The Luxury of Denial: Loving Without Losing Yourself

What do you do when the person you love is the one you can't reach?

Denial gets talked about as a failure of attention, as though the people living inside it had simply neglected to look. The reality is both more complex and illuminating. Denial is what love does when the thing in front of it is unbearable. It is well built: it arrives with explanations. It absorbs contradicting evidence. It can hold for years.

Linda Mestel had spent a career on the professional side of exactly this: a nurse through surgical trauma and psychiatry, then a manager and clinical supervisor in community mental health at a Montreal social service agency. Then her youngest child revealed to her that he had been using cocaine. Only once a month, he said, and he was stopping, and would she please keep it between them. She believed him, and has written since that she needed to. Part of what let her was an assumption she had carried for years without examining it: that addiction takes hold in households short on security and connection. Hers was not that household.

What she has learned since has been confronting. Sobriety and recovery are not the same thing. Relapse belongs to the process rather than proving its failure. Responsibility for a person's recovery sits with that person, however intolerable that is from the outside. And the people who love them are on a separate journey needing its own care. She describes the whole of it as a precarious dance between fear and hope, and her sense of flourishing comes straight out of it: growth in the richest possible soil, and, more poignantly, feeding the parts of ourselves that genuinely need to be fed, including the parts that get denied. Denial is not something that happens only around a person in crisis. Most of us practise it on ourselves. 

In this session, Linda will draw on her own experience to prompt a reflection on how we can not just dream about a better world, but have the integrity, purpose, courage, and compassion to create it for each other.

Linda Mestel believes our innermost strength and deepest gratitude comes from life’s greatest challenges. Author of her memoir titled The Luxury of Denial: A Moving Memoir. A Mother's Journey of Challenge and Hope Through Her Son's Addiction (Smiling Eyes Press, 2025), she writes of her deeply personal journey through her son’s addiction. Linda tells the story through her lens as a proud wife, mother, grandmother, and as a psychiatric nurse, and clinical supervisor throughout a career in mental health. Linda and her husband have long been dedicated to community leadership and the importance of family. She published her memoir to open a conversation she believes too few families are able to have, and to push against a stigma that still frames addiction as a moral failing rather than an illness.

In a time marked by growing mental health pressures, uncertainty about the future of work, and increasing polarization, the Center for Human Flourishing lecture series equips students, faculty, staff, and community members with research-informed tools to move beyond coping toward flourishing.

Your support helps translate wellbeing and health science into practical learning, strengthen trust and belonging, and position Concordia as a leader in nurturing resilient, engaged communities.

This event is part of the Flourish Fridays series.

Dynamic sessions.

Practitioners at the cutting edge.

Radically different ways to explore the same question:

What does it actually take to thrive?