet the parent doesn’t believe the child?  Many, too many.  Why does the parent not believe the child?  Inconvenience, the truth is simply too inconvenient.  It would mean that the adult in the situation would have to take personal responsibility, the adult would have to alter their status quo.

Never underestimate the lengths a person will go to avoid taking personal responsibility.  That’s why it’s so critical to be aware of this.  Nothing good comes from denial.  Never has.  Never will.