Imagine this.
You are in an airplane, flying across the ocean, and halfway across the ocean, a little light comes on that indicates that your oil pressure is low.
So what it is that you do? You take a piece of DUCT TAPE, tape it over that little light, and forget that it's there.
Problem solved? ..To someone in denial, that very apparent crisis is now packaged into the 'crisis averted' folder in their heads.
Hello there, deniers, this is one's for you.
*Above analogy is plucked from a Teal Swan youtube video I watched on Denial
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1. Denial, the (last) 'truth'-bender.
What makes wishful thinking, which is just innocent hope, cross into the realm of its dangerous cousin, 'denial' ?
Denial, is when people bend the truth to fit their pre-existing lens of a situation because facing situations for what it really is , will ruin the warm glow of the life that they know it to be. It denies that there is even the existence of a changed baseline, a manipulated variable. It makes erroneous comparisons.
Denial, is someone looking at the clear facts and seeing a problem, while the denier is looking right at it saying "WHAT PROBLEM" as if it genuinely does not exist. Somehow they have mastered the ability to make visible things disappear as if it is not part of the facts to begin with. It's a superpower, really !
It looks like echo chambers and logical fallacies, two topics which really pique my interest.
It could look as harmless as a 70 old man saying;
"I've climbed this mountain twice before, so of course I can do it again" (while actively having a blind spot that that happened when he was younger and healthier) (Also known as a 'false equivalence' logical fallacy)
--All's sunshine and roses until, in reliance on this truth-bending, he goes up the mountain the 3rd time, and, um, I don't know... dies?
It can look like a woman who has stayed single for a long time because she genuinely believes no man is good enough, while being blind to the fact that her difficult, unpleasant personality, views and mindset is the reason nobody can build a relationship with someone like that.
--All's sunshine and roses until, in reliance on this supremacist belief, she dies alone because all the reasonably 'good ones' have been taken?
2. Denial is disguised laziness
What separates innocent procrastination (we all do it!) from laziness fueled by denial?
Denial is a shortcut to not need to deal with an inconvenience immediately.
The very fact that a problem could have been fixed when it was a small problem, but DENIED as even being a problem in the first place, - results in a MUCH LARGER catastrophe that now becomes too impossible to even conceptualize to fix.
Denial can look like the harmless: "I will do this tomorrow" , "It's not a pressing need", "Actually it's still usable if we do ____ (the classic 'work-arounds', seem familiar?)".
Denial can look like "Oh there appears to be a leak pattern in these walls here, but it's okay, water is coming out from our tap anyway , so is there really a problem?" when in fact, calling a plumber the first instance you saw it would have been a quick and much cheaper fix than now needing to break up large chunks of your wall to realign the pipes.
Denial looks like, not ticking all the little and doable tasks on your to-do lists because you deny that it's something that takes time and must be done now, because there is always tomorrow, except, ten other tasks surface tomorrow and little left-over task from today remains unattended until you're really, really unable to postpone it and now have to do it stressfully.
3. Denial is both harmful and hurtful
What makes denial , as a shield for some to navigate their overwhelming days, become a sword to others?
In the comforts of rose tinted glasses, those who opt for denial will actually evolve a blindness or deafness to the real danger their coping mechanism pose to others.
Denial can look as simple as announcing; "This car is fully functional, there is nothing wrong with it" , then, in reliance of that representation, someone else drives it, and the car (which is clearly not fully functional) dies in the middle of the highway and the person driving it is left stranded and distressed.
Denial can look like the head of a household developing a hoarding habit where more and more junk is stored in the front porch because "these things might work someday", or "Actually there is nothing wrong with it", when the storing of all this mess creates a nest for rats who have now made it their condominium, along with the fumes of pests enter the house. Meanwhile, the general appearance of randomly arranged junk gives others who live in this home an immediate negative mental impact, which affects their mood, which affects their interaction with all others in the house, which leads to wars both internal and external.
Denial can look like a firm insistence that a friendship is platonic when someone in the equation has presented ample evidence that it's romantic to them and feelings are developed. The hurt from not nipping someone's feelings in the budding stage (because it's harmless, and because nobody actually confessed their feelings) only magnifies the impact of hurt someone feels when they have all this snowballed feelings that they find out could never be reciprocated.
Denial can look like carrying on with a relationship, or even a career that is slowly killing you day by day, because "too much went into it" already. (This is also synonymous with a 'sunk-cost' fallacy !) It is an adaptive a blindness to the negative factors in continuing this path of decision. It's like flogging a dead horse !
Denial can look like putting off a difficult conversation with a friend that has hurt you with something they did in the past, but one day exploding on their face for something trivial as a result of a build up of all the previous times the hurt went unaddressed.
You get the idea.
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You wanna know the worse thing about calling out someone so entangled in the webs of denial?
....THEY WILL DENY IT !