Never Underestimate the Power of Denial

She was smart enough to graduate at the top of her class at tiny Owen-Withee High School in Wisconsin. Yet, friends of Karen Marie Hubbard say the 19-year-old college freshman may not have realized she was pregnant until she delivered a baby last week in a bathroom stall at her college dorm.

By the time campus officials found her, her newborn baby was struggling to live and Karen had bled to death on the bathroom floor.

Now her friends and family are trying to understand how a girl so competent and kind could miss the signs of her pregnancy, or keep it a secret, if she knew. And her classmates at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire are pondering a lesson in the power of the mind that is more profound than any their professors could teach.

“If she didn’t want to believe it, you can explain anything,” student body vice president Kelly Witkowski told local reporters. “We’re always told that when you go to college, you gain weight. You’re stressed about being in a new place. Your body goes through a lot of changes. You can rationalize away a lot of things.”

As a woman who’s given birth three times, I find it hard to understand how the signs of pregnancy could be ignored for nine months by even the most innocent of teenage girls. But doctors and social workers who deal with young mothers say it happens all the time.

“I know it seems hard to believe, but the mind is a very powerful thing,” says Caroline Burry, professor of social work at the University of Maryland in Baltimore. “It’s very protective. ... It’s not unusual for a young woman to go from ‘This can’t be happening to me’ to ‘This isn’t happening to me.’ They totally disassociate from what’s happening.”

There’s been little research on the phenomenon, Burry says, but as a social worker dealing with adoption, she sees many young women who did not realize they were pregnant until they landed in the delivery room. “Some have had very limited sexual experience, so they didn’t really know what was going on. Others just couldn’t bear to consider the consequences.”

Hubbard fits the profile of the young woman most apt to deny or hide a pregnancy. “She seems like the classic picture,” Burry says. “High achiever, close to her family, the good girl who keeps playing sports, doing well in school. She thinks, ‘I’m not the kind of girl who does this.’ They may think, ‘I’ll lose my scholarship, my life will be ruined.’ They can’t bear to disappoint their parents, teachers, friends.”

Young people tend to engage in a naive sort of denial on many levels and in many circumstances, she points out. “It’s a protective response, as in ‘I couldn’t possibly be flunking out, therefore I’m not.’ It allows them to avoid having to consider things they fear would be devastating.”

And denial doesn’t operate only in this arena or among the young, of course. We often engage in a sort of denial, as a means of avoiding difficult problems, a way of holding uncomfortable emotions at bay. “We all know someone who’s engaging in denial on some level,” Burry says. “Like the woman whose husband is having an affair and all the signs are there, and she has to know it, but she swears nothing’s wrong. Upon reflection, we can all think of cases like that, or times we’ve done that.”

In the case of pregnant teens caught by surprise by childbirth, “it’s more than not facing up to it,” she says. “The truth becomes ‘transparent’ as they look for pieces of information that support their denial.... It’s an ego defense that protects the self from painful knowledge. If you can keep yourself from believing it, it lessens the pain and distress.”

Therapists say denial can be a useful tool, giving us time to prepare by cushioning the shock of the unbelievable. Who among us didn’t experience a moment, at least, of denial as we watched the planes crash into the World Trade Center?: This can’t be happening. It is too tragic, too extreme to even comprehend.

Most of the time, reality ends our dance with denial, just as the pains of labor signal an end to a pregnant teen’s fantasy.

Other times, we persist in holding on to airbrushed versions of our world, because to do otherwise would make us too uncomfortable. I see that in the e-mails I receive when I write about emotional issues, like race. Why do you keep writing about problems involving race? readers complain. As if our silence could make them go away.

That desperate wish may be what led Karen Hubbard into that bathroom stall alone, unprepared for reality so frightening she kept trying to will it away. But while denial may preserve our sense of innocence, it does nothing to keep us safe.

There will always be problems, but there are also solutions ... difficult and painful, maybe, but necessary. Because denial is not deliverance. Its innocence has a price to pay, too.

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Sandy Banks’ column runs on Tuesdays and Sundays. She is at sandy.banks@latimes.com.