Man in Denial
by
Roberto Diego
Copyright 2007 by Roberto Diego
Cannot be reproduced in any manner without written permission from the copyright holder.
http://www.robdiego.com/index.html
What is psychological denial? How does it affect the life of the denier and the lives of those around him? What if the denier is a person on the world stage influencing many lives and even nations?
For many years, I have performed research to develop a psychological principle that might explain addiction and denial and why these two psychological problems are so prevalent and damaging to so many. This discussion is part of a wider theory of human value and is intended to discuss only a single aspect: denial. It is intended to reveal characteristics of many men, including some women (though I think with less frequency generally). Although I am not a psychologist by trade, I believe I have achieved an understanding of psychological issues related to what I have called Man in Denial.
One principle I have identified is “Survival Stress Response” which I consider to have been with man before he became the “rational” creature he is today. The principle is based upon the theory that as primitive human societies developed into division-of-labor societies, the work of survival became predominantly a male business. In effect, females and children became gatherers while males became hunters of the wild animals that provided high protein meat. The hunt, because it presented a tremendous physical and mental challenge for males, created a whole new creature, the strong “alpha” male. He needed bigger musculature, more adrenalin output, an attack mentality, keen senses and a quick mind.
In a hostile and demanding environment where survival was achieved every day, sometimes moment-by-moment, hunting required that the male develop the physical and mental abilities necessary for feeding the family. A successful hunter, whose power and wit meant a happy, well-fed family, gained considerable prestige because of the larger and more dangerous animals whose teeth, horns and tusks his cave collected. A status society developed wherein the most successful hunters were revered above those not quite so successful. A pecking order developed. In fact, the dominant alpha male’s abilities may have even shown through in the number of children he could father and the number of females that desired him.
If a given hunter was not particularly successful, or if he was aging or wounded, no longer able to grapple with large animals, a loss of prestige and status for him was the result. Since this individual was no longer revered, since he was not as successful as the stronger and younger hunters, the result could have been psychological denial. This denial created a variety of responses to deal with the negative feelings inherent in failure and loss of position for the alpha male.
One result of such denial was a change in his relationships. Since, to him, others no longer respected him he rationalized a new more judgmental opinion of those around him where he no longer respected them. This set up a response in their attitudes toward him to either accept his changed view or to reject him totally. Denial is the form of rationalization he chooses for coping with fears and anxieties. Denial is the first line of defense against uncomfortable thoughts.
Move forward into modern times and we see that denial is used by many men to deal with childhoods that are filled with excessive conflict. In effect, deniers hold that life is conflict and that one must "win" over others in order to resolve the fears that conflict brings. This view is convenient for the individual who does not want to make the effort to understand life and sees all issues in the light of his relationship with others. If others default on their responsibility to be rational, then that default must be the natural condition. Denial is the mistaken recognition that the mind is not a valid means of survival so that if one denies the primacy of reality, one can then come down to the level of human conflict, of the concrete and that anti-intellectual. In such a case, the only option for men is to win, to dominate and to control others.
What if life is not a perpetual conflict with others? What if, instead, it is made up of cooperation and understanding, of people who want to do their best and live good lives without constant fighting and controversy at every turn? If this is true, then all the conclusions that the denier has reached about conflict in himself and in the world are wrong and they send the denier into a pattern of behavior that creates the very conflict that he assumes is out there in the "real" world, making him the cause of his own conflict and the bringer of strife into the lives of others. This inner struggle that the denier projects into the world creates a cynical belief that all are corrupt and all are manipulable and weak (assertions about love for mankind notwithstanding), all systems are based on conflict and all men must be conquered and forced to do the will of the one person who somehow knows what is right: the denier.
The longer ones goes into the cycle of denial, the more subconscious it becomes and the more able the individual is in keeping what is happening from himself which creates subconscious guilt and anxiety. This guilt and anxiety is fed into his “system” of denial and additional activities for energy release become necessary. As this downward cycle continues to alienate all around him, even some that love him, he becomes more and more alienated and more and more hateful of those he deems evil.
Anxiety for any individual, depending on how intense it is, can exert a tremendous influence on the denier. To understand this, let’s start with a normal person who has no foundation for fear except that which is part of his normal human makeup. Assume that he seeks rational action in pursuit of rational values; let’s say this individual has an anxiety level “1” and at this level there is no fear. This is just the normal level of anxiety when one does not know, in most situations, what will happen in the next moment. When important values are at stake, this threshold may take on the form of butterflies in the stomach. It may rise to say “2” or “3” in cases where something personal is involved of a significant nature. If he meets a new person, and most of his encounters in life have been positive ones, he still does not experience a high level of anxiety. Only in extreme situations of emergency or danger, that occur infrequently, does his anxiety level ever reach a high mark. He learns to live a normal positive life without fear.
If the individual plans his life properly, he gains knowledge and develops the ability to think, reason, project the future, select good people with whom to associate and plan his environment well. He can control his levels of anxiety and even find a level of strength that gives him a significant advantage in terms of his happiness and competitive posture economically and socially. He becomes secure and self-confident, productive and prideful.
Now assume a drastically different situation. Let us assume that the individual is raised by schizophrenic parents who impart their views that the universe is a hostile alien world, that people are to be distrusted and hated and that he will experience much hatred and prejudice in the future. By treating the individual cruelly, they will prove their point. By giving him a hostile environment, perhaps much yelling, arguing and extremely religious fears about a catastrophic end of the world and the immanent return of God, he will develop a much higher anticipatory threshold that becomes chronic anxiety and constant physical pain. More importantly, he will see himself as the cause of much of the turmoil and he takes to heart his parents’ constant berating of him as an indication of a terrible guilt that he possesses. After several years of youthful development in such an atmosphere, you will have a person that is chronically anxious and fearful. His anxiety level will probably be at, let's say, of 100 and be at that level at all times when he is around people.
He fears all people but must pretend to be normal. He may exude an air of confrontation in order to protect himself. He expresses his fears about others through an extremely paranoid view about people and reality and he learns to consider his life a struggle of monumental proportions – a struggle against others, possibly even a struggle for the future of the world. He tends to over-dramatize events in his life because in his early years there was a lot of drama exhibited by his significant others. He tends to create much of the negative reaction to himself by others because of his distrust of their motives. He tends to fear the opinions of others and projects an overly dependent personality. People become irritated by his constant questions about what they think of him and they tend to avoid him creating further doubts and tensions.
What you have here is the foundation for psychological denial. This individual is so fearful and so anxious chronically that he literally cannot move unless he finds legitimate ways to express his fears and doubts. And he feels that he cannot express them because others would think they are inappropriate so he blocks them from consciousness in order to pretend that he is not bothered. He is denying his own inner state. He expends a tremendous physical effort to pretend to normalcy, to stifle his doubts and questions and to rationalize those doubts he does express. The result is that he expresses his fears and doubts by means of sublimation, the redirection of intense emotions and desires into rationalized, seemingly harmless expressions, actions or escapes. His doubts and fears do not go away, he merely finds different, seemingly more “appropriate” methods for expressing them and releasing the tension they have created. He might become an extremely religious person (or an ideologue) because he finds in the rituals of religion (or ideology) a justification for his fears and a way of expressing them so they sound acceptable. As a religious fanatic, he hates pride in others and exhorts others to altruism. Indeed, the church has a whole philosophy dedicated to precisely that proposition. He feels a sense of being good once he is able to release some of his hatred against “bad’ people. As an ideologue, he might say that the enemy of mankind is the selfish individual, that big corporations are evil. In expressing socialist ideology he has found a ready outlet for his venomous hatred of others; the others that he subconsciously makes responsible for creating all the fear he is attempting to deny and sublimate. He may also escape into activities that directly affect the physical pain he feels such as over eating in order to blunt the pain in his stomach. Or he may become a recluse who reads romance novels in order to avoid intensifying the pain while in the company of other people and to gain a feeling of adventure that is sadly lacking in his life.
Unfortunately, for the more intelligent man in denial, mere sublimation is not enough. His tension (denied fear and anxiety) is at too high a level and he finds himself driven to create a complex web of intrigue and manipulations in order to capture and “pay back” all the evil people that caused him such anxiety. He spends himself in a venomous “creativity” to defeat his inner enemies now projected as evil in the world. His quest is so all consuming that nothing is more important than reaching his goal to save the world. He polarizes all action and opinion; you are either with him (good) or against him (evil). Bursting with a need to individuate himself as a fighter of evil, he creates even more tension in an effort to become a “Superman” of accomplishment.
Yet, there are times of leisure, when he does not work, and he learns in those times that his energies are not merely dormant but need even more release. Rid of the rigidity of living his career and goals of world domination, of playing the role of world savior, he finds that he is driven to do something, find some way of experiencing release in an exciting way, some way of having fun. He does not know that his body is in withdrawal from denial of his tensions and fears. He does not know that his body is demanding an even more intense experience of release – there is unspent energy that his rigid sublimations have not succeeded in releasing. He cannot merely explode into crazy violence because most people who do that become criminals and convicts so he finds other ways to do it and that is where his entertainment choices come into play. Since he has no self-esteem, he begins to make pleasure choices that give him the image of success or the feeling of control. He wants both to be out of control and in control of everyone around him, in an environment where the curtains are drawn and no eyes can see. He notices that there is an incredible amount of tension release in sexual activities so he becomes addicted to promiscuous sex. Or, he learns of the liberating effects of certain drugs. He finds in drugs an intense peace and relaxation so he becomes a drug addict. Eventually, he finds a balance between expressing his hatred for people, getting back at them, and finding release in the closet of his life either sexually or through other forms of addiction. Sometimes, he becomes normalized, to a degree and to an extent. Since there are many like him in this state of mind and body, he finds a ready audience for his hatred of selfishness and he becomes a prominent leader with a following. He may even become a politician or movie maker or engage in some other form of artistic expression. He may become wealthy and renowned. In reality, he is a dismal failure at life because real success demands much more creativity than he is allowing his mind to develop.
Denial creates a type of sleep, almost a form of sleep walking. It involves a mental compartmentalization that uses different parts of the brain to accomplish separate tasks without the individual parts knowing what the other parts are doing.
1. The first part of the denial activity is to use part of the brain to focus on the real world just enough to be conscious and functioning but with a special eye to the facial expressions and body language of others. This is where the personality pretends to rationality and focus. On the practical side, the individual must memorize rituals and habits that have worked for others in order to attain the same results – survival, getting along, belonging, etc. Because this aspect of denial requires a pretense to normalcy, the individual bases all intellectual actions on the foundation of emulation, copying and repetition of prescribed acts. Since none of the acts are “original” to the individual (they are copied from what others are seen doing), his life takes on an unreal aspect and he experiences this state almost half-consciously. This state is helpful in denial because it enables him to continue the activity of pretending to be normal while always watching for changes in the attitudes of others toward him.
With an intense focus outward, he can avoid confronting the reality inside, focusing on the consequences of his non-original repetitive actions rather than having to devote full attention to his inner fears. He can gain a sense, albeit false, that he is a normal person and functioning normally. But the key point of this focus is to be ever vigilant, subconsciously, for anything or any person that would remind him of his fears and anxieties. It is a subconscious consciousness with a "mental door" waiting to be shut at the sign of anything that might mean conflict or that might remind the individual of his basic fear and anxiety. He develops a keen sense of knowing when to shut down his sensory input from the outside in order to avoid confronting his fears and he develops a quick yet rationalized anger at anyone that has brought him close to confronting his inner state. He especially hates and avoids people who exhibit outwardly a sense of joy, happiness and genuine self-confidence. Instinctively, he shuts down, becomes incapable of social intercourse in their presence, and does everything to escape and rationalize his escape. Privately, he seeks out addictive behavior to get rid of the excess tension that encountering his "enemy" creates.
2. The second part of denial, and this is where the real payoff takes place, makes the denier an extreme over-achiever who must win at all costs because everything, especially the validity of his denials, are at stake. The method that enables this is rationalization. Because the individual feels a deep need for avoidance of his true needs and desires, he rationalizes his avoidances into “reasonable” acts for proper reasons, performing those acts with extreme effort and seeming competence, while at the same time denying that there is any fear or avoidance. This activity requires more physical tension and extreme physical effort. But it masks the tension created by pretension (#1), hiding the inner turmoil beneath smiles, exaggerated (or perverted) personal characteristics and needs, jokes, ultra-intellectualizing and over-achievement.
3. The third part of denial is to enlist others in the denial effort by blocking out of his life those people that do not, in his view, enable the denial, and accepting into his life only those that countenance and authorize it. His rationalizations and pretenses must be accepted and validated by those around him, or else. A system of such rationalizations and pretenses make up the denier’s armor, so to speak, and it is the agreement and enabling he obtains from others that allow his denials to prosper.
A good way to describe denial is to say that the man in denial is intensely aware, subconsciously, of those thoughts that he must deny (he is constantly subconsciously on the look out to block them immediately before they reach consciousness), while at the same time compensating for the consequences of denial (failure) through extreme concentration and over-achievement. Whenever something “good” happens the individual is elated (through pretension) because such good validates his method of survival. Whenever something “bad” happens, he is depressed but expresses that depression through exaggerated anger at others or at reality. To say that incredible amounts of concentration are required in order to be aware and selectively unaware at the same time is an understatement.
What is it that one denies in denial? Simply put, one denies any uncomfortable thought. It starts with a conscious refusal to believe a presumed or feared fact and requires that the individual stop thinking about that fact in order not to draw any further conclusions from it—to kill the thought of failure, so to speak. To support that denial, the individual uses devices like rationalization and pretense.
A rationalization is a concocted view about the nature of reality that is designed to enable or support denial. A rationalization may be a “truism” within a limited range of thought, but it is a selective truism, that when taken out of context serves the purpose of “making rational” a view that is untrue within a proper full context. Pretense is an effort to create a new fact that will replace the one denied, a reversal of cause and consequence intended to create a new, fully rationalized reality.
The only people who can recognize man in denial are the supremely rational men, those who have learned to survive without the need to deny their condition, whatever it might be, or those who do not tie their self-worth to success in the hunt or to the opinions of a group or family. These people will comprise, for man in denial, the enemy that must be obliterated in any way possible, especially when their existence makes man in denial confront the consequences of his denials.
Denial characterizes any number of prominent men (and women) today. To understand this more fully, we must imagine a brilliant young man who might have found himself in a broken home, with a somewhat abusive step father, a significant other who had little ambition, and certainly little in the way of brilliance. The promise that this young man revealed must have been staggering to those around him, and I’m sure many said, “Keep an eye on that one. He will go places.” As he watched his abusive father dominate their home, he certainly must have felt trapped in a family that did little to nurture and encourage his unique brilliance. He must certainly have felt excruciating pain that made him wonder how to change his unbearable abusive situation, how to escape the inescapable. He must have developed an intense need to control the world around him, to find a sense of security and rest. This need for control must have been so overwhelming that the denial of his situation was the only tool (he felt) that he could muster in his defense.
At some point, either after an intense bout of verbal or physical abuse (failure and weakness) at the hands of his step father, his life became so unbearable and inescapable that he developed an intense need to control his surroundings. He began to deny his weak position and started taking on new and stronger character traits, traits that involved manipulating people around him, using rationalizations and pretensions regarding his views and opinions and using all these tools to diminish his perceived failures. In effect, he was able to split into a new, stronger personality. With his stepfather, he may have begun playing intellectual games to confuse and confound him, to control him in ways that kept the stepfather off guard and made him less dangerous. To his mother, he may have become overly tender and protective. To his peers, he may have sought to do things that pleased and helped them, or he may have pursued sports or intellectual activities that could bring popularity.
He became a man of the 20th (or 21st) Century, and the premises of this century must certainly have led him to believe that the best way to extricate himself from his insecurity was to have power over others. To him, power is what those around him had over him and this power meant so much unpleasantness and fear that the only way to escape it was to get hold of the levers of power for himself. Since the society is overwhelmingly collectivist in nature, he began to see his goal to be that of manipulating and controlling groups of people.
Political or economic power is, after all, considered by many to be the height of accomplishment. And, indeed, this is the century of altruism where helping others is the most notable of activities. Being good at helping others must surely mean being able to control the demons of failure. Yet, somewhere in his mind was a love of some great activity, and whatever it was, it was not ambitious enough to extricate him from his unbearable abusive environment. In order to change his world, he must have a tremendous amount of control over events in his life. He learned that in order to move the world, he must move people, he must become good at manipulating and controlling people, starting with those in his immediate environment - and so he chose to pursue a career that could have the most effect on the most people possible. Often, that career is politics.
A career politician is an interesting phenomenon in the United States and almost an enigma. Most politicians throughout the history of our country were self-made men who were successful in another field and then chose politics because they were perceived by the voters to be honest and trustworthy. The career politician, on the other hand, chose to achieve his goals without achieving success in another field. Since he had no wealthy background, and since he needed to establish credibility as someone worthy of obtaining political leadership, and since he had only his ability to manipulate people as a weapon of survival, our example of a denier could not merely obtain credibility by getting a government job. In order to gain political support, he must be a formidable local presence first. A little wealth does not hurt. And getting that wealth becomes of paramount importance.
A young, ambitious man, like our example, must find a way to get rich, and he does it by developing alliances with people, sometimes questionable people, who not only can help him get rich, but can help him politically. Since he has a strong psychological need to manipulate people, he tells himself he is manipulating them rather than their manipulating him--he is rationalizing his alliances.
But it leads to a precarious existence. His early denials never go away. He can hone his knowledge, his speaking ability, develop stronger and better rationalizations, do much in his local community for others, and he can develop a reputation as someone who truly cares for others. But his inability to completely control his environment always looms as a gray ghost in his mind, ready to pounce on his youthful insecurity. Such is the nature of denial. Because survival must be gained in the here and now, denial of failure must be denied on a constant basis in the here and now. He is always around people and people are the source of his anxieties and fears. He becomes so insecure that the power he seeks necessarily consumes him. He tolerates no criticism, no self-criticism and no opposition. He polarizes everything and everyone around him. To allow such things into his mind is to open the door to his fundamental fear of looming and ever-present failure.
Man in denial is any man who does not accept the world as it is, who feels an intense desire to control his environment because of his insecurity. He is a man who refuses to accept weakness in himself and finds it everywhere he can find it in others (and pounces upon it with ruthless abandon). He is a man who “must” be great as a matter of survival and self-worth, a man so intent on winning, dominating, controlling that he would tolerate no defeat and deny the existence of any form of weakness in himself. He is a man who would become. To some he is a workaholic. To others he is a father never home, who ignores his wife and family in favor of career. To others he is a ruthless antagonist who will win at any cost, using subterfuge, intrigue and backstabbing in order to remove opposition once and for all—a man without friends, time and pity.
What man in denial denies is that he does not have complete control of his world and all those in it. He is driven toward control over others, to disregard of criticism, and to destruction of anyone who gets in his way. He makes promises he can’t keep, he develops strategic alliances that he intends to break after he gains the advantage he needs, he uses people in every way. Every decision, every choice, every alliance, every person, every part of his life is subordinated to his one goal, to control the reality around him - to control it completely.
The major enemy of man in denial is conflict. Conflict means confronting others and being confronted. It means anger of others aimed at him, disapproval and disagreement. Conflict means a loss of control over the world and tremendous anxiety is felt until the conflict is gotten rid of—by any means necessary. At the sign first of conflict, man in denial runs, conciliates, compromises and smoothes over all differences when it works to his benefit. If he is cornered, he insults and abuses. Surprisingly, in cases of conflict, it is the truly evil people in his life with whom he compromises and the rational people that he attacks.
The most telling aspect of man in denial is his fear of the world around him, which is an outgrowth of his terror of life from childhood; it is a fear that is so strong that he evades opposition--and has an intense tension, an intense need to escape - to something, to anything that gives him relief, any kind of relief. That relief is seen as a need to power over others, but often it is manifest in quite personal character traits. Those traits are revealed often in his subconscious fatalism, a fatalism that he also denies, but which slips out as a deep premise from time to time in spontaneous utterances and attitudes. It is also revealed in his sexual urges.
The desire to control manifests itself in his absolute ability to get others to do what he wants, particularly women who submit to him. He sees women as a means to an end, as objects that can give him a temporary sense of his ability to control. He becomes psychologically and sexually promiscuous because what matters to him is getting relief and it does not matter who gives the relief - who submits to his control, since it is control that is important, not the person controlled. And since sex is such a powerful capacity, it gives the most intense release and feeling of power to a man in denial.
He must have power over many women - because the terror he feels, the denied terror, always comes back within a few minutes of any success - and the need for control is immediate and ever-present. Sexual success is much easier to get than political success, or community success and especially career success. He becomes, in effect, a closet sex addict - a man with two lives, one public and visible, one private and hidden, one serious and deliberate, one lascivious and full of abandon.
Yet, the same tools of persuasion are used in both sex matters and political matters. He must engender trust, love and give people a feeling of being special. He has become good at it because he has plenty of practice in making others do what he wants. And getting people to do things is a source of extreme pleasure. It is all sex to man in denial.
The pursuit of political and sexual power is a dead end. One does not just get power as our example has done, one must earn it by being a person of character and respectability, of achievement and success in true accomplishment. Man in denial can never accomplish these things because he will always do something that will jeopardize his success—his closet personality gets in the way. He makes mistakes that reveal the inner contradictions of the phoniness of his life; and then, once the reality of his utter failure hits home, he develops the skill of cover up so that his indiscretion does not destroy him totally.
His enemies therefore become not only those men who see through his facade, who will not be manipulated, but also those with whom he has made deals and have fed his hungers for sex and power. Decent men who have earned their positions necessarily will not become allies, will never support a person that they instinctively know only wants power for power’s sake. These men become, for man in denial, a conspiracy to which he can point as proof that his goals are opposed by evil people. He has a ready ear from many others who want to see him succeed, who have been seduced by his ability to power or who want to use him to gain power themselves. “Birds of a feather” is the cliché.
The skeletons (usually promiscuous sexual activities or drugs) in his closet are a constant threat. If those skeletons are revealed, then those who would expose him become part of the conspiracy. Even people with whom he once allied, sexually or politically, who were once seduced by his attentions, promises, etc., can become his enemies if they attempt to reveal the truth. The man in denial must wage a constant war of cover up, buying off, personal destruction, deal making, etc., with anyone who would challenge the facade. Many innocent lives are destroyed because man in denial does not care that others are sacrificed in order that he be able to resume his pursuit of control over his own demons. And what’s more, man in denial actually believes in the conspiracies he has created, really believes that there are evil forces out to get him, that the world is nothing but conflict, and is totally oblivious to the fact that the demons are his own creation, his own paranoia.
Those who love man in denial find that they must accept his view of the world—or else. Their pronouncements on his behalf become “spin” and the respect he feels for them in their support is phony. They become codependent upon the validity of his conspiracy theories and rationalize their view of the world in order to support his rationalizations. Their views, as are his views, are of course inappropriate and ineffective because they represent non-existent enemies or real enemies that they have created and let loose. Whenever he sends a “loved one” out into the world to fare alone, he must ensure that his inner contradictions go out into the world with the loved one as well. The result for that loved one is failure and/or the realization that man in denial is a fraud.
The propensity for stonewalling, lying and character assassination of legitimate investigators is typical of man in denial. That he finds himself in scandalous situations repeatedly is not indicative of a conspiracy against him, but of his love of control over women and people, of his inability to decide with whom he will ally at any one time because his judgment is always clouded by the need for release (his addictions) and control—he is the source of his own problems with people and the law.
Man in denial will do whatever he must in order to avoid even believing that he has a character flaw. He will lie openly and believe that he is not lying, because to him others are easy to manipulate and use. He simply cannot conceive of his being wrong. It seems easy to believe the worst of people - they will almost always prove you right, he thinks. He would, if confronted by his wife, tell her that he has not had an affair with another woman because, in his mind, he has a right to do so. He has a right to lie because he hopes (by means of his pretenses) that there is something special about him that makes lying acceptable. He will tell himself that his wife deserves being lied to, for her own sake, that it is her fault, and that what he really had was not an affair, since he believes in his own definition of the word “affair.” In fact, such tactics reveal only his belief that only he has a right to control, that his control is right. It feels right because his need to defend himself against his childhood fears is more intense than mere logic. Chauvinism is his hallmark, in spite of his reputed advocacy of women’s rights issues.
What is the end of man in denial? Our time is such a confused time. Many men in denial live long lives of success and power. Many are considered great men by the time they die. However, the flaws of man in denial, tend to self-defeat and self-destruction, because, after all, one must be able to see reality fully in order to prosper. Most men in denial lead lives of mediocrity, desperation and, all too often, addiction, feeling misunderstood and despised for many years of their lonely lives. Their legacy, unfortunately, is that they put those around them through excruciating confusion and doubt and isolation.
Yet, within a man in denial is a child who once looked at the world with wonder and hope, who lost that hope because of intense cruelty and mental suffering, who became a cynic in order to control the pain, much of it inflicted by parents, authorities and social leveling. Hope is the cure but it can only be rediscovered by the person who learns to “un-deny,” so to speak—in other words, to accept the fact that what one denied in those early years was a child’s fear and anxiety and that the “mistake,” if it can be called that, was to think one could just wish it all away. He must grow up and learn to unravel the confusion inherent in adult exhortations and contradictory cultural messages and un-chosen roles. He must recognize that his childhood denials kept him from discovering the emerging adult and that his belief that life is conflict only meant that his life would be full of conflict.
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