denial

Admitting the need for help may also compound the survivor's sense of defeat. The therapists Inger Agger and Soren Jensen, who work with political refugees, describe the case of K, a torture survivor with severe post-traumatic symptoms who adamantly insisted that he had no psychological problems: "K...did not understand why he was to talk with a therapist. His problems were medical: the reason why he did not sleep at night was due to the pain in his legs and feet. He was asked by the therapist...about his political background, and K told him that he was a Marxist and that he had read about Freud and he did not believe in any of that stuff: how could his pain go away by talking to a therapist?

I am in good company, simply following those in front of me and knowing others are following behind. We are on our way up a narrow staircase. The bannister is a thick rope suggesting safety. The stairs go around and around inside a church tower; or perhaps it is a minaret? The whorls of the staircase grow narrower and narrower, but as there are so many people behind there is no longer any possibility of turning around or even stopping. The pressure from behind foeces me on. The staircase suddenly stops at a garbage chute in the wall. When i open the hatch and squeeze my way through the hole, i find myself on the outside of the tower. The rope has dissappeared. It is totally dark. I cling on to the slippery, icy wall of the tower while vainly trying to find a foothold in the emptiness.

DENIALDefense 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.

The manic relief that comes from the fantasy that we can with one savage slash cut the chains of the past and rise like a phoenix, free of all history, is generally a tipping point into insanity, akin to believing that we can escape the endless constraints of gravity, and fly off a tall building. ____ freeeee_ SPLAT!_.

Mental anguish always results from the avoidance of legitimate suffering.

The typical atheist rebels against God as a teenager rebels against his parents. When his own desires or standards are not fulfilled in the way that he sees fit, he, in revolt, storms out of the house in denial of the Word of God and in scrutiny of a great deal of those who stand by the Word of God. The epithet 'Heavenly Father' is a grand reflection, a relation to that of human nature.

If the social stress is physical, sexual, or emotional abuse, the way to treat the depression is to stop the abuse. Unfortunately, advocates of the biochemical treatment of depression have gone along with the view of academic theory and popular culture that the problem is entirely within the skull of the victim. Enthusiasm for biochemical treatment and research is partly due to the fact that it helps perpetuate the myth that suicide and depression should be treated by changing the victim, not by changing ourselves. As long as we have a narrow view of the causes of biochemical imbalance, such as limiting it to innate genetic defects, we can practice denial on the social complicity in the causation of suicide. The narrow view does nothing to help reduce pain and increase resources for the millions of people whose problems do not respond to medications. It also deprives us of an opportunity for progress in a much broader area for social reform. The dynamics behind the oppression of the suicidal is similar to the dynamics of other forms of injustice; progress in one area can support progress in other areas.

Societies have a peculiar way of relating, or more accurately non-relating, to rape maybe because it is so vicious, they choose to live in denial about it.

Your observations and conclusions are mirrored illusions of your inner state of being, teaching you truth through falsehoods, strength through weakness and clarity through confusion. You are seeing your Self now, disguised as the world through a lens of denial, but you will soon come to realize that what you choose to deny in yourself manifests into your world. The flaws you see in your world are your most powerful teachers.

Society gives the image of sexual violators as weird, ugly, anti-social, alcoholics. Society gives the impression that violators kidnap children are out of their homes and take them to some wooded area and abandon them after the violation. Society gives the impression that everyone hates people who violate children. If all of these myths were true, healing would not be as challenging as it is. Half of our healing is about the actual abuse. The other half is about how survivors fit into society in the face of the myths that people hold in order to make themselves feel safe. The truth is that 80% of childhood sexual abuse is perpetrated by family members. Yet we rarely hear the word __ncest_. The word is too ugly and the truth is too scary. Think about what would happen if we ran a campaign to end incest instead of childhood sexual abuse. The number one place that children should know they are safe is in their homes. As it stands, as long as violators keep sexual abuse within the family, the chances of repercussion by anyone is pretty low. Wives won__ leave violating husbands, mothers won__ kick their violating children out of the home, and violating grandparents still get invited to holiday dinners. It is time to start cleaning house. If we stop incest first, then we will strengthen our cause against all sexual abuse.

The individual benefits as an individual from his ability to deny the truth even though society as a whole, of which he is a part, suffers.

Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.

Well, there is a piece of famous advice, grand advice even if it is German, to forget what you can't bear. The strong can forget, can shut out history. Very good. Even if it is self-flattery to speak of strength--these aesthetic philosophers, they take a posture, but power sweeps postures away. Still, it's true you can't go on transposing one nightmare into another, Nietzsche was certainly right about that. The tender-minded must harden themselves. Is this world nothing but a barren lump of coke? No, no, but what sometimes seems a system of prevention, a denial of what every human being knows. I love my children, but I am the world to them, and bring them nightmares. I had this child by my enemy. And I love her. The sight of her, the odor of her hair, this minute, makes me tremble with love. Isn't it mysterious how I love the child of my enemy? But a man doesn't need happiness for himself. No, he can put up with any amount of torment--with recollections, with his own familiar evils, despair. And this is the unwritten history of man, his unseen, negative accomplishment, his power to do without gratification for himself provided there is something great, something into which his being, and all beings can go. He does not need meaning as long as such intensity has scope. Because then it is self-evident; it is meaning.

The clash is born of the fact that the child within me sees with undiluted clarity what the adult within me is incessantly working to deny. And in these most vexing moments, to be the adult is to defer to the child.

I'm convinced that most men don't know what they believe, rather, they only know what they wish to believe. How many people blame God for man's atrocities, but wouldn't dream of imprisoning a mother for her son's crime?

Joy is not a denial of painful circumstances, but a certainty that He is at work while we are in them. EL

It's all overrated, man. Sex is only a great thing if you're not getting any.

you cannot replace negative beliefs with positive ones you can't believe- positive ones that are too ambitious. you must find and choose a thought that allows you to feel relief.