“Denial is a very powerful thing, isn’t it? It’s been standing right in front of you all this time, and you chose not to see it. Kara Danvers is Supergirl.” - Lex Luthor
There’s a scientific reason Lena didn’t know Kara was Supergirl.
Let’s talk about Lena’s Denial, shall we?
To the people who were convinced that there was no way that Lena didn’t know that her best friend was Supergirl, consider how powerful the brain truly is.
Denial serves a very particular function. It is a coping/defense mechanism that gives you time to adjust to distressing situations, or is used when you don’t want to deal with a particular responsibility, situation, or the impact of your behaviour at all.
Denial can also be critically important to forming and sustaining close relationships. Here’s how: the very same psychological mechanisms people employ to, for example, ignore a persistent leaky faucet, are the same ones that are necessary in order to manage and live with people’s dishonesty and betrayal, including their own. Psychologists and anthropologists believe that these abilities are foundational for people’s capacity for forgiveness. 👀
Researchers have even begun to view denial on a spectrum from inattention to passive acknowledgement to willful blindness. Denial is a cognitive process that allows you to hide from negative, and even positive emotions when they make you feel vulnerable, or are incongruous with what you feel is/should be happening.
Katie McGrath has said many times that the structure of the show is such that Lena doesn’t know that her best friend is a superhero. But consider this, also: Lena arrives in National City fresh on the heels of Lex’s trial, with the stigma of the Luthor name and no friends to speak of. She befriends Kara and quickly sees that things don’t add up: Supergirl takes an interest in protecting her; when she’s with Kara, they seem to make it out of situations that would require superpowers and not simply keen intellect to escape; she has never seen both Kara and Supergirl at the same time even though Kara claims to be close/friends with Supergirl. Kara believes in her, but so does Supergirl for reasons that can’t be explained (psst..it’s because she’s Kara.) That attention, belief, and support are things that Lena craves (Lex mentioned this several times, as did Lilian) and Kara/Supergirl was the only place she was getting them. It was/is in Lena’s best interest to keep those relationships intact and not only because they were the only ones she had [for a long time.]‼️
Further, as Lena said on the plane home from Kasnia, and has been mentioned, inferred, demonstrated time and time again, she has trust issues because everyone she’s ever trusted has lied to her before. She cannot afford to put her trust in people and not have it work out, because often lives at at stake. In fact, the first time Lena found out someone had lied to her, her brain formed a neural pathway of, for the purpose of this illustration, ‘they lie = I distrust them AND my own instincts.’ (This + people’s assumption that she’s a bad person + everyone doubting her = why we often see Lena second guessing herself/not feeling confident in character/morality, and why her first move is always to be the martyr or overextend herself to help someone else…but that’s a conversation for another time.) Over time that neural pathway became strengthened and became a habit, or automatic response. So Lena doesn’t trust easily, even keeps things from her closest friends because the brain will always travel the neural pathway that is strongest.
So although there was a mountain of evidence that would lead any logical person to the conclusion that Kara and Supergirl are one and the same, Lena’s brain was working overtime to protect her from the cognitive dissonance she would experience without denial.
As always, I have so much more to say on this topic, but I’ll end here for now.✨
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