Defense Mechanism: Denial
You tell yourself that your smoking habit isn’t that bad.
You are convinced that a terminally ill loved one will be fine.
You lost your job but continue to spend money as you usually would.
Denial is the act of ignoring the reality of a situation. Why? Because there is something about reality that is hard, uncomfortable, or challenging.
The darker, harder emotions can be very convincing that if you step into them, you will never get out. If you lean into your smoking habit, you may experience overwhelm, defeat, exhaustion. If you lean into your loved one being terminally ill, you may experience deep sadness, grief, despair. And if you lean into losing your job and potential lack of money, you may experience shame, fear, sadness.
When you start to lean into these emotions, you may find that you are uncomfortable, anxious, and fear that these emotions will always define you. So, instead, you ignore them and turn to denial instead.
What is tricky, is that while you may think that this will be helpful in not having to experience the harder, more painful emotions, the exact opposite occurs; because emotions have to be felt. If you ignore them they end up bottling up and coming up in an outburst, they turn into physical aches and pains, or they start to impede on the amount of joy and happiness you experience.
If you find that you turn to denial often and you can recognize it, I encourage you to reflect and see if there are common emotions that you are struggling to lean into. Sadness? Shame? Defeat? Betrayal?
A goal, if you find yourself turning to denial, is to start to form a better relationship with those emotions that you are struggling to lean into. It will take time, it will be hard and scary at times, but emotions are fluid and fluctuate. So while it may be painful to lean into some of those harder, darker emotions, they do not last. If you can lean into your experience of them you will find that you move through them quicker, and you can move on to experiencing other emotions sooner than if you turn to denial and try to avoid them.
Identifying denial on your own can be a bit tricky to do. So if you feel like this may be something that you turn to, but you are not sure, you know you turn to it but cannot identify what emotions you are avoiding, or you know what emotions you are avoiding but are not sure why then I recommend reaching out to a therapist to help you process.
