Looking back, he asks himself, “How could I not see?” But it is human nature to cling to our sense of reality, to resist its possible shattering even in the face of irrefutable evidence. I assure him that his “cluelessness” is not something to be ashamed of. This kind of avoidance is not an act of idiocy but an act of self-preservation. It is actually a sophisticated self-protective mechanism known as trauma denial—a type of self-delusion that we employ when too much is at stake and we have too much to lose. The mind needs coherence, so it disposes of inconsistencies that threaten the
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