Denying trauma helps avoid its negative emotions. The brain uses numerous more methods to avoid bad emotions. Denial is a good coping tool. Short-term benefits can come from denying trauma and going about normal life.
It can restore strength and help people go on. It mitigates the event's impact. Delaying trauma generates more pain later. Because even while denial suppresses negative feelings, the body and mind carry the trauma until it is acknowledged.
Managing trauma symptoms is difficult but rewarding. It makes you stronger by teaching you from the past. It hurts but is essential to growth, evolution, and self-actualization.
Denial helps traumatised people recuperate and breathe again by ignoring their feelings and ideas. You can do this intentionally or unconsciously. After traumas, psychological defence mechanisms beyond denial may occur. These are:
Detachment from the Self (The belief that someone else experienced the event). Become "alienated" from feelings and thoughts.
Feelings Cold
Anosognosia (not realising or accepting an illness)
Emotional Atrophy (Lack of powerful emotion)
You ignore an elephant in your room in denial. Trauma-related emotional avoidance is an attempt to avoid painful emotions. You avoid thinking about the problems the elephant in the middle of your room is causing. A person who denies trauma may pretend they were unaffected by the event and act accordingly. Emotional avoidance may lead to drinking or isolating from loved ones to prevent trauma.
Denial or dismissing unresolved traumas might help:
To avoid discomfort
To live on
Maintaining the “illusion of control” (acting like everything is well)
Being loyal to individuals who hurt you (particularly family, wives, children)
Self-confidence maintenance
Research shows that persons who deny childhood traumas have a positive outlook that helps them avoid mental diseases like sadness and anxiety.
Denial can also be used to avoid admitting that trauma is difficult to heal without professional help. These folks may avoid therapy because they deny their experience. Denial may also be used to escape stigma after being diagnosed with PTSD or depression. Denial will only hinder their healing in the long term.