Just own up to it!

“Indeed experience demonstrates that we inflict heavier punishment upon persons who deny guilt and advance arguments in their own defense, but that anger desists from those who admit the justice of the punishment to be meted out to them. This, moreover, is reasonable, for denial of the obvious is insolence and effrontery, and there is no mockery or disdain like it.”&mdashJudah Messer Leon, The Book of the Honeycomb’s Flow: Sēpher Nōpheth Sūphīm (ed. I. Rabinowitz; Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), 331 as quoted in Forestalling Doom page 169 n. 82

<idle musing>
Indeed. But our natural tendency is to bristle and deny, isn't it?
</idle musing>