Denying that something is true, in order to protect yourself from difficulties which might arise if it were.
Discussion
Denial is perhaps the most famous defense of them all, and it’s literally that: you deny that something is true because you don’t want it to be.
This is sometimes trivial, like denying you made an embarrassing slip-of-the-tongue, but it can also be more serious, as in the alcoholic who denies their addiction.
Denial also plays out through overlooking unpleasant details of a larger phenomenon. For example, the person who expresses happiness at unseasonably warm autumn weather while making no comment on the disastrous climate change which is its cause.
The person who uses denial is often ridiculed for being willfully ignorant or stupid, but this overlooks its deeper emotional component.
For example, it’s surprisingly common for parents to deny any knowledge that their children are/were being sexually abused. This protects the parent from:
- Acknowledging that something bad is happening
- The personal upset of directly engaging with their child’s suffering
- The conflict created by confronting the abuser
- Admitting that such terrible things can happen at all
Counter-Productive
Denial is an excellent example of how defences work more generally. It is a short-term solution to an immediate problem: I am experiencing emotional pain/anxiety and I want to get rid of it; I don’t care how, and I don’t care about the consequences.
In the immediate moment, denial is extremely effective. If you don’t admit there’s a problem, it doesn’t exist. The hitch is, of course, that the problem does exist, and ignoring it doesn’t make it go away. Ignoring it just allows it to deepen and spread to other areas. This is what people mean when they talk about enabling. Denial allows the addiction or abuse go on for far longer than it should, and the longer it goes on, the more damage it does, and the more difficult it is to repair.
The hard part about denial is that the denying person refuses to admit that they’re “in denial” because they literally can’t see the problem, because they’re in denial. So as far as they’re concerned, they can’t be in denial because there’s nothing there to deny…