Stepaway News Blog

Denial is a feature of any substance dependency, and although a commonly used term it is much misunderstood.

Understanding denial is central to any drug addiction treatment or alcohol dependency counseling.

Denial is essentially an unconscious defence mechanism that protects us from a reality that's too painful to confront. It is not easy admitting you are a drug addict or that alcohol is causing problems in your life.

Alcohol dependency is both a way of avoiding reality and not dealing with it, and denial works to help keep us from dealing with the actual problem we have with alcohol or drugs in our lives.

Dealing with denial is an essential part of any drug rehab and addiction treatment programs and is dealt with in most stages of addiction recovery.

Denial even works to help us deny that we are actually in denial!

Popular forms of denial are:

• Simple denial is where we deny the reality of the self-destructive behavior such as alcohol or drug abuse altogether.
• Minimization - where we admit the addiction but deny its seriousness thereby rationalizing it away.
• Projecting - where we admit both the reality and seriousness but blame somebody or something else and therefore avoid taking responsibility ourselves for the addiction.

Step Away Rehabilitation Centre South Africam

Denial is not a river in Egypt, it is the elephant in the room.

Contact our rehabilitation centre for more information about our addiction recovery programme.