Dancing with Dinosaurs

In one of Dr. Sandra Brown's recent newsletters about dealing with dangerous people, she discusses the subject "normal responses to abnormal situations." Although I would recommend that anyone who has any personal need or even interest to read Dr. Brown's insightful and helpful material, there's another aspect to this subject that few people understand.

Many people are familiar with the term "the dinosaur in the living room" (some call it 'the elephant,' or other similar names). What this is a reference to is something which some people learn in childhood, and tend to carry with them throughout their lives; on the opposite side of the spectrum are those of us who did not learn it, and have never "caught on."

The dinosaur in the living room is about pretense. For children whose home environments consist of abnormal situations, such as a parent who is extremely abusive, or a parent who is in a general state of drug or alcohol intoxication, as a child lacks mature coping skills the only way he or she can function in such a situation is to ignore the problem, to pretend that it is not there, that it does not exist. Before people started to overuse and misuse terms like 'in denial,' it was spelled out much more clearly.

The catch is, when youngsters who had to resort to pretense to cope in their childhood environments grow up, the lucky ones seek help, but many others are never able to leave "the dinosaur" behind. When Dr. Brown speaks of "normal responses to abnormal situations," it says a lot that there are so many people-- usually women, but not all-- who truly do not know if their responses are normal or not. They have spent so much time with the dinosaur of pretense that they doubt themselves when their gut-reactions tell them that something is very wrong.

As someone who had the opposite type of background, I personally have a bit of difficulty relating to "how people get to be that way." In my own childhood environment, nobody beat anybody, nobody used drugs or alcohol at all-- so there was no 'dinosaur' to learn 'denial' from. In other words, I never got the hang of pretense-- how to be in a bad situation but "act as if" all were well.