Denial Is Willful Ignorance
I want to talk to you about something difficult but necessary: denial. I’ve been there myself, and I know how tempting it can be to hide from painful truths. Denial isn’t just simple ignorance—it’s a chosen ignorance, a deliberate turning away from what’s right in front of us because the reality hurts too much.
Here’s what happens: Something is true, and deep down you know it’s true, but you refuse to believe it. You push away those lingering suspicions, those quiet moments when reality tries to break through. If you weren’t consciously ignoring or suppressing these truths, it wouldn’t be denial at all—it would be not knowing.
People who are particularly skilled at denial often don’t even realize they’re doing it. They’ll say things like, “I’m just not sure yet” or “I’m waiting for more information before making up my mind.” They actively search for any scrap of evidence that contradicts reality while ignoring the mountain of evidence supporting it.
But here’s the hard truth I learned: denying reality doesn’t change it. Not one bit. And making decisions based on what we wish were true instead of what is true leads to poor outcomes—sometimes dangerous ones.
Think about it this way: if you deny a traffic light is red when passing through an intersection, you risk causing an accident that could harm you and others. In medicine, denial kills when people ignore early warning signs of disease until treatment is no longer effective. With a special needs child, denial can be just as harmful—it means failing to get proper assistance for a child who desperately needs it.
My own denial was mercifully short-lived. During my son’s first 18 months, I practiced willful ignorance even though the signs were obvious and numerous. When my wife finally showed me a list of signs for autism, I knew immediately it was true. I couldn’t muster much denial after that moment of realization—my son’s condition was severe enough that the ray of hope that people often expand into full-blown denial simply wasn’t available to me.
I want you to understand something important: denial has one useful function, and only one. When emotions become too intense, too difficult, or too prolonged, your mind will seek ways to lapse into denial as a safety measure to avoid depression. It usually takes the form of bargaining—believing that some action will make the undesirable problem disappear. Both bargaining and denial provide a welcome break from processing sadness.
But this needs to be a temporary pause, a rest stop on your journey—not the final destination. When someone remains stuck in denial, they aren’t making progress toward acceptance. This is where those snake oil treatments and false hopes take root. Grasping at miracle cures is a common form of bargaining, and it can waste precious resources—time, money, emotional energy—on treatments that won’t help. Because the hard truth is, for many conditions, there is no cure.
Denial and the Special Needs Child
For many parents, the reality of having a special needs child is deemed too difficult to accept. Denial seems like the easier road to travel because the pain of acceptance feels too great. “My child does not have special needs” becomes a shield against that pain. I’ve seen it happen countless times: denial becomes a mechanism to avoid the sadness that comes with acceptance. Some people would rather be impervious to reality than feel any pain at all. One way parents sustain this denial is by refusing to seek a diagnosis—because an objective opinion from an expert is hard to deny. That’s why people avoid it.
I remember the doctor who finally diagnosed my son actually chastised us. At first, I was offended, but later I realized she was probably tired of seeing children brought in well after the signs were obvious. The result of refusing to obtain a diagnosis is often a lack of proper medical care, and that’s not doing right by your child.
Another form of denial is refusing to seek government assistance. After all, you don’t need to fix a problem you don’t have. If you deny having a problem, you won’t bother seeking out help for it. Some parents are philosophically opposed to assistance due to their political beliefs. But your family and your child pay a high price for this stance.
I need to tell you something that still causes me pain to admit. When my son was young, we didn’t apply for the assistance programs we were eligible for. My wife couldn’t work because our son needed 24/7 supervision. My state offers payment for this service as in-home care, but I carried the false belief that by obtaining assistance, I was taking it from a more “deserving” family. I also didn’t feel we needed it because I saw myself as a good provider.
My ignorance, arrogance, and stubbornness cost my family thousands of dollars a month in aid and services for my son. I didn’t apply for one important program for nearly 10 years after we became eligible. The opportunity cost in lost assistance to my family was well over $100,000. I put my family through unnecessary hardship due to my failure to seek the proper assistance to which we were entitled. An entitlement granted by a State that recognizes we have a huge financial burden other families simple don’t have. I feel strong remorse over these bad decisions.
Please don’t make the same mistake I did. My wife did not work so she could provide our son the care he needed. The loss of income could have been made up by state assistance. This can be a significant, life-changing amount. And even if your state or country provides little support, anything is better than nothing. Your pride is expensive.
Diagnosis Shopping
Another form of denial I see often is parents who say, “My child doesn’t fit under that label.” They argue that labels are harmful because they cast an identity that can be difficult to overcome. And there’s some truth here—nobody is a label, and labels can create limitations that aren’t real. But a diagnosis doesn’t need to become a label. You can accept the diagnosis, seek appropriate treatment, and reject the limiting aspects of the label. But please, don’t fight the label as a way of avoiding the diagnosis.
The faulty thinking goes like this: if we avoid the diagnosis or the label, my child doesn’t have a problem. I know a family that went to four different physicians to obtain a diagnosis. The first three diagnosed autism of varying degrees, but they kept lobbying for a diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome, which they considered preferable since it’s on the less severe end of the spectrum.
On their fourth attempt, they finally got the result they wanted: “pervasive development disorder with autism-like tendencies.” They were relieved that their child was “not autistic.” Their denial was affirmed. They spent all that money and effort to support their denial, but the diagnosis didn’t change their child. That fourth doctor probably knew about the previous diagnoses and chose to tell them what they wanted to hear to stop their doctor shopping. Denying the correct diagnosis also prevents you from seeking proper treatment or assistance.
I’ve also seen what I call “denial lite”—minimizing the implications of reality. While exaggerating a child’s problems for attention is harmful (though rare), more commonly, people attempt to minimize the true condition out of fear or shame.
Have you heard or uttered any of these?
“My child is normal, but a little odd.”
“My child needs a little help, but is not special needs.”
“My child’s condition is not as bad as the doctors make it out to be.”
“My child will grow out of it.”
Again, this is counterproductive because it means parents won’t seek appropriate help.
I’ve noticed that parents often minimize their child’s condition to avoid being ostracized. Parents have a tendency to keep their children away from those who are more severely affected. Typical children rarely want special needs children around, while parents of special needs children want their children to play with typical children. “More typical” is always considered better, so parents pretend their child is less severely affected than they really are.
Denial of Responsibility
It’s common in the early stages of acceptance to admit the problem is real but to deflect any responsibility to others. Parents will seek someone to blame for the condition itself.
Some blame doctors: “My child was poisoned by vaccines” or “Something happened during childbirth.”
Others blame the school: “The teachers are bad” or “The teachers don’t understand my child.”
And sadly, many blame their spouse like I did.
All attempts to assign responsibility are wrong because we simply don’t know what causes autism. Some of the sources of personal blame are downright ridiculous: bad genes, bad diet, bad parenting, bad karma.
The blame game contributes to the high divorce rate among parents of special needs children. When one parent is in denial, that parent becomes an obstacle to treatment, thwarting the primal desire to help, and the parent pushing for treatment will be extremely upset, and rightly so. The parent in denial is hurting their child.
My wife and I each blamed each other and formed resentments over it. I have an uncle who is on the spectrum, and my wife concluded it was my “bad genetics” that were responsible. She said I should have told her about my family history—I guess she wouldn’t have married me, right? One data point can be completely convincing if there’s no other place to assign blame.
My counter-argument? My wife ate tuna during her pregnancy. Tuna is known to be high in mercury, and heavy metals—particularly mercury—have been falsely linked to autism.
I told her she should have known better than to eat tuna, and she was responsible. I didn’t really believe it, but it seemed like a good retort at the time.
When we argued over this issue, we each came up with even more bizarre and far-fetched reasons why the other was responsible for our son’s autism. Only the futility of the exercise finally prompted us to stop.
The Buck Stops Where?
Let me ask you: what positive end result does assigning blame gain? Let’s imagine that one of us is right, and the other person is responsible for our shared problem. It’s still a shared problem that doesn’t go away with blame. We are both equally responsible for solving it.
It’s not like the party who is “not responsible” is no longer going to help with care. Well, some try to avoid helping, making the other parent responsible for fixing the problem the other supposedly created, but reality has a way of forcing selfish asses like that to get with the program.
What are we supposed to do with information on who is responsible for the cause? What possible useful decision or course of action can come from properly assigning blame? Would knowing it was my bad genes or her bad diet in any way suggest a course of treatment? If either one of us accepted this blame, we would have ended up feeling terrible about what we supposedly did. What good would come of that?
Should I feel bad for having a family member on the spectrum? Should she feel bad for eating tuna? Remorse has benefit if it prevents bad decisions in the future, but remorse has no benefit in this situation.
If you think rationally about the possible outcomes for assigning blame, you won’t do it. First, you could never be sure you were correct. There is no known cause for autism, so any blame would be based on supposition, not fact. People are often quite certain in their blame and completely mistaken. Would it be appropriate to hold someone responsible for something they did not cause?
Second, if blame is accepted, it merely causes distress with no positive value. It’s all cloud and no silver lining.
Third, if blame is rejected, it causes ongoing tension between parents as each blames the other and sustains anger over it, which hardens into resentment. Resentment against your spouse is a common cause of divorce.
For all these reasons, my wife and I stopped blaming each other and decided to put that energy into making our son’s life better instead.
Beyond blaming others for the condition, parents in denial often seek to make others responsible for “curing” their child: “I can’t solve it, so others must.” They believe their child can be cured by doctors, social services, or the school system.
I was guilty of committing this error. We lived in a great school district with stellar services, and I felt good because I knew my son was getting the best education possible. But I used this to sustain my denial that he would be “cured” and completely overcome his autism.
I remember one of my son’s early education meetings where I asked that he be made to “catch up” to his peers. The educators were gracious enough to remain silent and offer to do what they could. However, they could see my denial for what it was. They could have stated his limitations; his future was clear to his caregivers.
But I didn’t want to hear the truth. It probably would have made me angry if they had told me because my denial and resistance to reality wouldn’t permit that to be true.
Some parents believe their child can be cured by faith or their social network. While it’s good to have support, it’s wrong to believe this support will “fix” your child. Blaming others and making others responsible for curing your child is not productive or helpful in any way.
The Problems with Denial
The key to overcoming any disturbing emotion is to focus on the problems that pattern of thought and feeling creates. Denial creates many problems, and I want to share them with you so you can recognize them.
First, there’s the relentless resistance of reality. Despite my determination and effort, my son was not “cured” because he was not ill, merely different. The despair remained, and I got used to the feeling. Only denial and the desire to find a cure pulled me out temporarily. At the time, I wished I had better techniques for dealing with despair, but I thought the best alternative was to find a solution to my son’s autism. Unfortunately, I didn’t know then that seeking a cure is merely a path to denial. I was wrong, so the despair hung around while I jousted with windmills.
My irresistible force of determination encountered the immovable object of reality. You can’t change what is through force of will. The belief that you can is a source of tremendous suffering. As the Borg from Star Trek said, “Resistance is futile.” As the Buddha noted, “It is your resistance to what is that causes your suffering.”
Let me share a painful memory that illustrates this. Part of the reason I became an arrogant and prideful fool in my youth is due to the stellar scores I always obtained on standardized tests. I consistently scored in the top few percentiles in every area on every test I had ever taken. I was always told I was super smart and destined for great things. The result was numerous false and grandiose beliefs about myself that ended up hindering me for most of my life.
Since I had consistently done well on tests, I assumed my child would inherit my “brilliant genes,” and he could compete with me growing up to see if he could score better. It didn’t turn out that way. I used to dread the education meetings where we would discuss his results on standardized tests. My son scored literally on the other end of the testing spectrum. I guess it makes sense if I scored in the 99th percentile that someone out there had to score in the 1st percentile. I just never thought it would be my son.
1 in 10,000
In one of the education assessments, they reported my son had scored in the 0.01 percentile. He literally obtained the worst score out of 10,000 people. In fact, it was probably worse than that as they only kept decimal precision to the second digit. That 0.01 percentile number was burned into my brain.
I don’t remember the rest of the meeting, what was discussed or decided. The thought of 0.01 was so overpowering to me that I wanted to break down into tears right there. I held it together through the meeting, putting my emotions on a shelf for later processing.
The only thing I do remember from the meeting was when we signed the acknowledgment papers, I told them that they really should drop the decimal precision on their reporting. No parent wants to read that their child is in the bottom 0.01 percent. To this day, when I think about that score, it makes me sad.
Parents in denial are extremely unhappy. Denial of the obvious takes tremendous energy. Denial requires a constant influx of anger to maintain—cursing God or Fate. Parents often retreat into negative behaviors: alcoholism, drug abuse, workaholism, or family abandonment. Our culture is full of stories of heroic resistance winning out in the end. Unfortunately, in the real world, permanent resistance is a soul-draining path to a hollow defeat.
We met a couple in Irvine with two special needs children. The wife became a special needs teacher, and the father was devoted to both his children. I greatly admired both parents for their unwavering devotion. Unfortunately, I also felt very sad for them.
By the time their children were teenagers, the parents were completely defeated. You could see in their eyes the despair of 15+ years of sustained effort with so little to show for it—at least from their perspective, because they desperately wanted a cure. The look of defeat was palpable as they exuded a sad resignation.
They weren’t interested in acceptance of their children’s condition or finding ways to enjoy their children as they were. Sadly, as the father grew to accept their fate, the couple grew apart. The mother simply couldn’t accept that her children would remain autistic. The couple ended up divorcing.
Denial leads to negative outcomes for both parents and children. The child doesn’t get appropriate help, proven treatments for symptoms aren’t implemented, and appropriate aid resources aren’t utilized. The sooner you abandon your denial, the happier you will be, and your child will experience better life outcomes.
I know it’s hard—believe me, I know. But on the other side of that pain is a peace I never thought possible. And your child deserves the best care possible, which can only come when you fully accept the reality of their condition.
