Another view of how to act from what you know to be true

Extract from Nancy Kline’s Time to Think: Listening to Ignite the Human Mind (Cassell, 1999), pp. 82-83:

Denial is the assumption that what is true is not true.  When something, for whatever reason, is too difficult to face, your mind can interpret it as something else.  A colleague humiliates you in a meeting, more than once.  Everyone around the table winces, but no one speaks.  No one, including you, stops it.  Almost immediately your mind interprets her behaviour as an aberrant outburst, then as ‘the way powerful people behave’ and then as nothing to make a fuss about.  By the next day you have begun to think it didn’t actually happen.  Sure, she got a little annoyed, but nothing dramatic happened, did it?  

This is denial. It is the antithesis of reality.  It is dangerous because thinking works best in the presence of reality.  Part of reality is correct information about what is real, even if what is real is very painful or disappointing or threatening.  Your mind does have the capacity to handle anything.  But it can’t do it if you present it with lies.

Questions help to punctuate denial.  A few powerful ones are:

        • What is in my face that I am not facing?
        • What is the worst thing that can happen if I face this?
        • What is the worst thing that can happen if I don’t?
        • What am I assuming that makes me turn away from this?

There is another good question we can ask that pierces denial.  It acknowledges the phenomenon of our being willing to deny difficulties at the beginning of something because we prefer a romanticized pastel view of what is ahead.  But in fact if we only ask the question early enough, and then face the answer, we can prevent heartache and failure which otherwise can trip us up because we lived too long in denial.  

What startled me about it the first time [I was asked it was the] astute recognition that we can usually go for about a year before we are forced to see what has been right in our face from the beginning.  The question is:


This question requires you to supply and face your own information.  Ask it at the beginning of any relationship or enterprise or change.”