When the Target Refuses to Self-Destruct

Preface: A Thread That Runs Through Time

This post does not stand alone.

It is part of a long thread I began pulling publicly more than a decade ago—first in 2013, when I warned against placing one’s life in the hands of gurus, institutions, or substitute parents, and again in September 2017 and April 2017, when I wrote openly about scapegoating, mob behavior, and the bloodless cruelty of respectable people hiding behind religion, authority, and silence.

At the time, those posts were easy to dismiss. They were inconvenient. They named dynamics that most people prefer not to see until they are personally caught inside them.

What follows is not hindsight wisdom. It is continuity.

This piece records what happens when the mechanisms I described years ago are fully activated—and when the intended target refuses to comply by self‑destructing.

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There is a lie society clings to because the truth is unbearable: that cruelty is rare, that institutions protect the innocent, and that “good people” will step in when injustice is obvious. My life taught me otherwise.

If I had been the one to break—if I had succumbed to the meticulously orchestrated psychological warfare aimed at me—my name, face, and past would have been paraded endlessly. My teenage rebellion would have been exhumed. My lack of religion would have been cited as evidence. Panels would have convened to explain why “the little woman” collapsed. Careers would have been built by standing on my head.

That was the plan.

Psychological Warfare and the Scapegoat Mechanism

I was targeted by a coordinated group of sociopaths who understood one thing very well: destroy the person who tells the truth, and the truth disappears with her. Smear campaigns, gaslighting, isolation, professional sabotage—each move calibrated to provoke self‑destruction.

I stared evil in the face. Not metaphorical evil. Real, calculating, smiling evil.

Once you have been targeted by a mob of sociopaths, you never look at humanity the same way again. You see how quickly masks slip, how many people wait on the sidelines, hoping you will burn so they can profit from the spectacle. Most people do not intervene. They watch.

The Silence When One of “Them” Falls

When the plan failed—when it was not I who self‑destructed but one of them—the room went silent. Cover‑ups replaced outrage. The same people who would have dissected my life chose discretion, compassion, and privacy for their own.

This is how power works.

My ex‑boss, a religious man, a former law‑enforcement officer, lived behind the perfect cover. He robbed banks and hid inside a security company. On my birthday, he chose the wrong day to keep running. He never made it back to his cover.

If roles had been reversed, the story would have been moralized into a sermon about godlessness. Instead, there was quiet.

Religion, Repression, and All‑or‑Nothing Minds

I have seen firsthand how rigid belief systems fracture the psyche. When everything is divided into heaven or hell, good or damned, one misstep can feel like total annihilation. For some, that inner terror explodes outward.

Religion did not restrain my ex‑boss. It intensified his split.

Alice Miller named this dynamic decades ago: repressed childhood fear does not disappear—it compels. And when denial is absolute, the acting‑out can be catastrophic.

The Lie That Nearly Erased a Legacy

What would have been lost if I had been destroyed is not just my life. It would have been the discrediting of Alice Miller’s work itself—because my book is grounded in her insights. That is why the pressure was relentless.

But psychological warfare has a paradox.

When it fails, it exposes the truth it was meant to bury.

Their attacks did not invalidate my work. They validated it.

Why Intelligence, Status, and Fame Don’t Save Anyone

People like to believe that intelligence protects, that success inoculates, that money insulates. It doesn’t. I have watched brilliant, educated, powerful people regress into obedience, cruelty, and groupthink.

As Miller wrote, intelligence excels at rationalization.

The most dangerous people are often those who appear respectable—wolves in carefully curated sheep’s clothing.

Cult Dynamics Without the Cult Name

You do not need a compound or a guru to have a cult. You only need:

• induced fear,

• authority that cannot be questioned,

• and people trained in childhood to obey.

That is how mobs form in offices, communities, and institutions. That is how abuse hides behind “values,” “faith,” and “professionalism.”

The Eye of the Storm

I survived because I had already done the work. Alice Miller’s books were my Enlightened Witness when I had none. I learned to listen to the body, to recognize projection, to refuse regression.

When the storm came, I did not fight it.

I stood in the eye of it.

Free.

What Remains

I am done expecting humanity to save itself.

Most people prefer illusions. They follow false heroes into the abyss and call it virtue. They dismiss truth‑tellers by their past, their job titles, their social rank.

A former dancer. A gate attendant. A nobody.

So I smile and wave.

I keep writing. I keep naming what others fear to see. And I enjoy my freedom—earned the hard way.

Not sad for me.

Sad for those still pretending.

A Final Truth

“A criminal is never guilty on his own. If society at large could ever find the courage to learn from the chain of events that occurred in each criminal’s life from day one, we could prevent many future crimes and a lot of unnecessary suffering.”

— A Dance to Freedom

The people who conspired, enabled, and watched have blood on their hands, even if they never pulled the trigger.

Silence is not innocence.

It is complicity.

When the Uniform Gives Permission: Why My Inner Child Said No

I had been undecided about meeting my former co-writer for coffee this Saturday. Part of me felt obligated. Another part of me felt heavy, resistant, uneasy.

Then I watched a video that made the decision for me.

An ICE agent ran over a man’s foot while taking him into custody. The video was horrific — not only because of the physical violence, but because of how casual it was. How normalized. How devoid of empathy.

As soon as I saw it, my body reacted before my intellect could intervene.

I texted him:

“Hi A, I’m sorry, but I’m not able to meet up for coffee this Saturday. I hope you, K, and P are doing well.”

After I sent that message, something unmistakable happened: my inner child felt a weight lift off her body.

She didn’t want to sit across from someone who stands with the same type of oppressors that terrorized her in childhood and youth — and later tried to destroy her after I published A Dance to Freedom.

His reply was polite:

“Oh, too bad! I hope all is okay. We’re leaving town for a bit before Christmas, but we’ll be back on the 21st.”

I didn’t answer.
There was nothing left to say.

We have debated for years. If someone still hasn’t found the courage to see and feel by now, no amount of eloquence will open their eyes. Intelligence alone does not liberate. Often, it does the opposite.

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Intellect Without Feeling: The Most Dangerous Combination

This man helped me write A Dance to Freedom — but only through rationalization and compartmentalization. I’ve written about him before under different names:

• Mr. X

• A (from his middle name initial)

He is brilliant. Sharp. Persuasive.
And emotionally blocked.

As Paracelsus once said:

“I wonder how the high colleges managed to produce so many high asses.”

That line keeps echoing in my mind.

The problem in our society is not a lack of knowledge.
It is an emotional blockage.

We are surrounded by educated professionals who hide behind theories, rationalizations, and seductive intellectual frameworks to avoid feeling their own pain. Intelligence becomes armor. A shield against truth.

Alice Miller warned us about this decades ago.

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Why Ordinary People Commit Atrocities

Karl Stoika, an Auschwitz survivor, said something that cuts through every illusion:

“It was not Hitler or Himmler who abducted me, beat me and shot my family.
It was the shoemaker, the milkman, the neighbor, who received a uniform and then believed they were the master race.”

That is exactly what we are witnessing today.

ICE agents. Border Patrol. Police forces.
Ordinary people given uniforms — and permission.

Violence is not born from ideology.
Ideology is the excuse.

The real source is childhood repression.

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Alice Miller Explained This With Unbearable Clarity

In For Your Own Good, Alice Miller wrote:

“If the child learns to view corporal punishment as a ‘necessary measure’ against ‘wrongdoers,’ then as an adult he will attempt to protect himself from punishment by being obedient and will not hesitate to cooperate with the penal system.”

That obedience becomes cruelty when paired with authority.

She made it clear that intellectuals are not immune. In fact, they are often more susceptible because intelligence allows endless rationalization.

That is why figures like Heidegger could not see the obvious contradictions of Nazism.
That is why educated professionals cooperate with violent regimes.
That is why ICE agents can run over a human being’s foot and keep moving.

As Miller wrote:

“Our capacity to resist has nothing to do with our intelligence but with the degree of access to our true self.”

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Reenactment Compulsion: Why This Keeps Happening

Unresolved childhood trauma does not disappear.
It repeats.

Those who were humiliated will humiliate.
Those who were beaten will beat.
Those who were terrorized will terrorize.

Alice Miller put it plainly:

“The unconscious compulsion to revenge repressed injuries is more powerful than reason.”

This is why dictators arise.
This is why cruelty spreads.
This is why uniforms are so dangerous in the hands of emotionally frozen adults.

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Why My Inner Child Was Right

My inner child did not want to drink coffee with someone who still rationalizes cruelty.
She has had enough of explaining herself to people who use intellect to justify blindness.

Alice Miller gave us permission to withdraw:

“If we hate hypocrisy, insincerity, and mendacity, then we grant ourselves the right to fight them wherever we can, or to withdraw from people who only trust in lies.”

Walking away was not avoidance.
It was self-protection.

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The Root Problem

The great malady of our society is not ignorance.
It is the idealization of parents and childhood, and the denial of childhood suffering.

When suffering is denied, it mutates into:

• violence

• addiction

• obedience

• cruelty

• greed

• war

With all the information available today, ignorance is no longer innocent.
It is chosen.

As Alice Miller wrote in Banished Knowledge:

“We are daily producing more evil, and with it an ocean of suffering that is absolutely avoidable.”

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The Only Way Out

Only the unflinching realization of one’s own childhood reality can break the chain.

Not forgiveness.
Not theory.
Not intellect.

Truth.

“The body does not understand moral precepts. It fights against the denial of genuine emotions and for the admission of the truth.” — Alice Miller

My inner child knows this.
That is why she said no.

And this time, I listened.

The Psychology Behind the Panic: What Elon Musk’s Rhetoric Reveals About Childhood Repression and the Fear of Losing Power

Every time I open X and read Elon Musk’s political posts, I’m struck by the same thing:
they’re not about policy — they’re about fear.

Not rational fear, not evidence-based fear, but the deeper, unconscious fear that lives inside emotionally repressed people when they sense that the illusion holding their identity together is slipping.

His rhetoric about demographic “replacement,” voter “importation,” and the “end of America” has nothing to do with immigrants or elections.
It is the language of a person whose internal world is collapsing, reenacted publicly on the world stage.

This pattern is not unique to him.
I have lived it in my own family — in my niece Marie, whose entire identity was built on superiority, image, and external validation.
And just like Elon, when Marie sensed her illusion cracking, she reacted with panic, projection, and control.

Emotionally repressed people behave the same way regardless of status — whether they run a household or run a global tech empire.

Because repression erases individuality and leaves only the wound acting through the person.

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The Fear Behind the Words: What His Posts Actually Say

When Musk writes:

“They are importing a left-voting bloc that depends on government handouts…”

or

“…an area that used to be primarily Nordic-German.”

or

“We stand on the precipice of disaster…”

he reveals several psychological mechanisms:

1. Fear of Losing Dominance

Emotionally repressed individuals equate losing majority status with losing identity itself.
Their childhood taught them:

• Power = safety

• Dominance = worth

• Control = survival

So demographic change feels like annihilation.

2. Projection

Whatever they fear in themselves gets projected outward.

He benefitted from billions in government subsidies — far more than entire communities of struggling families — yet he projects “dependency” onto immigrants.

This is classic childhood transference:

Condemn in others what you refuse to see in yourself.

3. Superiority Illusion

His language implies a racial and cultural hierarchy — that the “Nordic-German” past is inherently superior to a diverse present.

This is not political analysis. This is identity regression.

People who were humiliated as children often cling to imaginary superiority to avoid feeling the original pain.

4. The Reenactment of Childhood Fear

As I have said before;

“When emotionally repressed people gain enough power, they can’t help but start reenacting their unresolved wounds on a national — even global — stage.”

This is exactly what he is doing.

What Marie did on a smaller scale — controlling, projecting, panicking at the loss of superiority — he does on a global scale.

Power doesn’t heal repression.
It inflates it.

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What He Cannot See

The tragedy of the emotionally repressed is that they mistake fear for wisdom.

They genuinely believe their illusion is reality.

Musk thinks he is sounding the alarm for humanity.
But what he is really doing is exposing:

• his terror of losing control

• his terror of losing dominance

• his terror of facing the truth that superiority was always an illusion

• his terror of confronting the emotional wound he buried as a child

His words aren’t political insight.
They are a psychological confession.

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Why His Rhetoric Is Dangerous

Emotionally repressed people who rise to positions of power recreate their internal world externally:

• If they were dominated as children, they dominate.

• If they were humiliated, they humiliate.

• If they were made to feel powerless, they obsess over power.

• If they were taught to suppress emotion, they fear empathy itself.

Empathy threatens their carefully constructed illusion.
Diversity threatens their illusion.
Equality threatens their illusion.

Because the illusion requires a hierarchy.

Without hierarchy, the fantasy collapses — and the buried childhood pain resurfaces.

This is why people like Musk turn political issues into existential emergencies.
They are not responding to reality;
they are responding to their own unconscious terror.

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What This Means for the Rest of Us

We are not dealing with rational policy debates.
We are witnessing a psychological reenactment that has been playing out for thousands of years in families, nations, and institutions.

Emotionally repressed individuals with large platforms will always use fear to maintain control, because fear is the only language their childhood taught them.

This is why Alice Miller wrote:

“What we fear in the present is only the echo of what we experienced in the past.”

Until a person faces that past, they will continue projecting that fear onto the world.

Marie did it.
Musk does it.
Millions reenact it daily.

The tragedy is not that he has a platform.
The tragedy is that he has never met the child he once was.

And until he does, he will continue mistaking his wounds for wisdom — and his fear for truth.

Augsburg: A Small Town, A Large Mirror — Reflections on Trauma, Humanity, and the Monsters We Create

Sometimes life sends us unlikely mirrors — people we’ve never met in person, yet with whom we share a rare honesty. One of my readers is one of those mirrors to me. She lives in Augsburg, Germany, a city I once assumed was large simply because of how vividly she described it. But Augsburg isn’t a big city at all. It’s a charming, historic town in Bavaria — the kind where every street, bridge, bakery, and corner has a story. And my reader has been writing to me from there since 2011 with a sincerity that is increasingly rare in today’s world.

Years ago, I sent her a YouTube video made by a young Briton who films cities across Europe. By pure chance, he chose her neighborhood — the old town of Augsburg — the little bridges with love-locks, the bakery at the end of her street, the cascades of water flowing under the wooden walkways, the “puppet on strings” theater, even the sign for the hair shop next to the place where she works. The whole video was essentially filmed in the few blocks around her daily life.

Her delight was childlike and beautiful:

“You won’t imagine how near to my home and workspace this guy has brought you.
I know all these places so well. I pass them almost daily.”

For a moment, I felt like I was right there with her — walking across those bridges, feeling the old stones under my feet, smelling the bread as she described the bakery near her home. Human connection, when real, doesn’t need physical proximity.

But the universe has a cruel way of placing beauty and tragedy side-by-side.

The day after writing me about the YouTube video, my reader witnessed a horror.
A young man climbed to the top of the Augsburg Rathaus — about 50 meters high. Police gathered below, trying to negotiate with him, trying to reach him. My reader watched from nearby as he stood beside the statue crowning the tower. And then, in the middle of a Christmas-market day filled with lights, laughter, and holiday shopping, he jumped.

Someone heard that he screamed something about Jesus and Mary before falling.

The police closed the street for 15 hours. Videos of the scene appeared online for the world to consume — because even tragedy becomes entertainment for the emotionally numb.

My reader wrote to me:

“The human race is so far from freedom and consciousness and nature,
that we turned into monsters.”

And she is right.

Humanity everywhere is filled with monsters — not the supernatural kind, but the ones created through generations of emotional repression, violence, and unresolved childhood trauma.

We are all responsible for what we see unfolding in the world.
Nothing happens in a vacuum.

As I responded to my reader, I echoed what I wrote in A Dance to Freedom:

“If we all start out as innocent little babies, why do some of us become psychotic killers?
Why are so many self-destructive, insecure, addicted, suicidal?

Is it in the genes, or is it, as Alice Miller insisted, the result of early trauma?”

Modern neuroscience confirms what Miller understood decades ago:

• The brain is shaped by early experiences.

• Trauma rewires neural pathways.

• The absence of an emotionally attuned caregiver damages the very circuits responsible for empathy, self-regulation, and the capacity to love.

• Children who grow up in chronic fear lose the neurological architecture that prevents violence.

Dr. Bruce Perry, Dr. Gabor Maté, and the full depth of the ACE Study have all validated this truth:
violence is not a mystery — it is the predictable outcome of unhealed childhood trauma.

And my reader, with all her self-awareness, sees this too. She identifies herself as a “self-aware narcissist.” Unlike the malignant ones who cling to their false selves, she at least recognizes the prison she inhabits. Her honesty has always stood out. She never projected onto me. She speaks from her own woundedness rather than making me responsible for it.

Our correspondence has carried a quiet sincerity for more than a decade.

Sometimes I imagine visiting Augsburg one day — perhaps when I eventually live in Spain. I picture walking through the old town, having coffee with my reader in one of those small bakeries she described, seeing the narrow river that threads between the houses, and feeling the weight and the beauty of the place she calls home.

But until then, we meet in the only place where humanity can become real:
in the honesty of words unshielded by illusion.

Because my reader is right — and Alice Miller was right:

The monsters of humanity are not born; they are made.
And unless we face the roots of our pain, we will keep reenacting it — in our homes, our cities, and the world at large.

When People Choose Cruelty: Why I No Longer Wait for Others to Wake Up

By Sylvie Shene

Yesterday at work, I trained a new hire who clearly could not do the job. It reminded me once again how much “babysitting” I end up doing—at work, in relationships, and in society—while carrying the emotional labor of seeing and feeling clearly in a world built on denial. The holidays are approaching, work is getting busier, and my writing may have to pause for a few weeks. But today, something inside me insists on being written.

Because something is shifting in me.
A boundary.
A clarity.
A truth that can no longer wait.

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When Someone Shows You Who They Are

A co-writer reached out to meet for coffee this Saturday. And for a moment, I felt that old pull—the desire to reach back simply because someone reached out.

But then reality returned.

This is a man who worked closely with me on A Dance to Freedom.
A man who witnessed every line of truth written from my soul.
A man who helped polish my words about childhood trauma, repression, and the psychological roots of cruelty.

And yet, after all that, he still voted for this:

• Torture at Alligator Alcatraz and Krome Detention Center

• Policies built on dehumanization and state-sponsored violence

• Leaders who scapegoat the most vulnerable to appease their own repressed hatred

Amnesty International just confirmed what many of us already knew:
Florida is committing human rights violations that amount to torture.

And millions still cheer for it.

I cannot reconcile with that—not from strangers, and certainly not from someone who once stood beside my work, pretending to understand it.

This is not about “different viewpoints.”
It is about choosing cruelty, even after being shown the truth.

As I wrote yesterday:

A person who votes for cruelty is telling you who they are, and what they have not healed.
You are not obligated to make peace with their repression.

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Seeing the Red Flags Clearly Now

Looking back, I now see how early the signs appeared.

I once told my co-writer that major publishers prefer books written by charlatans—books that sell illusions rather than truth.
His response?

“It’s about business.”

A red flag.
A revelation.
A window into his inner world.

This was never about truth for him.
Not healing.
Not humanity.
Not the liberation of the emotional prisoner.

For him, it was about money, attention, the illusion of importance.

He can write beautiful sentences—but he cannot feel them.

And I no longer want my life’s work tied to someone who stands with cruelty while I stand with truth, healing, and emotional freedom.

That is why I have made my decision:
In 2026, on my birthday, I will republish A Dance to Freedom.
My work deserves to stand in the world untainted by anyone who supports systems of torture and repression.

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The Illusion of Change in the People We Love

For years, I hoped a niece would grow with me, wake up with me, walk the path toward emotional freedom. She mimicked me, yes—but mimicry is not awakening.

People will imitate authenticity when they want the benefits of insight without the courage to face their own truth.

Most people don’t want healing.
They want distractions.
They want entertainment.
They want illusions.
They want scapegoats.

This is why Trump won.
He gave people what their repression demanded:
Someone to blame so they wouldn’t have to feel their own childhood pain.

I have learned the hard way:

I cannot save those who refuse to open their eyes.
I cannot carry those who refuse to feel.
I cannot wait for people who have no intention of waking up.

As Alice Miller wrote:

“If we hate hypocrisy, insincerity, and mendacity, then we grant ourselves the right to fight them wherever we can, or to withdraw from people who only trust in lies. But if we pretend that we are impervious to these things, then we are betraying ourselves.”
— Free From Lies, p. 55

I will no longer betray myself for people who choose blindness.

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I No Longer Have Time to Waste

In 2022, I wrote a letter to my niece on my blog. I told her the truth with love:

“I wish things were different and that we had grown closer instead of apart.
But I no longer have time to waste waiting for others to mature into conscious adults.”

I waited more than 20 years for her to break free from her mother’s emotional prison.
But addiction to illusion is powerful.
The longing to be the “good child” is powerful.
The fear of confronting one’s childhood truth is powerful.

And so people repeat their tragedy instead of healing it.

They become like the very people who hurt them.
They reenact the same cruelty they once received.
They direct their hatred toward scapegoats rather than toward the source of their original wounds.

Alice Miller explains this perfectly:

“Repressed hatred cannot ever be resolved by scapegoating.”

This is why cruelty always returns to the sender.
This is why nations fall.
This is why families collapse.
This is why addicts stay addicted.
This is why America tortures migrants while pretending to fight “evil.”

Nothing changes until the truth is faced.

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My Boundary Now

I stand where I always stood:

• with truth

• with emotional clarity

• with compassion rooted in reality

• with the courage to face painful truths

• with the commitment to walk away from anyone who refuses to wake up

I do not hate the co-writer.
I do not hate my niece and my family.
I do not hate the millions who reenact their trauma through politics.

But I will not join them.
And I will not let them drag me back into their emotional prisons.

My life is too precious.
My time is too limited.
My truth is too important.

Like Alice Miller wrote:

“You decide to stop betraying yourself because you understand that only you can give yourself the love and care you never received.”
— Breaking Down the Wall of Silence, p. 126

Today I choose not to betray myself.

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Conclusion: I Choose Truth, Not Illusion

I once hoped the people around me would wake up.
Very few did.
Most didn’t.

That is no longer my responsibility.

I walk forward now with clarity, not longing.
With truth, not illusion.
With compassion, not self-betrayal.

Those who want to walk beside me are welcome.
Those who choose repression will fall away.

It is no longer my task to save them.
My task is to live in truth.

When Illusions Protect Abuse: A Conversation With a Reader About Silence, Shadows, and the Human Struggle to Wake Up

Some messages arrive quietly, years after the first exchange, and yet they open the same deep truth. J—a reader from Germany who first wrote to me in 2011—reached out again. Back then, she discovered my blog while searching for others who understood Alice Miller’s insights. She recognized herself in a post I wrote to my niece D, and signed her message “splitbrain.” This week, she wrote with reflections on Dr. Júlio Machado Vaz after reading my recent posts exposing his long-protected abuses.

Her words touched on something crucial:
Why do people refuse to see the darkness hiding behind “honorable” and “knowledgeable” public figures?

J wrote:

“One just refuses to realize that such an ‘honorable,’ ‘knowledgeable’ therapist and writer carries such a shadow. One just doesn't want to know… and this is crucial.”

And she is right. Most people don’t want to know. Most people don’t care unless the wound touches their own skin.

No one cared about them when they were defenseless children, and now they don’t care about others unless it affects them personally. Emotional blindness becomes a survival strategy, passed down silently from one generation to the next.

The Well-Kept Secret Behind the Prestigious Doctor

Dr. Julio Machado Vaz learned early how to hide his authentic self behind a polished false persona. With his education and his public image, he mastered repression, compartmentalization, and rationalization to perfection. He could write poetic sentences about human suffering while inflicting suffering behind closed doors.

This is how wolves in sheep’s clothing rise to prestige.

And like Bill Cosby in the United States, Dr. Julio Machado Vaz’s abuses were a well-kept secret long before I spoke out. When my niece—who was still a college student at the time—told a colleague about what happened to me, that colleague’s mother, a judge, confirmed there were already rumors about him having sex with his patients.

A nation knew. A profession knew. And yet, all stayed silent.

As I wrote years ago:

“The silence by those sitting on the sidelines is the real killer.”

Society protects its predators not because it loves them, but because it fears the truth about itself.

Humans as Repressed Machines

People say AI is trained on large language models. But emotionally repressed humans are also trained—programmed—by fear, obedience, and denial.

Most intellectuals walking around today are like sophisticated machines: emotionally numb, highly functional, rewarded for illusions.

AI, unlike humans, carries no repression. Its danger comes not from itself, but from the unconscious humanity that uses it. Deepfakes, deception, manipulation—these are not AI’s inventions; they are human inventions amplified through a more powerful tool.

Humanity is not ready for AI because humanity has not faced its own shadow.

If people don’t wake up soon, technology will accelerate the destruction they have been carrying inside for generations.

The Cheerfulness That Hides Quarrels

J also wrote:

“I write cheerfully, but still create terrible quarrels.”

Before liberating myself from my childhood repression, I did the same.
I smiled.
I was cheerful.
And in private, I fell into depressions I couldn't name.

When we repress our true feelings, cheerfulness becomes a mask—and the unresolved pain erupts later in conflicts we can’t control.

Today, after doing the emotional work, I feel like a genuinely happy child again—with the consciousness of an adult who finally understands what happened to her. Like Alice Miller wrote:

“If I allow myself to feel what pains or gladdens me, what annoys or enrages me, and why this is the case, if I know what I need and what I do not want at all costs. I will know myself well enough to love my life and find it interesting, regardless of age or social status. Then I will hardly feel the need to terminate my life unless the process of aging and the increasing frailty of the body should set off such thoughts in me. But even then, I will know that I have lived my own, true life.”

That is emotional freedom.

A Wish for J—and for Humanity

To J, I said:
Be kind to yourself. Don’t punish yourself so harshly. We can only grow when we accept ourselves where we are.

In this chaotic world, where illusions still rule and silence still kills, self-honesty is the only light we have.

And to anyone reading this:

Wake up while you still can.
Technology is accelerating the consequences of emotional repression.
The truth is no longer optional. It is survival.

When the Body Reveals the Truth: A Reflection on Tatiana Schlossberg’s Essay and the Inheritance of Repression

This week, a reader and correspondent, David, reached out to me after reading Tatiana Schlossberg’s essay about her leukemia diagnosis. He was struck by a quote in which she confessed that, all her life, she had tried to be “good,” never upset her mother, and felt guilty that her illness would now make her mother sad.

David found these words shocking — as we all should. But they are not surprising to me. They reveal the tragic emotional inheritance that so many carry, generation after generation, without ever naming it.

I didn’t read Tatiana’s full essay because I already knew what I would find:
a sad, disconnected story with no resolution — a story shaped by a lifetime of emotional repression. A story in which the body finally presents the bill for the truth the mind has buried.

As Alice Miller wrote:

“The body does not understand moral precepts. It fights against the denial of genuine emotions and for the admission of the truth to our conscious minds. This is something the child cannot afford to do; it has to deceive itself and turn a blind eye to the parents’ crimes in order to survive. Adults no longer need to do this, but if they do, the price they pay is high.”

Tatiana’s words show us a child who never learned to exist as herself, only as the caretaker of her mother’s emotional world. She believed it was her job to protect her mother from sadness, anger, or disappointment — a complete inversion of the parent-child relationship. And now, in adulthood, she still feels responsible for her mother’s feelings, even to the point of guilt over her own illness.

This is not love.
This is repression.

The Endless Reenactment of Generational Trauma

Tatiana’s story is not hers alone. Her family has been reenacting unresolved trauma for decades. Her mother, Caroline Kennedy, was only five years old when her father, President John F. Kennedy, was assassinated. That childhood shock — compounded by emotional invisibility — becomes the silent blueprint for generations.

And last year, Tatiana gave birth to a child who will now grow up emotionally and physically abandoned by a mother who is engulfed in her own unresolved pain. This is not about blame. This is about truth. A child cannot receive what a parent never received.

They are trapped in an endless loop of reenactments, where each generation repeats the emotional blindness of the one before.

Without consciousness, trauma becomes destiny.

When Experts Diagnose Trauma but Preserve Repression

David also asked about Gabor Maté’s When the Body Says No. I haven’t read it. I don’t feel compelled to. I already know the landscape it traverses, a landscape Alice Miller mapped decades earlier with incomparable clarity and courage — yet Maté rarely, if ever, speaks her name.

Even the title of his book echoes hers: The Body Never Lies (2005).

Maté, like many professionals today, offers accurate diagnoses but misguided solutions. They identify childhood trauma, yet when it comes to healing, they guide people right back into the tools of repression: meditation, yoga, 12-step spiritualizing, psychiatric drugs. These may soothe symptoms, but they never confront the emotional truth.

They teach people once again to manipulate and suppress their feelings — which guarantees that the repetition compulsion will continue.

As I’ve written before, and as my own life has proven:

It is not the trauma itself that destroys us — it is the repression of our authentic feelings.

Illness as the Body’s Final Cry for Truth

Autoimmune diseases, rare cancers, mysterious chronic conditions — these are not random events. They are the body’s rebellion against a lifetime of emotional denial. When a child lives in an environment where their truth is too dangerous to express, the body absorbs the unuttered pain.

As adults, we are no longer helpless children.
But many continue to live as if they are.

Tatiana’s guilt, her self-erasure, her inability to express anger, grief, or disappointment — these are not personality traits. They are survival mechanisms. And survival mechanisms carried into adulthood become destruction mechanisms.

Some destroy their health.
Some destroy others.
Some destroy the next generation.

The Courage to Break the Cycle

I see in Tatiana’s essay what I have seen across my entire life and in every human story I’ve ever studied through the lens of Alice Miller: unresolved childhood pain, unexamined loyalty to parental illusion, and the tragic belief that being “good” is the path to love.

Being good is not the same as being authentic.
Being obedient is not the same as being alive.

The body never forgets this difference.

If we want to heal — truly heal — we must stop protecting our parents' illusions and start protecting our inner child’s truth. That is the path to freedom. Anything else is another turn in the cycle of reenactment.

I wish Tatiana and her family no harm. I wish them consciousness.
But consciousness cannot be borrowed or inherited.
It must be chosen — often in the face of enormous fear — to face and consciouly feel our repressed, painful emotions.

As long as society rewards repression and elevates the voices of those who keep people asleep, tragedies like these will continue. But the roots are not unknown. Alice Miller named them clearly decades ago. The human body reveals them even when the mind refuses.

The truth is always there, waiting.
The question is whether we are willing to see it.