 simple pain avoiding psychological denial. Charlie talks about how a family friend who was a super athlete and super student, just a great person in general, went off to war in World War II. Now he died but his mother, who was a rational person, couldn't come to terms with this. She actually refused to believe that he was dead. She made up a story to justify her false belief that he was alive when there was undeniable evidence that he died. Now this is a true case of psychological denial. Now everybody faces denial at different stages and at different magnitudes but it generally stems from when you reach a point in which your reality is too painful to bear. Now I've got a similar story to Charlie's except it has to do with my father. Now my father was younger and he was living in a kind of like a shared house. There was a bunch of different people that were there and there was this one particular old man who must have been like 85, 86. Now the house had people that were much younger in the 30s and 20s but this old man kept telling my father about how he was a millionaire and how he was actually going to become rich. It's just that there was some issues with the government and the money that they owed him or something like that. Now on the surface this story seemed far fetched of course here you have this old man talking about how he has done great things how he's going to be a millionaire and yet he's living in a shared housing. You see this is true denial if you look at the actual aspects of the story the old man didn't want to face his reality. He was old and he did not do much with his life. He did not leave anything remarkable to memorize best so he has to come up with elaborate stories to justify himself. The reality is too painful to bear when you understand that you're probably going to die soon and you haven't done much. So of course you will have psychological denial. Now this happens to a lot of drug addicts. They have psychological denial that they're becoming addicted. So that's one of the biggest problems with addiction is the person who's getting addicted doesn't even know they're getting addicted or they don't accept it. It's a thing called absence of blindness. The problem is a huge one because you don't even know it's a problem. It's generally like how in the workplace no one knows about a problem until something breaks down because of absence of blindness. If there was a problem that was resolved without people knowing about it without anything breaking down it's as good as the problem not even being there. You need something to be visible for it to be in your awareness so if the addiction is not an addiction in the addicted's eyes it's not in their awareness and that's what makes addictions so dangerous. Remember that humans go after pleasure and avoid pain but sometimes it's necessary for you to confront the pain and see it through a different lens to not mix up the image see for what it is and accept it and work from there. That is how you can untangle yourself from many different situations. Do not choose a comfortable route of denial the more pleasurable way out where you could just pretend it didn't happen and ignore your problems see them head on and deal with them. Anyway I hope you guys enjoyed that peace