Is there a price to living in denial?

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The price of denial is loss. To ignore life is to give yours away. To ignore emotion and pain is to ask your body to free you of it. To not care about what happens - invites loss. To live is to accept reality - to accept reality is to accept loss, but to care about losing is the first step in gaining back what was lost. So perhaps you should have just not denied anything in the first place and saved yourself the hassle?

I don't think that I've ever thought of anyone living in denial as a happy liar before.

It's as though denial is a form of debt that must be paid off at some point.

Kiddo, a recommendation....before you start hoping OTHER people will approve of you and appreciate you, YOU have to approve and appreciate you. What you appear to be looking for is external acceptance...and it's false.

I don't know if glider18 is looking for acceptance, he's looking at how he perceives things and is trying to align his internal perceptions with those of others.

I agree that it starts with approving and accepting yourself, but sometimes it is also helpful when you realize things about other people. And I can relate to glider18's experience. I realized in my 20s that my ramblings about special interests were not appreciated by others, so I stopped talking about my special interests. Probably went overboard because I have a high knowledge level in a couple of areas that few people are aware of.

Z

No reason at all, if you can, without hurting anyone...I sometimes enjoy visiting other people's "lives in denial" immensely, and I mean that sincerely...

The only thing that stops me living in denial myself is the strain of being constantly aware that reality is not playing along with me. Some people can, and do, find ways to shut that awareness down, I am never going to be one of them. Sometimes wish I was though.

M

Not so long ago I'd have said that being in denial is always harmful, but these days I'm not so sure. What about a religious person who was dying of a terminal illness? From my perspective, most religious people are in denial about the fact that there is no evidence for an afterlife, but I wouldn't dare try to tell them that under the circumstances. Suppose they recognised my logic and beieved me, after all those years of expecting a nice reward after all their Earthy suffering? It's OK for me, I'm used to the idea that when I die I simply won't exist.

The human psyche is very different from a computer following the old "rubbish in, rubbish out" rule. Crudely speaking, the left lobe doesn't like the right lobe to know what it's up to. If the average person were to take a pill that abolished all their self-delusions, it's quite possible that the ego wouldn't be able to take it all at once. I'm pretty sure the unconscious exists, and I think it's there for a good reason. Many of our motivations are beyond our vision, yet we nearly always manage to concoct and believe rationalisations that bolster up the crazy notion that we're logical creatures.

On the other hand, once I glimpse an awkward idea that I seem to have been hiding from, I can't easily resist chewing the matter over and challenging even my most cherished beliefs. A counsellor once warned me that I might be doing more harm than good. But I still have a very strong feeling that if I'm wrong, I need to know. I'll habitually scrutinise and try to correct every slight stretcher that I (or anybody else) comes out with, always turning ideas upside down. Of course in my role as a science worker, that can be very useful indeed. A scientist's job is to believe nothing and test everything, and I love it

There's also the problem that, once I've noticed a dodgy-looking assumption, I KNOW when I'm blocking its examination. Self-delusion only really works when I'm "lucky" enough not to have glimpsed the flaw in the fabric, and of course if I can't see it, I can't decide whether to debunk it or not, and if I can see it, the cat's out of the bag - surely nobody can consciously stay in denial?

I'm not sure about abreaction - recalling painful memories in the hope of release from buried traumas that supposedly inhibit our proper functioning in the here and now. I think it likely that believers in that process have done immense damage, though I can't rule out the possibility that some people have achieved closure and moved on, like Sherlock Holmes in the film "The Seven Percent Solution" who overcame his cocaine addiction and his distrust of women once Freud had got him to recall the childhood trauma that gave rise to his eccentricities. I'm sure there was never a real case that was so tidy, but maybe the technique is valid sometimes.

Summary: the price depends on the circumstances, and our capacity to judge a bargain is severely impaired because of the way our brains are wired, autistic or not. We're mostly at the mercy of our true nature which is largely hidden from us. All I can advise is to try to pursue the truth however bad it may turn out to be, but if the process starts to feel seriously harmful, to be prepared "not to go there" sometimes.

yes dare is a price for living in denial.
if you live in denial you will be eaten by de crocodiles dat live in denial.

^^^

Zonder---you are exactly right in your explanation of me in the post you made earlier here. I feel you definitely understand me. I appreciate that.

Such wonderful replies! And I thought the thread had no new posts! I hate when this happens: I'll post a thread I'm looking forward to reading the contributions to, and get no notifications for new posts and so think that there were no replies. I hate this bug. I came across this thread by chance today, luckily.

alba, I could've written the first paragraph of your post. I had to check to see if I had written it or someone else. I always thought that I too attracted people who live in denial like a magnet. And I thought my parents lived in denial. However, after reading and pondering over the posts on this thread, I realize that what I was calling denial was actually manipulative lying. The people I'm talking about are not lying to themselves. This is why I couldn't find any disadvantages to their "denial". There"s a heavy price to pay for denial:
People who are in denial are maladjusted to reality and therefore keep failing once and again at the same thing.

I went out on a limb there, but we seem to have had some of the same experiences . . .

Z

Yes I think that's an important distinction. And to make things even more complicated, I've heard there's a huge grey area between the two extremes. A person might get a little bit of evidence that some belief of theirs could be wrong. Say it's a belief that justifies that person getting a better deal out of others than they otherwise would. Before that thought becomes fully expressed in consciousness, it triggers a little burst of anxiety and the brain represses the thought, or at least fails to bring it into full light for examination.

It's just like wishful thinking - we shun ideas that feel unpleasant, amplify ideas that make us feel good. When that process is completely unconscious, that's denial in the psychiatric sense. When the culprit knows exactly what they're doing but conceals it, that's manipulative lying. Between the two poles, a person has some potential to see what's happening but they might not get there if their introspection skills aren't great, or if the anxiety is too intense, or even if they just get distracted from the problem at the wrong time. They might get a vague feeling that something's not quite right, but if they don't make quite an effort to go back to it and work it out, they won't get the benefit of it.

What I'd like to know is, for any particular case, how do you detect where on the "awareness spectrum" an individual was at the time? Superficially there's no obvious difference. Did Al Capone really mean it when he argued that he was "only providing a service?" Dale Carnegie suggests he did, and that everybody does this kind of mental self-delusional trick on themselves to protect their self-esteem. He made a lot of money through marketing that was based on that kind of paradigm, and even claimed that it could be used to win friends and influence people - his methods do seem to work to some extent, for anybody who's happy to craftily feed people's ego for ulterior purposes.

denial is much worse than obliviousness.

to deny means to resist truth with false explanatations that promote disengagement from realization of the reality of an event..

oblivion is in the domain of innocence.

Good question. I see lots of people lying to themselves that someone else is in denial when it's not true. Like a woman saying a certain man is in denial about being head over heels with her, when he's actually not into her at all. Many times people project their own denial onto others, to protect their own egos. Could you give an example of what you mean by "where on the "awareness spectrum" an individual was at the time?"

Aye, but there's none so oblivious as those who don't want to be de-oblivionated.