“ We need to understand the ways in which problematic beliefs are bound into the social and emotional lives of those who hold them.”

Many years ago, I worked as a counsellor on a program that provided support to the families of sex offenders. In practice, that usually meant working with the wives of men convicted of child sexual offences. You might expect that my job would have consisted largely of helping these women work through their shock, horror and grief. That was certainly my expectation when I started working on the program. Yet that was almost never how it went.

Instead I invariably found myself dealing with women deep in denial, either refusing to believe the evidence of their husbands’ crimes (the offenders, for their part, frequently continued to protest innocence to their families, even if they had pled guilty in court), or minimising the seriousness of the offences and deflecting blame onto the victims. My job was to dismantle that denial without losing the client – a delicate operation that often felt like trying to reel in a marlin with a cotton thread; the quiet voice of truth rarely had a chance against the roaring locomotive of self-deception.

My first instinct with such clients was to confront them with incontrovertible evidence. Yet I soon learned better: any attempt to force a reckoning with reality merely drove the client