I think the main reasons psychological denial takes place is because of some ego-preserving need or due to an inability to come up with a reasonable response when the first brush of awareness occurs.
In a response, someone once told me, "your paradox was stupid." When I told him that I did not mean it as a paradox he replied, "Of course you did." He denied my explanation of what I had said just because it invalidated his criticism that it was stupid. If he tended to think that what other people said were stupid then he might have had to characterize his criticism as 'stupid' according to his way of characterizing things. I think he couldn't do that because he never characterized anything that he said as being 'stupid'. The insight that I just had recently was that denial may start off as a return to an habitual way of thinking about something. So if you can't come up with a good response you might look for other ways to explain what happened in order to find a more well-formed way to respond. Here, denial is a technical strategy to look at the problem in a way that allows you to use the best tools that you have. I think that may be what you were saying. But if denial is often used and it is used in a way that prevents you from learning new ways to look at a kind of problem, then the denial that the denial-strategy isn't working has to start kicking in. So the habitual use of an ineffective strategy of denial will tend to produce more overlapping layers of denial. Jim Bromer On Sun, Aug 2, 2015 at 2:34 AM, Piaget Modeler <[email protected]> wrote: > > In my view, denial is a coping strategy that supports recovery from failure by > re-attempting an existing failed solution or failed explanation simply because > circumstances may change, even when all other applicable or relevant > solutions > have already failed. > > ~PM > ------------------------------------------- AGI Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/21088071-f452e424 Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=21088071&id_secret=21088071-58d57657 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
