Denial: The Stuck Point That Repeats the Pattern
In clinical practice, especially at the intersection of existential psychotherapy and sex therapy, I have seen how denial quietly sustains cycles of harm in intimate relationships. Clients often arrive describing partners who were charismatic, intense or sexually intoxicating, yet something in the relationship left them disoriented or diminished. They can articulate that the relationship was painful, but struggle to fully name the nature of that pain. Denial fills the space between what they sensed and what they can bear to acknowledge.
Denial is often misunderstood as blindness. In truth, it is a protective maneuver. It shields the psyche from truths that threaten a person’s sense of coherence. From an existential perspective, denial functions as an intrapsychic defense that preserves identity when reality would otherwise overwhelm it. In that sense, it is less a failure than a temporary strategy. The individual protects the bond, the fantasy or the hope that the relationship was what they believed it to be. The alternative would require reckoning with betrayal, disillusionment or the recognition that what felt like love was closer to domination or performance.
This protective function becomes the very mechanism through which repetition occurs. When denial remains intact, the internal template for what intimacy feels like remains unchallenged. The client leaves one harmful relationship but carries the same interpretive framework into the next. Months later they encounter someone new who feels electric or consuming. The sexual connection is intense. The early mirroring feels uncanny. The pattern reconstitutes itself. Withdrawal replaces warmth. Boundaries are contested. The client begins to question their own perceptions. It is the familiar dynamic wearing a different face.
One of the most powerful adhesives for denial is sexual intensity. Clients often describe the sex as the best they have ever had or describe a chemistry that felt rare. Here, psychosexual and existential layers intertwine. Sexual intensity can operate as evidence that the relationship was meaningful. Yet intensity is not the same as mutuality or safety. It can arise from dysregulation as easily as from genuine connection. It can reflect objectification as easily as it reflects embodiment. Without examining how the body actually felt, the memory becomes idealized and repurposed to justify the relationship long after it has ended.
The role of denial becomes clearer when we consider how it stabilizes identity. Many clients who remain attached to partners with narcissistic traits were taught that love requires endurance, or that desire must be earned through performance, or that boundaries threaten belonging. These beliefs are often implicit. They emerge not as articulated rules but as embodied habits. In this way, denial protects not only the partner but the client’s inherited map of what intimacy is supposed to feel like. To abandon the map would mean confronting aloneness, grief or uncertainty. As Sartrean thought suggests, freedom often arrives with an uncomfortable dose of responsibility.
Existential Psychosexologist | Sex Therapist
In existential sex therapy, working with denial is not an exercise in confrontation but in witnessing. The therapist slows down the story until the body can join it. We ask what denial needed to protect. We explore the gap between what the client told themselves and what they actually felt in their muscles, their breath or their chest. We track how longing, shame, seduction or dissociation moved through the relationship. We consider developmental histories without reducing the client to biography. We allow grief to surface without turning it into diagnosis.
Over time, the client begins to perceive a distinction between intensity and intimacy, between being desired and being valued, between being seen and being used as a reflection of someone else’s grandiosity. This distinction marks the beginning of what I call erotic clarity. It allows the person to recognize reciprocity as a condition of intimacy rather than an optional trait. It allows them to choose connection instead of reenacting survival strategies that once kept them safe.
Denial deserves respect for the work it once did. It kept a person from psychological collapse while they were in proximity to manipulation, volatility or charm used as a weapon. The task in therapy is not to rip away denial but to render it unnecessary. When the client can hold the truth without shattering, denial dissolves and agency enters the room. The relationship template shifts from familiar harm to deliberate authorship.
At that point, repetition loses its momentum. The individual is no longer compelled by dynamics that once felt magnetic. They are no longer seduced by intensity that lacks care. They can discern when desire is mutual rather than extracted and when excitement is fueled by danger rather than recognition.
Denial was never the flaw. It was the psyche’s way of saying not yet. Therapy invites a different sentence: now it is safe enough to know.