Perhaps the most famous defense, denial is literally that: you deny that something is true. This is sometimes trivial, like denying one made an embarassing 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.

Denial is often ridiculed as the person being wilfully ignorant or stupid, but this overlooks its deeper emotional component. There are many examples of parents who categorically deny any knowledge that their children were being abused. I would never argue that this isn’t negligent and abhorrent, but it can be understood without reaching for defensive outrage.

Denying knowledge of it protects the parent from the pain of seeing their child suffering and the shame of feeling powerless to stop it. The fact that it leads to even greater future suffering doesn’t factor in at the time, because knee-jerk defenses like denial are concerned only with the short term: I am experiencing emotional pain/anxiety now, get rid of it now, I don’t care how, and I don’t care about the consequences.

Denial is always counter-productive, and often catastrophically so, as in the above example. Ignoring a problem gets rid of your awareness of it, but leaves the problem itself intact. The challenge of changing denial-based defense patterns is that because the person is blind to the problem they won’t believe they’re in denial, because as far as they're concerned, there’s nothing there to deny…