Soon men and women fear their inner voices because the voices tell them the truth about what they are doing to themselves and others. People are able to deceive themselves and numb their pain through denial. They jointly establish their own sanity and call themselves normal. Denial allows people to become indifferent, to ignore what happens right in front of them, and to create and sustain a false version of reality. Denial diminishes life and blocks from consciousness what is real.
Denial is the alternative to transformation and is a primary defense of addiction.
It takes control of us, causing us to do and think things that are inconsistent with our personal values and leading us to become progressively more compulsive and obsessive. A sure sign of an addiction is the sudden need to deceive ourselves and others to lie, deny, and cover up. We think of addiction to substances like heroin, alcohol, cocaine, marijuana, or cigarettes. We can also have process addictions. Process addictions are addictions to a series of events or relationships that together form a process.