The most common emotional defense is avoidance (an ineffective coping skill for any stressor) as expressed through denial (e.g., "That wasn't really bad, I barely remember it").

you cannot replace negative beliefs with positive ones you can't believe- positive ones that are too ambitious. you must find and choose a thought that allows you to feel relief.

The process of leniency involves accepting the reality of the current situation and finding a satisfying meaning therein, as opposed to misconstruing or denying the facts of the situation.

He hadn't "abused" alcohol, but had spent almost four years sitting in a chair drinking jug wine around the clock and looking, variously, at the wall, the window blind, and the TV screen.

Go ahead, look at the message. You know you want to.”“No, it doesn’t matter.”“Then why do you keep staring at it like it’s the last piece of food on earth?

The mass communications that could enable our politics for good have instead turned it into a bland conglomeration of stinted opinion cloaked in the occasional media frenzy of blame or denial.

If your eyes can not cry, then your gut will."The head and heart may be in denial of your human needs, but the gut will always carry the wisdom of your needs met and unmet, and thusly respond.

You heard people say forty was the new thirty and fifty was the new forty and sixty was the new forty-five, but you never heard anybody say eighty was the new anything. Eighty was just eighty.

You can hold on to the smallest doubt and take comfort in it, stay in denial and go on with your carefree life, until one day you're finally cornered by a truth that can no longer be ignored.

I didn't want to kill them all. I didn't want to kill anybody! I'm not a killer! You didn't want me, you bastards, you wanted Peter, but you made me do it, you tricked me into it!

A man who denies his past is a man who truly denies himself a future, for he refuses to know himself, and to deny knowledge of oneself is to stumble through life as handicapped as the blind mute.

Denial is the lid on our emotional pressure cooker: the longer we leave it on, the more pressure we build up. Sooner or later, that pressure is bound to pop the lid, and we have an emotional crisis.

I will go to the Ring of Sacred Volcanoes, but I shall go not as a member of the MacHeath clan — no, I shall go as a free runner. I reject you. I deny you, I refuse and repudiate you as my clan.

Benefit is the only blindfold required to convince ourselves that poison is wine. Liberty's comfort level rises and falls with the sympathies of its children. Well, I for one will not collaborate.

If you believe everything you feel is an illusion then you’re delusional. Your emotion is part you. You’re made with it. Denying it and thinking it is all your mind, is denying your existence.