Page 100 - ECOlogic Book

Denial: Micro and Macro
(Winter, 1995)

Some things you’d rather not know. Denial, so easy to see in others,
remains largely opaque in ourselves. An overused buzzword, “denial” is
often used to explain (or discount) puzzling behavior in others or any activity
that seems to fly in the face of the obvious. “He”, “she”, or “they” may be in
deep denial; never “us” or “me.’

The process of denial, ever present in our lives, works hard to keep us from
knowing anything that might threaten our present view of reality or demand
that we face an unpleasant fact. An “unpleasant fact” might be that we have
damaged someone else or ourselves, or that we might have to do something
differently in the future. That twinge in our side is just a twinge, we think.
“It’ll go away.” And usually it does. The unwelcome feedback from a friend
may very well be “just their projection.”

Denial works to protect us from overreacting. If we called the doctor for
every twinge we’d be hypochondriacs. If we adjusted our behavior to
answer every well-meaning criticism, we’d lose our center and become
slaves to the opinions of others. It’s when we keep insisting that the twinge
in our side is nothing, even though it persists over a long period of time, or
we fail to hear repeated feedback from others about our behavior, that
denial becomes a problem. It’s a problem because it causes us to override
signals that could be important for our survival.

Often denial functions on both cultural and individual levels and a powerful
macro-denial can make it difficult-to-impossible to perceive a personal (or
micro) denial.

In his recent book, the Making of a Conservative Environmentalist, Gordon
Durnil talks about the reluctance of people to expose themselves to facts
about the environment, including elected officials, both Republican and
Democrat: It seems as if most of us don’t want to know about anything we
are doing that might somehow interfere with the mysteries of life and our
abilities to learn, to reproduce, and to fight off sickness.” 109

109 Durnil, Gordon R.,the Making of a Conservative Environmentalist, (Indiana University Press, Indiana &
Bloomfington, 1995, p. 144.).

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