Karen said that Denmark as a nation was engineered to the identity of benevolence which sustained through the denial of a violent colonial past; Thus, it denies meaningful discourse and transformation for the hurt and oppressed communities.

The culture of suppression, denial, and avoidance comes from the collective inability to see and hold sufferings, which maintains public blind spots and socialized biases that make it impossible to nurture deep intimacy.

Berliner (2019) stated that the breakdown of a community comes from what we do not dare to think about (suppression), what we refuse to acknowledge (denial), what we cannot look openly and realistically in the eye (avoidance).

In a dinner with a German friend who is living in Copenhagen, she shared her frustration that the women circles she had attended in this city usually came together without addressing darkness. Their union was bubbly and sterile of the difficulties of being human. She craved to confront the shadows within the fortress of hygge. I ponder whether the Danish national narrative of happiness and benevolence might fortify the struggle to authentic intimacy.