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Vanishing cream for the mind, English writer Jeremiah Creedon calls it.
It's beholding the mote in your brother's eye, says the Bible, while disregarding the beam in your own.
Denial is refusing to listen to the voice that awakens you in the night and whispers, "You know, you really are an incredible jerk and you ought to do something about it!"
"Beware thoughts that come in the night," cautions William Least Heat Moon at the start of Blue Highways, his evocative journal of self-discovery on the back roads of America. "They aren't turned properly. They come in askew, free of sense or satisfaction, deriving from the most remote of sources."
Samuel Taylor Coleridge called those remote sources "an aching hollow in the bosom, a dark cold speck at the heart, an obscure and boding sense of something that must be kept out of sight of the conscience, some secret lodger, whom they can neither resolve to reject or retain."
Denial is keeping from ourselves secrets we already know.
It's choosing to forget what we can't bear to remember.
It's making people tell us what we want to hear so we can keep believing the lies we've told ourselves, keep punishing those who dare to make us listen to the truth.
Denial is the psychology of self-deception, the mind's deliberate failure to see things as they really are in order to protect ourselves from ourselves, says Donald Goldman, author of Vital Lies, Simple Truths: The Psychology of Self-Deception.
Familiar words of denial:
It's not about the money.
I am not a crook.
I was only obeying orders.
Business is business.
I can quit whenever I want.
I don't remember.
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