The following gem comes from pathwork lecture 165:
“You are using the busy mind, the overemphasized reasoning faculty, to fit your feelings into pictures, to build theories about why you feel a certain way. The mind is so trained in overusing reason that you think you need a reason to feel a certain way. Thus, your real motives and the actual situation often escape you. Since you fear feelings and see reason as the saving measure, you concoct reasons for feeling. You are always full of explanations of why you feel a certain way, until no feeling remains — only theory and explanation. This is so important, my friends, because if you learn to see through these “explanations” it will teach you the art of self-observation.
Let us say, for example, that you feel hurt. In many instances, you completely deny the hurt, even to yourself. You often manipulate it into an elaborate accusation — sometimes even using distorted facts about the perpetrator of the hurt. But this can be at best only a tiny part of the whole picture of your personality or the motives for the hurting act. There is thus no longer any reality behind the elaborate, reasonable-sounding explanations. The denied hurt turns into anger, which is also denied. You explain the anger away by theorizing about what caused the hurtful action. All the explanations and theorizing make it impossible to really experience the hurt. And when you deny an actual experience, you cannot put it truly behind you. You cannot really be done with it. And so you often build on top of this structure a false, exaggerated hurt — the game of, “See what you have done to me? My hurt now will force you to act differently.” This kind of artificially exaggerated hurt results from all the false layers that separate your consciousness from the original hurt. The false hurt creates an unbearable pain that leads to desperation and never to a satisfactory conclusion. The real hurt is a gentle, soft experience, never unbearable, always leaving the essence of the personality intact.
If you can let yourself feel such a hurt, simply and without adornment, stating the fact and why it hurts you, you create a new pattern. You learn to deal safely not only with your feelings but also with your surroundings. At the same time, you establish a new lifeline to your creative nucleus, your true identity. If you can endure your real hurt and let it be — even if you do not know or understand what hurts you — you will not have to become angry or destructive. These are merely reactions to a feeling you do not want to endure. This is the harm of denial: It builds further layers that remove and alienate you from your true self.