A close friend found it very stressful that any toilet visits in the great outdoors should involve ice bears precautions in ice bear countries. She preferred not to think about it, and found it hillarious that she was not scared at all when she just ignored the dangers and just went away and did her business. Bringing a gun meant relating to the ice bear problem, and THAT was stressful.

Both she and I thought this example offered great insight into how the mechanism of denial works: If I ignore it, I am happy and therefore there is no problem. If I take proactive measures, I might be very worried that those measures are not good enough - and that would make me very scared and extremely unhappy. Much easier to ignore it and be happy...


Of course, any gentleman would volunteer to stand guard for a lady in need, right? That's how we solved that dilemma.