Truth Unseen - Chapter 2: The Nature of Denial
How denial becomes the air we breathe.
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Every human life turns on this question: what sustains us when illusions collapse? Philosophers and prophets have wrestled with it. Pascal spoke of the God shaped void. Augustine confessed the restlessness of the heart. Hebrews named it “the substance of things hoped for.” The struggle is not new—but it is always personal, because substitutes abound, and only one thing endures.
When we speak of denial, we do not mean a moral failure or a falsehood in disguise. Denial is first a coping mechanism—an adaptive instinct that saves lives. Faced with chaos, pain, or problems too big to solve, the mind finds a way to blunt the impact. It protects the heart when no teacher has shown how to respond, no parent has explained what to feel, no guide has handed down the answers. Denial buys time. It allows a child to survive a house of storms. It helps a soldier walk off a battlefield. It lets the grieving take a breath. In its first season, denial is mercy. It is clever, intuitive, and wise.
“Don’t knock denial—it’s the reason half of us survived childhood.”