Okay, so here I am, guilty of that. The blind spot. I just read an interesting sentence that went something like that:

When you live in denial you build up pressure which will have to blow up eventually, and then you will have to face what you have been denying anyway. Except you will have to face it in state of extreme stress.

True, so true. But how to know that I am denying something? The whole prerequisite of denial (as the psychological mechanism) is that the person doing that is not aware of it.

Let's hack it. Psychologically, denial serves the purpose to bring relief. And yes it does it well. There is another thing that brings relief - when I realise that my fears and thoughts have been irrational. Let's call it the "healthy rationalisation". Irrational thoughts and emotions happen to borderlines all the time, hence is it so easy to confuse denial with healthy rationalisation. What is that distinguishes the healthy rationalisation from denial?

For example, a husband went for a conference and again his phone is switched off in the afternoon. It's not the first time it happens. Is he having an affair? In one marriage the defence mechanism of the wife could be denial: "No, he would never cheat on me. In the end bought me flowers back then, and that other time he gave me a hug, and a month ago he even kissed me while leaving for work. I'm overreacting.". While in another marriage and another situation the wife could realise something like this: "Ah damn, I saw last time that his phone is getting old and the battery is empty after 5 hours. It's not a surprise that it's always off in the afternoons. I need to talk with him about it when he's back.". To be clear, by any means I am not suggesting that in first situation the husband had an affair and in the second he didn't, it is independent of wife's reaction. I only want to analyse how these two reactions can be distinguished from one another.

When denial happens, all the worry disappears. It is pure relief. When healthy rationalisation happens the worry disappears, but also there is a part of myself that I identify as something that needs to be improved. At least because I did have some irrational thoughts or emotions. Not only I am relieved but also I see a piece of hard work ahead.

Another feature that distinguishes the two is how it feels when I try to mentally come back to the train of though that led to the relief. If the relief was caused by healthy rationalisation, tracing back the thoughts is smooth and becomes easier each time I do it. If the relief was caused by denial, tracing back always invokes fear first, only then can I remember what was the explanation that I gave myself, and this always requires a lot of effort. And in some situations this spike of fear is so short that it can be easily missed, or it can even be attributed to something else.

When I think about the latter symptom, maybe it is enough to say that any worry that keeps on coming back that I have to silence down by some kind of rationalisation has a high potential to be a denial. Because as soon as healthy rationalisation occurs, each next time would be more obvious, to the point when the issue would cease to exist. If something remains an issue and I keep on rationalising it, then this is most likely denial.

I should pay special attention to the issues that keep on coming back and I keep on rationalising them. I should pay attention to the situations when the rationalisation resulted in pure relief.

One last thing: it does not mean that the denial is bad. I have myself unconsciously used it once to handle a terrible breakup, which allowed me to shift big part of the pain 4 years into the future (impressive, right). From this perspective I think that it was very useful, as I am not sure how else could I handle it at that time. So maybe applying denial more consciously is not such a bad idea in the end. Only denial of denial is what is really dangerous.