Stephanie: My mother was a paragon of denial when the three of us were growing up. I think for her it was what freud and his daughter annifreud would have called the defence of denial. She found that she was successfully able to mute the physical pain by denying. But why do we have pain? Why do we have suffering? It isn't alert. It is telling you that something is wrong, and you have to actually do something. What anna's doing there isn't that different from any of us putting our hands over our eyes in watching a horro movie, or something like that.