611 Quotes About Denial

It was that culture of denial that allowed my abuse to take place to start with. Did you know that it wasn't until 1984 that the Department of Health added the category of "sexual abuse" to its list of harms that can befall children? When I was being raped and made pregnant at the age of 11, it wasn't just my own dissociative process that told me that it wasn't happening; it was society too. "We don't have a category for that. Computer says no."͏

I cut myself up really badly with the lid of a tin can. They took me to the emergency room, but I couldn’t tell the doctor what I had done to cut myself—I didn’t have any memory of it. The ER doctor was convinced that dissociative identity disorder didn’t exist. . . . A lot of people involved in mental health tell you it doesn’t exist. Not that you don’t have it, but that it doesn’t exist.

The human brain can protect us from seeing and feeling what it believes may be too uncomfortable for us to tolerate. It can lead us to deny, defend, minimize, or rationalize away something that doesn’t fit our worldview.

How can it be that Jane is with me, and says she loves me? Will she not depart as suddenly as she came? To-morrow, I fear I shall find her no more.

I'm not crying. My eyes are sweating.

To seek permission is to seek denial.

It was because he could not bring himself to believe in the reality of his experience that he did not give way to utter despair.

Like the paint cans in the basement, the file cabinets in the garage, the rusted push-mower in the shed off the porch— Goody lived in the corners, the creases, the tucked-away parts of their house and their lives. They never talked about it, but they knew. To talk about it was to admit it was there.

What ideology, I wondered, was not based on a principled denial of the facts?