Denial Defense Mechanism Quotes

The human mind has a primitive ego defense mechanism that negates all realities that produce too much stress for the brain to handle. It’s called Denial.

If you are deemed insane, then all actions that would oherwise prove you are not do, in actuality, fall into the framework of an insane person’s actions. Your sound protests constitute denial. Your valid fears are deemed paranoia. Your survival instincts are labeled defense mechanisms. It’s a no-win situation. It’s a death penalty really.

She's terrified that all these sensations and images are coming out of her — but I think she's even more terrified to find out why." Carla's description was typical of survivors of chronic childhood abuse. Almost always, they deny or minimize the abusive memories. They have to: it's too painful to believe that their parents would do such a thing.

The most common emotional defense is avoidance (an ineffective coping skill for any stressor) as expressed through denial (e.g., "That wasn't really bad, I barely remember it").

They feel guilty for having survived so they pretend the bad things never happened Exodus (1960) screenplay

DENIAL Defense mechanism in which the existence of unpleasant realities is disavowed; refers to keeping out of conscious awareness any aspects of external reality that, if acknowledged, would produce anxiety.

Sorrow comes with so many defense mechanisms. You have your shock, your denial, your getting wasted, your cracking jokes, and your religion. You also have the old standby catchall—the blind belief in fate, the whole "things happening for a reason" drill.

Being in a state of denial is a universally human response to situations which threaten to overwhelm. People who were abused as children sometimes carry their denial like precious cargo without a port of destination. It enabled us to survive our childhood experiences, and often we still live in survival mode decades beyond the actual abuse. We protect ourselves to excess because we learned abruptly and painfully that no one else would.

Denial of one's need for others is the most common type of defense against bonding. If people come from a situation, whether growing up or later in life, where good, safe relationships were not available to them, they learn to deny that they even want them. Why want what you can't have? They slowly get rid of their awareness of the need.

Family secrets can go back for generations. They can be about suicides, homicides, incest, abortions, addictions, public loss of face, financial disaster, etc. All the secrets get acted out. This is the power of toxic shame. The pain and suffering of shame generate automatic and unconscious defenses. Freud called these defenses by various names: denial, idealization of parents, repression of emotions and dissociation from emotions. What is important to note is that we can’t know what we don’t know. Denial, idealization, repression and dissociation are unconscious survival mechanisms. Because they are unconscious, we lose touch with the shame, hurt and pain they cover up. We cannot heal what we cannot feel. So without recovery, our toxic shame gets carried for generations.

Denial is a useful defense mechanism until it's not.

Carla's description was typical of survivors of chronic childhood abuse. Almost always, they deny or minimize the abusive memories. They have to: it's too painful to believe that their parents would do such a thing. So they fragment the memories into hundreds of shards, leaving only acceptable traces in their conscious minds. Rationalizations like "my childhood was rough," "he only did it to me once or twice," and "it wasn't so bad" are common, masking the fact that the abuse was devastating and chronic. But while the knowledge, body sensations, and feelings are shattered, they are not forgotten. They intrude in unexpected ways: through panic attacks and insomnia, through dreams and artwork, through seemingly inexplicable compulsions, and through the shadowy dread of the abusive parent. They live just outside of consciousness like noisy neighbors who bang on the pipes and occasionally show up at the door.

Attending a funeral would leave the average person insane, if they truly believed that sooner or later they are also going to die.

The triad of methods used to achieve this remarkable increase in killing are desensitization, conditioning, and denial defense mechanisms.

Recovering from family scapegoating requires recognizing that being the ‘identified patient’ is symptomatic of generations of systemic dysfunction within one’s family, fueled by unrecognized anxiety and even trauma. In a certain sense, members of a dysfunctional family are participating in a ‘consensual trance‘, i.e., a ‘survival trance’ supported by false narratives, toxic shame, anxiety, and egoic defense mechanisms, such as denial and projection.

The central mechanism of the avoidance mechanism of PTSD is the ego defense of denial

A person whom fails to conquer oneself will always live in fear, and experiences life filled with conflict and emotional storms. Fearfulness prevents a person from perceiving reality and ever knowing oneself. Unable to cope with fear and uncertainty, a person resorts to denial, repression, compromise, and hides behind the mask of a false self.

Human beings have an enormous desire not to know. It is very painful to know. If we did a popularity contest among all the defense mechanisms, the defense mechanism of denial would win hands down. It is the most popular one. Unconsciousness is difficult to deal with, and it takes a heroic struggle in the psyche to develop a strong ego. Certainly anything like an adequate ego function is not automatic. If you have evaluated your own ego function lately, you know that even after much therapy and struggle it is difficult to get yourself conscious and stay awake. This is the primal deep reality in this whole issue of spiritual warfare. It is a struggle against unconsciousness.

Denial is a defense mechanism, all about self-preservation.

Consciously experiencing one's own victimisation instead of trying to ward it off provides protection against sadism; i.e., the compulsion to torment and humiliate others.

Some of the facts we are denying we were told by our very own eyes.

The ad-hominem of reducing people with an inclination to help as having a “savior complex” is merely a display of their own defense-mechanisms acting as a resistance to action or responsibility. No thank you.

In addition to denial and reaction formation, a third defense mechanism, identification with the aggressor, was also at play. This occurred when the children took the fear of the alienating parent and turned it into an allegiance with that parent against the targeted parent. In this way the child transformed him or herself from a victim to a victimizer.

Under the heading of "defense mechanisms,” psychoanalysis describes a number of ways in which a person becomes alienated from himself. For example, repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection. These "mechanisms" are often described in psychoanalytic terms as themselves "unconscious,” that is, the person himself appears to be unaware that he is doing this to himself. Even when a person develops sufficient insight to see that "splitting", for example, is going on, he usually experiences this splitting as indeed a mechanism, an impersonal process, so to speak, which has taken over and which he can observe but cannot control or stop. There is thus some phenomenological validity in referring to such "defenses" by the term "mechanism.” But we must not stop there. They have this mechanical quality because the person as he experiences himself is dissociated from them. He appears to himself and to others to suffer from them. They seem to be processes he undergoes, and as such he experiences himself as a patient, with a particular psychopathology. But this is so only from the perspective of his own alienated experience. As he becomes de-alienated he is able first of all to become aware of them, if he has not already done so, and then to take the second, even more crucial, step of progressively realizing that these are things he does or has done to himself. Process becomes converted back to praxis, the patient becomes an agent.

we discussed the function of defense mechanisms and found that we were humbled by the power of that portion of our psyche, we began to understand that if it weren’t for rationalization, sublimation, denial—all the little tricks we let ourselves perform—if instead we simply saw the world as it was, with nothing to protect us, honestly and courageously, it would break our hearts.

Sorrow comes with so many defense mechanisms. You have your shock, your denial, your getting wasted, your cracking jokes, and your religion. You also have the old standby catchall--the blind belief in fate, the whole "things happening for a reason" drill. But my personal favorite defense has always been anger, with its trusty offshoots of self-righteous indignation, bitterness, and resentment.

She says that people who wonder how you can have hope in seemingly hopeless situations, like a death camp, confuse hope with idealism. Idealism expects everything to be fair or easy or good. She says it's a defense mechanism not unlike denial or delusion. Hope, she says, does not deny the evil but is a response to it." I was beginning to see that hope was not just wishful thinking. It did take the facts and the obstacles into account, but it did not let them overwhelm or stop us. Certainly, this was true in many seemingly hopeless situations.

The energy of intense suffering is pushed out of consciousness simply so that life can be allowed to go on. Denial permits us to survive the unsurvivable—for a while. Left too long, any unconscious defense mechanism becomes detrimental to life. When collective denial goes unaddressed, we see the proliferation of groups that deny that the Holocaust occurred, that a civil war was waged to defend the economic institution of race-based slavery in the United States, or that hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims are subjected to state-sanctioned ethnic cleansing in the form of mass murder, sexual violence, and forced exile from the primarily Buddhist Myanmar.1

That lack of insight is called “anosognosia,” a condition in which the person suffering the disability is unaware of the existence of it. Unlike denial, which is a defense mechanism, anosognosia has physiological roots in the brain.

The road to self-improvement does not begin with the realization of other people’s scorn. Personal salvation commences with the determined excavation and displacement of a crusty layer of self-denial, which defense mechanism camouflaged my intensifying sense of self-repugnance for how I acted in this earthly life.

I suppose that’s just the world we live in today . The supernatural— the paranormal— we’re fascinated by these things so long as there’s some room to doubt, to question, to explain it. But when it stares us in the face? When there is no alternative explanation? When something scares the crap out of us? We turn to denial. We pretend it didn’t happen. Denial is a defense mechanism. It allows us to move on with our lives under the illusion of normalcy.

you get such an indication from Jan that she’s going to try to derail you with a denial, or if she beats you to the punch and is able to voice the denial, there are several immediate actions you can take to quash her effort. First, if you want to get a person to stop talking, a very effective way to accomplish that is with one word: the person’s name. A fascinating nuance of human communication is that when we hear our name, we have a natural inclination to switch from speaking mode to listening mode, because it’s the way people typically get our attention to tell us something—we hear our name, and our ears perk up. The next step is to use a control phrase, like, “Jan, hold on a second,” or “Jan, give me a chance to make this clear.” That enables you to gain control of the exchange, and to ease back into your monologue. As always, it needs to be conveyed calmly, and without raising your voice—trying to control the situation by turning up your volume will create a confrontational atmosphere that will only make your job more difficult. Third, a remarkably effective mechanism to get someone to stop talking is the universal stop sign: You hold up your hand. You do it almost as a gesture of self-defense—you’re not extending it out aggressively and shoving it into the person’s face, or doing it with attitude. It’s a visual amplification of your control phrase, and it’s more powerful than you might imagine. The reason is that this is a verbal battle, and when you get the person to stop talking, you’ve taken away his weapon. In medieval times, it was a clash of swords;

Acceptance of climate change is assumed to be transferred, as though through osmosis, by reading a book or watching a documentary. When it is acquired, it is assumed, like the data that it is based on, to be solid and unshakeable. Because there is no recognition of climate change conviction, there is no language of climate change doubt, no one is offering to give us encouragement or to help us to “walk though that together.” There is no defense against backsliding and denial, and there is no mechanism for coping with grief.

That is how defense mechanisms work—in this case, denial and rationalization. We can distort reality so that we don’t feel its effects on our emotions, even to the extent of temporarily fooling the adrenal glands.

Emotional distance, or denial as psychologists call it, is a defense mechanism that helps keep us from being overwhelmed by an emotional experience.

On some level, I’m sure Mrs. Lawton knows what her daughter is. She’s not a stupid woman. But denial is a powerful defense mechanism.

Recovering from family scapegoating requires recognizing that being the ‘identified patient’ is symptomatic of generations of systemic dysfunction within one’s family, fueled by unrecognized anxiety and even trauma. In a certain sense, members of a dysfunctional family are participating in a consensual trance, i.e., a ‘survival trance’ supported by false narratives, toxic shame, anxiety, and egoic defense mechanisms, such as denial and projection.

Those who persecute others are warding of knowledge of their own fate as victims.

Denial may offer temporary relief, but it ultimately robs us of the opportunity for self-reflection and personal development. It is a defense mechanism that shields us from painful realities, but it also obstructs our ability to face and overcome them.

The reason why people go into denial is pretty simple. People set it up as a defense mechanism. The first line of defense that your brain sets up for any crises that come your way is denial. No one does it on purpose. It happens unconsciously. The brain will actually put it in front of you in such a manner that it will seem non-threatening to you at the time. Subsequently, you alter the way you see things so that you are protected against getting hurt or overwhelmed. Here are some of the common reasons why people prefer to be in denial – To Avoid Difficult Emotions Codependents go into denial to avoid any feelings or thoughts that might lead to pain if they were asked to come face to face with the facts of your life.

To get to the point of recovery, we must survive. Survivors are by necessity co-dependent. We use many coping skills and “ego defenses” to do this. Children of alcoholics and from other troubled or dysfunctional families survive by dodging, hiding, negotiating, taking care of others, pretending, denying and learning and adapting to stay alive using any method that works. They learn other, often unhealthy, ego defense mechanisms, as described by Anna Freud (1936) and summarized by Vaillant (1977). These include: intellectualization, repression, disassociation, displacement and reaction formation (all of which if over-used can be considered to be neurotic) and projection, passive-aggressive behavior, acting out, hypochondriasis, grandiosity and denial (all of which if over-used can be considered immature and at times psychotic).

Unable to face the paltriness of our lives, it is simpler to bask in a fleeting pleasure dome than labor endlessly to create worthy secular testimonies demonstrating that a life well lived does in fact have intrinsic value. Regardless of what providence has in store, dense men such as me fritter away their lives hoping to capture eroticism’s delights. It is less taxing to rummage through the garbage dump picking amidst the trash heap of life’s inglorious scandals than it is to delve into penetrating our defensive shells.

The first step toward attaining a greater mastery of our inner world is to stop denying, ignoring or numbing ourselves to the events of our psyche. Many people, afraid or ashamed of what they may see if they take an honest look within, resort to drugs and alcohol, or other defense mechanisms, to quiet any psychic conflicts. But the more we seal ourselves off from our inner world, the more we create a threat from what should be our greatest ally. The path to inner harmony always goes through our psychic conflicts as denial will only cause such conflicts to intensify. If shame is preventing us from admitting to our psychological problems, then it can be helpful to realize that psychological discord is far more the norm, than the exception and that inner demons are but an inevitable part of what it means to be human.

I wonder who "they" are for him. Most of us have a "they" in the audience, even though nobody is really watching, at least not how we think they are. The people who are watching us - the people who really see us- don’t care about the false self, about the show we are putting on. I wonder who those people are for John?" "I thought about how many people avoid trying for things they really want in life because its more painful to get close to the goal but not achieve it than not to have taken the chance in the first place." "Every hour counts for all of us and I want to be fully present in the fully hour we spend with each one." "You will inevitably hurt your partner, your parents, your children, your closest friends - and they will hurt you- because if you sign up for intimacy, getting hurt is part of the deal." "The more you welcome your vulnerability the less afraid you'll feel" "We all use defense mechanisms to deal with anxiety, frustration, or unacceptable impulses, but what’s fascinating about them is that we aren't aware of them in the moment. A familiar examples is denial- some, rationalization." "Generally when the therapy is coming to an end, the work moves toward its final stage, which is saying goodbye. in those sessions, the patient and I consolidate the changes made by talking about the "progress and process". What was helpful in getting to where the person is today? What wasn't? What has she learned about herself -her strengths, her challenges, her internal scripts and narratives- and what coping strategies and healthier ways of being can she can take with her when she leaves? Underlying all this, of course, is how do we say goodbye?" "Just like your physiological immune system helps your body recover from physical attack, your brain helps you recover from psychological attack." "But many people come to therapy seeking closure. Help me not to feel. What they eventually discover is that you can't mute one emotion without muting others. You want to mute the pain? You will also mute joy.

When a person projects, they cannot accept a quality that exists in themselves. Instead, they see it in—and project it upon—another person. Essentially, they blame someone else for having the same faults they refuse to see in themselves. HCPs project their own perceived badness and unworthiness onto others. This projection is a defense mechanism that allows them to feel better about themselves, in a manner similar to rationalization and denial. All-or-Nothing

Grieving requires softening your self-protective defense mechanisms enough to feel: getting beyond the denial, numbness, righteousness, apathy, and other obstacles we have put In place to avoid the depths of pain. The humanity that was previously made invisible must be made visible again.

Not impossible, Robert, just unthinkable. The human mind has a primitive ego defense mechanism that negates all realities that produce too much stress for the brain to handle. It’s called denial.” ==========

The human mind has a primitive ego defense mechanism that negates all realities that produce too much stress for the brain to handle. It’s called Denial

This is one of our most powerful motivators, but it is mostly unconscious. Simply put, we act to guard our ego from anything that would make us feel psychologically less. In doing so, it is so powerful that it allows us to bend reality and lie to ourselves and others—all outside of our conscious awareness. Defense mechanisms are the ways that we avoid responsibility and negative feelings, and they include denial, rationalization, projection, sublimation, regression, displacement, repression, and reaction formation, to name a few. When you know the ego is in play, it often takes front stage over other motivations.