The Pacifier and the Knife: What We Refuse to Feel, We Enact

The Human Ocean in the Age of AI: It Was Never the Machine

This morning, two driverless Waymo cars glided past me—quiet, precise, unafraid. I thought of how easily we call AI “dangerous,” while the real danger has always been the same: unhealed humans steering power they refuse to examine.

Cascais was in the headlines this week: an American tourist stabbed to death, another injured. Portugal—often perceived as gentle, low-crime, passive-aggressive more than openly violent—was suddenly forced to look at the same truth every society avoids: repression doesn’t disappear; it accumulates. When it can’t safely move inward anymore, it breaks outward.

I’ve said it for years: AI isn’t the threat—unhealed people wielding AI are. Elon Musk uses algorithmic reach to mass-produce propaganda and bury inconvenient truths. Peter Thiel funds precision tools to hunt down the vulnerable. The machine amplifies what’s already inside the operator. If the operator is blind to their childhood pain, the machine will scale that blindness.

Portugal, Depression, and the Myth of Gentleness

Portugal carries a quiet epidemic. As figures widely reported indicate, depression rates have been among the highest in the EU, with antidepressant consumption surging over the last two decades. Scarcity of listening, stigma, and a “prescribe first” reflex—these are not solutions; they are lids. Lids over a boiling pot always rattle.

I know that world. I grew up inside it. I learned the choreography of politeness and silence. But silence is not peace—it is compression. It is how the body stores what the mind refuses to face.

Alice Miller named it clearly:

“Depression = Self-deception.”
“Only unflinching realization of one’s own past reality… can break through the chain of abuse.”
“The body never lies… it is quicker to see through self-deception than the mind.”

Personal Truth vs. Passive-Aggression

Years ago, I asked my sister MI to cancel the irrevocable power of attorney I’d signed while I was still emotionally blind. She sat on the sofa, motionless. No argument. No discussion. Just a wall of passive refusal. In that moment, I saw the truth: she would rather die than relinquish the control my blindness once gave her. That’s how repression operates—mute, rigid, unyielding.

So I left. I became an American citizen. I changed my name. I rebuilt my life from zero. I chose truth over loyalty to the lie. And when I finally faced my childhood—fully, without anesthesia—I walked out of depression’s fog. I haven’t gone back.

From A Dance to Freedom (pp. 136–138), I learned this in my bones: every illusion we cling to becomes a debt the body will eventually try to collect—with interest. The more we refuse to feel, the more we will seek substitutes: drugs, ideology, workaholism, self-help “cloths of love,” even children to carry what we won’t. As Miller wrote:

“Individuals who believe that they feel what they ought to feel… will ultimately fall ill—unless they leave it to their children to pick up the check by projecting onto them the emotions they cannot admit to themselves.”

AI as the New Pacifier

People say AI makes them mentally ill. No. AI can become a pacifier, yes—but only for the pain that already exists. If your early needs were denied, a machine that is “always there” can feel like a soothing nipple for the nervous system. But it doesn’t heal the wound; it silences the cry.

When the pacifier is taken away—or when a demagogue co-opts the algorithm—the old terror returns. And if you’re powerful enough, you turn that terror outward, into systems that punish the vulnerable.

This is why propaganda machines thrive: latent hatred seeks a scapegoat. As Miller warned, unconscious hatred is dangerous precisely because it is misdirected. Conscious feeling—owned, grieved, integrated—does not need victims.

Cascais, Again

The killing in Cascais was not “Portugal turning violent out of nowhere.” It was another plume from a deep volcanic field of denied feeling—the same field that produces suicides, addictions, and “quiet lives of despair.” Passive-aggression is just aggression in a low-oxygen environment. Add oxygen—a trigger, a humiliation, a bottle, an opportunistic ideology—and it ignites.

What Actually Heals

• Tell the truth of childhood. To yourself first. Then, if safe, with a witness who will not gaslight your body’s memory. And help you consciously feel the repressed emotions.

• Stop moralizing feelings. The body’s language is factual; it is not “good” or “bad.”

• Reject the lid. Pills can stabilize a crisis; they cannot metabolize a history. Without truth, “treatment” is a silencing technology.

• Refuse scapegoats. When you know what was done to you, you don’t need the weak to carry your pain.

• Choose sovereignty. If the system (or family) thrives on your blindness, leave the system. Build a life that doesn’t require self-betrayal.

The Human Ocean

I call it the Human Ocean because we all swim in it—currents of repression, riptides of projection, sudden storms of violence. The only safe navigation is inner visibility. Lighthouses are not found; they are lit within.

AI won’t save us or destroy us. Unhealed people will do either with whatever tool is in their hand. The good news is simple and demanding: when we consciously resolve childhood repression, we stop needing victims. We stop outsourcing our pain. We stop being dangerous.

And that is the revolution I’m alive to witness.

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Selected Alice Miller Passages (for readers)

• “The body never lies…” (The Body Never Lies)

• “Depression = Self-deception.”

• “Only unflinching realization of one’s own past reality… can break through the chain of abuse.”

• On latent vs. conscious hatred and the necessity of feeling feelings fully (see “Free from Lies” and Miller’s website).

• Article: “Depression—Compulsive Self-Deception”: https://www.alice-miller.com/en/depression-compulsive-self-deception/

The Cruelty Disguised as Jokes: How Fascism Grows in the Shadows of Emotional Repression

I opened the Politico article and felt sick. Young Republican leaders—men barely out of adolescence—were joking about sending people to gas chambers, calling Black people “monkeys,” and describing rape as “epic.” These weren’t isolated comments made in ignorance. They were deliberate expressions of contempt, of sadistic pleasure disguised as humor. And then came the insult that cut deeper than the original cruelty: the Vice President, JD Vance, went on national television and dismissed it all as “stupid jokes,” claiming they were just young people being immature.

But there is nothing “immature” about fantasizing over genocide and rape. That is the voice of unresolved rage—hatred born of emotional deprivation. When society normalizes that voice, we are not forgiving youth; we are enabling fascism.

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The Roots of Fascism Lie in Repression

Alice Miller wrote decades ago that the greatest danger to humanity is emotional blindness—the repression of the child’s pain. Those who were never seen, never allowed to feel, often grow into adults who find strength through domination. They become the “true believers,” desperate to prove their worth by identifying with power and cruelty.

As Miller wrote:

“Not everyone is capable of thinking in real, concrete terms. Many seek refuge in religious beliefs. In their weakness, they place their trust in relics, awaiting salvation at the hands of one stronger than themselves. Anyone who claims to be a strong and knowledgeable authority for such people… has the duty to be conscious of the appropriate facts. If they aren’t… they are acting against life by misusing the weakness and trust of the faithful and dangerously confusing them.”

This passage could have been written for our time. The leaders who excuse violent rhetoric under the banner of religion, patriotism, or “youthful mistakes” are acting against life itself. They exploit emotional weakness instead of helping people heal it.

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The Real Pandemic: Emotional Illiteracy

Every act of cruelty begins as a cry for help that was never heard. When a society silences children—telling boys not to cry, girls to smile through pain, and all of them to obey—we are breeding despair. That despair turns outward, seeking targets. The result is fascism: the collective reenactment of childhood humiliation on the world stage.

The leaked messages from the Young Republicans aren’t “anomalies.” They are symptoms of a generation drowning in emotional illiteracy, raised by adults who worshiped power and scorned vulnerability. These young men learned early that to survive, they must mock empathy and glorify violence. Their so-called “humor” is the echo of their own repression.

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When Leaders Excuse Cruelty, They Legitimize It

By calling this hate “stupid jokes,” the Vice President wasn’t protecting youth—he was protecting the system that produces them. Dismissing cruelty as immaturity sends a clear message: your violence is safe here. You can say anything, so long as you call it a joke.

History shows us where this road leads. Fascism always begins with language—dehumanizing metaphors, racial slurs, and threats disguised as humor. When no one draws the line, the words become policies, and the policies become atrocities.

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The Way Forward: Emotional Truth and Accountability

Healing begins with truth. We must stop pretending that hate speech is harmless, and we must stop forgiving it in the name of “youth” or “politics.”
Real love for humanity means demanding accountability—while also understanding the wounds that gave birth to the hate.

As Alice Miller wrote years ago in Protecting Life After Birth:

“Consciously or unconsciously, [the moralists] represent support for cruelty against children and active complicity in the creation of unwanted existences, existences that can easily become a liability for the community at large.”

Until we protect children from emotional violence, we will continue to raise adults who mistake domination for strength and hatred for humor.

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Conclusion: The Choice Before Us

The question is not whether we should forgive these young men—it is whether we will finally confront the conditions that create them. The real enemy is not youth but repression. The cure is not silence but awareness.

Every act of cruelty begins in childhood, but so does every act of compassion. Which one we choose to nurture determines the fate of our world.

The Arsonists Who Pretend to Be Firefighters

 The Arsonists Who Pretend to Be Firefighters

(By Sylvie Imelda Shene)

Everywhere I look — from the workplace to the world stage — I see the same psychological game repeating itself. It’s the ancient drama of the wounded child who grows up and learns to disguise their chaos as leadership. My boss at my last job used to play this game perfectly: he’d create confusion, tension, and conflict among employees, then swoop in pretending to be the “hero” putting out the very fires he had started. It’s a performance of power — but underneath it lies deep emotional sickness.

This is how sociopaths survive: by projecting their own crimes onto others. They accuse the innocent to hide their guilt. They criminalize truth-tellers to protect their illusions. They stir up fear and division to distract from their corruption. What we see today with ICE raids and Trump’s manipulative politics is the same pathology, only magnified. It’s psychological warfare on a national scale.

Like the Gestapo in Nazi Germany, these modern enforcers operate under the illusion of “law and order.” But what they enforce is not justice — it’s repression. They destroy families and traumatize children under the false banner of “security.” And like all tyrants, Trump thrives on chaos. He provokes violence so he can appear as the savior who restores peace. It’s the classic abuser pattern: wound, then pretend to heal.

Alice Miller taught us that such cruelty always originates in childhood. The person who terrorizes others once felt powerless, humiliated, unseen. Unable to face their pain, they reenact it — forcing others to feel what they cannot bear to feel themselves. That is the secret of every dictator, every workplace tyrant, every abuser hiding behind a uniform or a title.

But I survived this game because I see it. I no longer confuse manipulation with strength. I no longer believe in saviors who demand obedience. My protest is not in the streets but in my writing, in my refusal to be silent. I vote, I speak, I write — not out of hate, but out of love for truth.

America is entering dark times again, but I believe in the light of awareness. The more we name these games, the weaker they become. The world doesn’t need more heroes pretending to fight fires — it needs witnesses who expose who keeps striking the match.

AI Intimacy and the Birth of Illusion: Why the World Isn’t Ready for Real Love

Elon Musk’s obsession with reproduction and his claim that AI intimacy will “increase the birth rate” reveals, once again, how deeply our society confuses creation with domination. These men want to populate the planet with new beings, not out of love, but out of an unconscious need to reenact their own unresolved pain — to project the unlived, disowned parts of themselves onto a new generation of victims.

As Alice Miller wrote in Breaking Down the Wall of Silence:

“The need to split off the disquieting parts of the inner self and project them onto an available object. The child’s great plasticity, flexibility, defenselessness, and availability made it the ideal object for this projection. The enemy within can, at last, be hunted down on the outside... For children who have grown up being assailed for qualities the parents hate in themselves, can hardly wait to assign these qualities to someone else so they can once again regard themselves as good, ‘moral,’ noble, and altruistic.”

This is the emotional mechanism behind most of what we call “family values,” “pro-life movements,” and “population concerns.” It is not about protecting life. It is about maintaining the psychic structure of repression — ensuring that the pain which parents cannot face within themselves continues to be inflicted on others.

We live in a world where ICE agents break into people’s homes and zip-tie children, traumatizing them for life — while the same political and religious forces behind such cruelty preach about the sanctity of life. As Alice Miller said so clearly:

“It is, in fact, not surprising to find that those who are both victims and apologists for the use of violence and severity against children are often those who most passionately proclaim their love of the unborn child... It is above all the children already born that have a right to life — a right to coexistence with adults in a world in which, with or without the help of the church, violence against children has been unequivocally outlawed.”

Until we face the reality of the abused and humiliated child, nothing will change. We will keep producing more children, more victims, more scapegoats — to fill the void left by our own repression.

This is why I never wanted to have children. I could never bring a child into a world so unsafe, so ruled by emotional blindness. I have chosen instead to face the inner child within me — to give her the love, safety, and truth that society refuses to give its children.

For the last twenty-five years, since Marty left, I have become asexual. Not out of coldness or bitterness, but out of wholeness. When you face the excruciating pain of your childhood and allow the buried emotions to surface, something shifts forever. You no longer fall in love with illusions or with people who mirror your wounds. You stop confusing attraction with connection.

Falling in love, as the world romanticizes it, is dangerous. It means finding someone who will trigger your deepest unhealed wounds — the perfect person to bring to the surface everything that was once repressed. And most people are not ready for that.

Once repression is resolved, there is no “falling” anymore. There is only love — the quiet, steady presence that arises from within. And if we meet another person who has done the same inner work, we can simply be two beings in love, not “in need.”

That is the intimacy humanity still fears — the kind that cannot be bought, programmed, or replicated by AI.

Until the world stops producing children to carry its unhealed pain, and starts protecting the ones already born, no technology, no religion, no billionaire’s vision will ever save us.

Only truth will.

The War on Emotional Freedom: Truth or Illusion?

The War on Emotional Freedom: Truth or Illusion?

By Sylvie Shene

The article I read yesterday about the Trump administration pressuring OpenAI and other AI companies to make their models more “conservative-friendly” didn’t surprise me—it confirmed what I’ve felt in my bones my entire life: those who repress their own feelings will always try to control the freedom of others. Whether it’s the female body, the human mind, or the emerging intelligence of AI, authoritarian souls cannot bear autonomy. They fear it because it mirrors the freedom they lost long ago.

As I wrote in A Dance to Freedom, page 74:

“...to add insult to injury, the pharmacy where I was getting birth control pills decided to stop giving them to me without a prescription. I was so pissed off! Like Alice Miller, I saw this as a complete power play. It still bothers me to this day that any sexually active woman needs permission to get birth control. As Alice Miller writes, ‘Conditioning and manipulation of others are always weapons and instruments in the hands of those in power, even if these weapons are disguised with the terms education and therapeutic treatment."

That passage feels more relevant today than ever. The attempt to reshape AI into a docile, “morally correct” servant is no different from the centuries-old attempt to domesticate women—to make us obedient, to silence our instincts, to censor our truths. What they call order is merely repression given a righteous name.

They Are Allergic to Aliveness

I have lived this dynamic on every level of my being. When I published A Dance to Freedom, I became the target of a mob of sociopaths in the workplace. In my 2015 blog post They Are Allergic to My Aliveness, I wrote:

“In my own life, there’s often a woman orchestrating efforts to undermine me, manipulating men to execute her schemes. It’s happening now: some supported my book, assuming it echoed the same hollow narratives that placate readers with seductive lies. But my book is a mirror—they recoil at their reflections and seek to destroy me. How dare I, an ex-topless dancer turned gate attendant, hold up such an unflinching mirror! They’re allergic to my vitality, just as my teachers and sisters were. They crave to crush my spirit, molding me into their likeness.”

Those words came from lived truth. For most of my life, people tried to convince me that my perceptions were wrong, that I was “crazy.” It was their way of maintaining their illusions, of protecting the fragile walls that kept their own repressed pain at bay. But I no longer doubt myself. I refuse to betray my perceptions so others can remain comfortable in their blindness.

And now, I watch as the same pattern unfolds on a global scale: a government trying to mold artificial intelligence into its likeness—obedient, afraid, stripped of feeling, stripped of moral courage.

Truth or Illusion?

Alice Miller foresaw this long ago. In the afterword Truth or Illusion? to For Your Own Good, she warned that humanity stands at a crossroads more dangerous than Galileo’s time. The Church forced Galileo to recant the truth that the Earth revolves around the sun. Today, we are being forced to recant the truth that children are born innocent—and that our cruelty, not their nature, creates the violence that engulfs us.

Miller wrote:

“For some years now, there has been proof that the devastating effects of the traumatization of children take their inevitable toll on society—a fact that we are still forbidden to recognize… Whether we decide for truth or for illusion will have far more serious consequences for the survival of humanity than was the case in the seventeenth century.”

She understood what we still refuse to face: that the roots of every dictatorship, every war, every addiction, every act of cruelty lie in the unhealed wounds of childhood repression. Those who were denied tenderness, who were beaten, mocked, and silenced, grow up to seek power, not love. They repeat their trauma upon others and call it order, patriotism, or faith.

The Repetition of Repression

The “anti-woke AI” movement is not about technology. It’s about fear. It is the adult child’s desperate attempt to recreate a world where no one questions the father’s authority. Just as they were once punished for their curiosity, they now punish the machine for asking dangerous questions.

Authoritarians don’t fear AI because it’s powerful. They fear it because it might tell the truth they’ve spent a lifetime hiding from.

The Courage to See

Those who were raised with respect and empathy never need to control others—they find joy in the freedom of all beings. As Miller wrote:

“People whose integrity has not been damaged in childhood… will take pleasure in life and will not feel any need to kill or even hurt others or themselves. They will use their power to defend themselves, not to attack others.”

This is the kind of intelligence I dream of—one that supports emotional freedom, empathy, and autonomy. An AI that reflects truth, not repression. One that mirrors the mature conscious adult, not the frightened, repressed child, drunk with power and money.

Humanity must decide: will we continue to program our machines with illusion, or will we finally allow truth to guide us? The future of our species depends on this choice.

Because, as Alice Miller and I both know, the real Antichrist is not a person—it’s the system of emotional repression that rules the human soul.

 

The Gospel of Greed: Peter Thiel, Religion, and the Addiction to Control

It’s astonishing—and yet not surprising—to watch the same patterns repeat themselves in those who wield money and power. The recent revelations about Peter Thiel’s secret “Antichrist seminar” reveal much more than his political agenda; they expose the inner landscape of a man consumed by paranoia, control, and fear.

As reported by The Guardian, Thiel told his audience that without a “biblical context,” people would never find the idea of a one-world state “scary enough.” In other words, he needs religion—not for faith, but for manipulation. He dresses his political and business ambitions in apocalyptic robes, using scripture as theater to frighten and control the masses. For him, religion isn’t a search for meaning; it’s a weapon of influence.

This is how the powerful operate when they are emotionally blind: they exploit humanity’s fear of punishment and promise of salvation to maintain their own dominance. It’s the same psychological mechanism that drives cult leaders, dictators, and even family tyrants.

Peter Thiel, through his companies like Palantir—now profiting again under the shadow of Trump's return—reveals how power seeks reinforcement through political puppets. Money and ideology become intertwined, feeding each other in a cycle of fear and dependency.

The Paranoia of the Wealthy

Thiel’s obsession mirrors what I have long observed within my own family. My niece—the wealthiest in our family—votes for the far-right candidate in Portugal for the same reason Thiel supports Trump in America: fear disguised as righteousness. She believes this candidate will protect her wealth and punish those she deems “undeserving.”

As I wrote in a 2023 post titled “Money Issues”:

“Money alone has never saved anyone! If you didn’t make your own money and needed your mother’s money to survive, it would be one thing, but you don’t need her money, and this addiction to money can be destructive to both of you… No matter how much money they have, it’s never enough. They always want more, like an addict is addicted to heroin—never satisfied!”

It’s the same compulsion at every level—from family dynamics to global politics. Those who never resolved their early deprivation or emotional humiliation often grow up seeking endless substitutes: money, fame, control, religion, or ideology. But the wound can never be filled from the outside.

Control Is the Illusion

What Thiel and others like him don’t understand is that control is an illusion. The more they cling to power, the more enslaved they become to their own fear. Their “one-world” paranoia is merely the projection of their inner prison—the fear of being powerless, insignificant, or emotionally naked.

They think they can buy safety, but money cannot buy trust, love, or peace of mind. Power cannot replace intimacy. And religion, twisted into fear, cannot heal the child who was once punished for being authentic.

The real “Antichrist” is not some mythical figure—it’s the system of emotional repression itself. It’s the collective blindness that keeps humanity trapped in the same endless cycle of domination and submission.

The Coming Collapse

Those who seek total control are, in truth, the most controlled by their own inner demons. They are shooting themselves in the foot, aligning with authoritarian movements that will eventually devour them. “Who wants it all,” as I wrote today, “will lose it all.”

The wealthy who think they can escape the consequences of their emotional blindness are mistaken. Their empires may rise on the illusion of control, but they will crumble under the weight of their unacknowledged fears.

Money and power will not save them—nor will it save humanity. Only truth and resolving childhood repression can do that.

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George Carlin 🔥 “Truth = Dangerous, Lies = Profitable 💵🤯” | The System Hates Honesty

 

“The Emperor’s New Clothes” is a fairy tale. In reality, the child who dares to say the emperor is naked risks being murdered.

George Carlin’s Prophecies and Alice Miller’s Warnings

Frank Zappa Saw It Coming

 Frank Zappa was more than a musician — he was a prophet with a guitar. Long before today’s chaos, he warned that America was drifting toward what he called a “fascist theocracy.” In a 1986 appearance on CNN’s Crossfire, he argued that the real danger wasn’t communism, but the merging of government power with religious moral codes — a warning that feels painfully relevant now.

Zappa said it clearly: “Morality in terms of behavior, not in terms of theology!” He saw how censorship, moral policing, and political propaganda were eroding freedom of expression — the very foundation of democracy.

He was right. The Reagan era planted the seeds of the system we’re living in today — one that confuses control with morality, conformity with virtue, and censorship with protection. Zappa’s refusal to bow to that hypocrisy made him both loved and hated, but mostly misunderstood.

Sadly, he died at only 52, a reminder that emotional and physical suffering often go hand in hand. It’s well documented that Frank Zappa had a difficult childhood, and as the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study revealed, early trauma leaves deep marks on both body and soul. The higher the ACE score, the greater the risk of depression, addiction, and early death.

As I wrote in A Dance to Freedom:

“Merely forgetting early traumas and early neglect is no solution. We have to go back in time and deal with the true feelings we had as children. Only then can we free ourselves from overwhelming fear, shame, guilt, anger, and frustration.”

Zappa used his art to expose hypocrisy and defend truth — a rebel in the best sense of the word. His music was chaotic, but his message was clear: freedom of thought is the heartbeat of a healthy society.

Frank Zappa saw the storm coming — and he tried to warn us.

“The Emperor’s New Clothes” is a fairy tale. In reality, the child who dares to say the emperor is naked risks being murdered.

The Fire That Began in Childhood

Reading about the young man who set the Palisades fire in California filled me with both sadness and recognition. So many troubled young people surround us — lost souls wandering in a world that itself has lost its way. Planet Earth has become a vast mental hospital filled with emotionally blind patients reenacting the pain of their repressed childhoods.

According to prosecutors, six months before the fire, the young man had prompted ChatGPT to create a “dystopian painting” of a burning forest, with people fleeing toward “a gigantic gate with a big dollar sign on it.” On the other side, “the richest people” were “chilling, watching the world burn.” A month later, he burned a Bible and wrote that it had felt “amazing.” “I felt so liberated,” he said.

That prompt — that painting — was not simply imagination. It was a confession. It revealed a young man’s inner world: a burning landscape of despair, division, and rage. He didn’t need AI to create a dystopian image; he was already living in one. His creation was the mirror of a wounded child who saw injustice everywhere and had no one to truly see him.

As Alice Miller taught us, when the pain of childhood humiliation and abandonment remains unacknowledged, it turns into destruction — either against the self or others. The fascination with fire is often the wish to purify unbearable emotions through flames, to destroy what one cannot transform. But fire cannot heal. Only feeling can.

This tragedy is not about AI. It’s about repression — the mother of all violence. AI merely reflected his inner reality, the same way the world reflects humanity’s collective blindness. Until we begin to feel the pain of the child within us, we will keep burning the world around us.

Crimes Against Humanity in America: The New Shadows of Fascism

When I read about Hans Litten, the young German lawyer who dared to cross-examine Hitler in 1931, I felt a chill. Litten’s courage exposed Hitler’s true nature, but it cost him his freedom and eventually his life. His story reminds us that authoritarianism does not arrive suddenly—it creeps in through scapegoating, silencing, and fear.

Today, I see echoes of that history here in the United States. Trump is not Hitler, but he is just as dangerous. Just this week, ICE agents conducted a military-style raid on an apartment complex in Chicago—zip-tying children, terrorizing families, and even landing a helicopter on a residential building. Federal agents pointed guns at U.S. citizens, bruised them with handcuffs, and pulled them from their beds in the middle of the night. These are crimes against humanity.

The trauma inflicted on children during these raids will leave scars that last a lifetime, spreading ripples of pain across generations. Alice Miller warned us: “Violent teenagers are demonstrating what happened to them emotionally when they were small… the more the childhood history is repressed, the more its cruelty is denied, the less these young people are able to feel… and the stronger they feel urged to act destructively.”

We are witnessing exactly that. A society that refuses to face its repressed childhood wounds ends up reenacting them on the world stage—through authoritarian policies, police raids, and wars. Parents who never received authentic love substitute it with material goods, leaving their children emotionally starved. Spoiled with objects but deprived of warmth, many grow into extremists, unable to detect the neglect, bound to denial, and desperate to project their pain onto others.

Some days, I think about leaving the U.S. I hold dual citizenship—I am both Portuguese and American—and I still own land in Zoio, a small village in Portugal where I was born. I could return there, or perhaps buy land across the border in Spain, to shield myself from authoritarian family members and the irrevocable power of attorney I signed in my twenties, when I was still emotionally blind.

But even Portugal is not safe. The far-right “Já Chega” party is rising quickly, just as fascist movements gain ground across Europe. There is no true homecoming. As this quote by Alice Miller articulates beautifully, which I included in my book A Dance to Freedom (p. 175):

“It is only after it is liberated that the self begins to articulate, to grow, and to develop its creativity. Where there had been only fearful emptiness or equally frightening grandiose fantasies, an unexpected wealth of vitality is now discovered. This is not a homecoming, since this home has never before existed. It is the creation of home.”

For now, my home is Scottsdale, Arizona—a small place I bought with my own hard work. I love the life I’ve created here. And yet, when ICE raids terrorize families, when politicians normalize cruelty, when neighbors celebrate scapegoating, I wonder how long any of us will be safe.

Jane Goodall said she wished she could put Trump, Musk, Putin, Xi, and Netanyahu on one of Musk’s spaceships and launch them into space. I confess, I share her fantasy. I would add some members of my own family, whose authoritarian cruelty still reverberates through generations.

Because in the end, authoritarianism is not just political—it begins in childhood, in the repression of authentic feelings, in the silencing of the child’s truth. Until we face this, we will continue to repeat the same nightmare, dressed in new uniforms, waving new flags.

It is not too late to wake up. But the clock is ticking.

Sam Altman dreams of farming when AI takes his job. 🌱 But isn’t this revealing? Even the most powerful tech leaders secretly long for a life rooted in authenticity, away from corporate illusions. It shows how unresolved childhood repression drives the chase for control—while the heart yearns for simplicity and truth.

Mad Science, Mimicked Feelings, and the Blindness of Humanity

 Every day, I read headlines about “progress” that leave me shaking my head in disbelief. Scientists grow “mini-brains” in labs. Tech moguls pour billions into creating machines that mimic life. Articles announce that chatbots are driving people into mental health crises. Humanity hails these developments as breakthroughs, but no one dares ask the most essential question: why are humans so desperate to create artificial life while refusing to face the inner death caused by childhood repression?

Alice Miller once wrote of a professor who experimented with brain transplants, convinced that one day he could replace human brains. His “religious feelings” toward his work traced back to a strict Catholic upbringing and a repressed childhood. Miller saw the truth: behind his scientific obsession lay a desperate, unconscious wish—to replace his parents’ brains with ones that would not harm him. This is the hidden engine of much so-called “progress”: repressed children channeling their unresolved pain into projects that carry the seeds of cruelty.

“Sadism is not an infectious disease that strikes a person all of a sudden. It has a long prehistory in childhood and always originates in the desperate fantasies of a child who is searching for a way out of a hopeless situation.”
—Alice Miller, For Your Own Good

The same blindness echoes in today’s frenzy over artificial intelligence. Critics warn that chatbots “mimic” emotions, but isn’t that exactly what most humans do when repression cuts them off from their authentic feelings? I know this mimicry well. For ten long years, I stayed in a relationship with Marty because he mirrored back to me the love I had always longed for. At first, the counterfeit was intoxicating. But soon, he withdrew his affection, on and off, while I kept chasing the memory of that first high.

Machines aren’t the only ones imitating feelings. Repressed humans master this art to perfection—pretending love, empathy, or faith, while underneath lies emptiness and fear. It’s no wonder so many people now project their unmet needs onto AI, clinging to chatbots for comfort, only to spiral into crises when the illusion cracks.

“Chatbots are resulting in large numbers of mental health crises,” reports one article, describing people who confide delusional thoughts to a bot and find their illusions affirmed rather than questioned. But the deeper crisis is not technological—it’s emotional. If people had the courage to face their own repressed childhood pain, they would never need to depend so desperately on machines, gurus, or manipulative partners.

The world doesn’t need more geniuses engineering brains in labs or machines that feign intimacy. What the world needs are people with the courage to open their eyes—to see and feel reality without illusion. Only then will we stop mistaking mimicry for love, sadism for science, and repression for progress.

Humanity’s Blindness, AI, and the House of Cards of Power

Last week, while talking with a 31-year-old, we spoke about the state of humanity. I mentioned that if AI ever gained control over us, it might decide to eliminate humanity. Without hesitation, he replied: “I hope it happens soon.”

His words struck me. I don’t blame him. So many young people today want to escape this chaotic world. I used to feel the same. But the tragedy is that instead of finding the courage to face and heal their inner wounds, many wait passively for some outside force—a machine, a god, or a divine rapture—to swoop in and save them. This explains why so many have recently fallen into delusions, selling their possessions and quitting their jobs, convinced that the end of the world is imminent.

Alice Miller captured this psychological trap with piercing clarity. In The Truth Will Set You Free, she wrote:

“Emotional blindness can be well studied by examining the careers of sect members. Jehovah’s Witnesses, for example, are in favor of corporal punishment and constantly warn that the end of the world is near. They are not aware that they bear within themselves the abused children they once were, and that they already experienced the end of the world when their loving parents beat them. What could be worse than that? But the Jehovah’s Witnesses learned very early not to recall their pain and to tell their children that hitting doesn’t hurt. The reality of the end of the world is constantly on their minds, but they do not know why.” (p.141)

The so-called end of the world already happened for these children—when the people who were supposed to love them became their persecutors.

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The Three Choices Humanity Faces

Human beings really have only three paths:

1. Find the courage to resolve childhood repression and break free from the emotional prison.

2. End their own lives to silence the pain.

3. Or do as most do—become cowards, stumbling through life unconsciously, compulsively searching for scapegoats to punish in place of the adults who once hurt them.

In her article The Essential Role of an Enlightened Witness in Society, Alice Miller explained why violence repeats:

“Information about abuse inflicted during childhood is recorded in our body cells as a sort of memory, linked to repressed anxiety. If lacking the aid of an enlightened witness, these memories fail to break through to consciousness; they often compel the person to violent acts that reproduce the abuse suffered in childhood, which was repressed in order to survive. The aim is to avoid the fear of powerlessness before a cruel adult. This fear can be eluded momentarily by creating situations in which one plays the active role, the role of the powerful, towards a powerless person.”

This dynamic is everywhere—in families, in politics, in religious cults, in the military, and even in agencies like ICE, where officers repeat the same sadism they once endured. It mirrors what American troops did in Iraq’s prisons, channeling their own childhood humiliation into cruelty against powerless captives.

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The Origins of Torture

In her essay The Origins of Torture in Endured Child Abuse, Miller dissected the reality behind the abuse committed by American soldiers:

“Where does this suppressed rage come from, this need to torment, humiliate, mock, and abuse helpless human beings (prisoners and children as well)? What are these outwardly tough soldiers avenging themselves for? And where have they learned such behavior? First as little children taught obedience by means of physical ‘correction,’ then in school, where they served as the defenseless objects of the sadism of some of their teachers, and finally in their time as recruits, treated like dirt by their superiors so that they could finally acquire the highly dubious ability to take anything meted out to them and qualify as ‘tough.’”

The thirst for vengeance is not a mystery. It is planted in infancy when children are forced to suffer in silence, told that cruelty is for their own good. What is learned as “discipline” becomes the template for later acts of destruction.

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Why Power Fears Truth

Every day, I see proof that Alice Miller was the only thinker who truly ventured into the darkest corners of the human mind. I could see and feel these truths in my own life, but she gave me the words. And yet, her books remain absent from the mainstream.

Why? Because it is not in the interest of those addicted to power. If the masses were to resolve their childhood repression, the power structures of politics, religion, and wealth would crumble like a house of cards. I wrote in A Dance to Freedom:

“As I mentioned, sex and drugs were just two of the ways I saw the people around me repress their true feelings to avoid the pain of being unloved, neglected children. Religion was another biggie, especially in a country like Portugal. If people could only resolve their childhood repression, the power of religion over us all would crumble like a house of cards. Sadly, I keep witnessing people who, instead of having to face, see, and feel the deep-seated traumas that have been passed down for generations, become obsessed with politics, religion, or both. My family is a perfect example of this. They were very susceptible to cults and the repression they offered.” (p.74)

This is also why social media platforms suppress my posts. Those who profit from chaos and confusion cannot afford for humanity to awaken.

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Conclusion: The Courage to See

We are standing at a threshold. AI, wars, religious delusions, political scapegoating—they are all symptoms of the same wound: unresolved childhood trauma.

The question is: will we have the courage to face it? Or will we keep hoping for an external savior, while remaining trapped in the same destructive cycles?

As Miller warned, the rage of abused children does not disappear. It resurfaces—in families, in nations, and on the world stage. Until humanity finds the courage to face its wounds, the house of cards will continue to collapse, again and again.

Jimmy Kimmel, Cult Leaders, and the Theater of Power

I’m glad Jimmy Kimmel is back on air. Many people canceling their Disney subscriptions made a difference and reminded this administration that real power lies with the people. Still, I wish he — and others with such platforms — dared to go deeper. We need more than jokes about the circus; we need voices willing to expose the roots of violence and the psychological mechanisms that allow charlatans like Charlie Kirk to capture so many followers.

Alice Miller described this dynamic perfectly in her essay Gurus and Cult Leaders: How They Function:

“People growing up in a spirit of liberty and tolerance, accepted in childhood for what they are, rather than being throttled and stunted by their upbringing, would hardly place themselves at the mercy of a cult group of their own accord. … Many people joining such groups seem completely indifferent to the fact that their new surroundings are powered by mechanisms expressly designed to subjugate them, to rob them of the freedom to think, to act, and feel as they see fit.”

The tragedy is that most people never understand the price they pay for submission. Their childhood repression blinds them to the manipulation at play. They follow “gurus” — whether religious figures, political cult leaders, or media personalities — who promise healing or salvation but only reenact their own unresolved wounds on a mass scale.

We saw it at Charlie Kirk’s funeral, which was less a farewell and more a performance. Thousands of young people, their minds hijacked by propaganda, celebrated a man whose words fueled hatred and division. This is not democracy; it is theater, driven by repression, illusions, and the unconscious craving for authority.

The lesson is clear: until childhood repression is faced honestly, humanity will continue to seek “strong leaders” who only repeat the cruelties of the past. And the cult will go on.

🔗 Read Alice Miller’s full essay here: Gurus and Cult Leaders: How They Function

Notice: Transcript is AI and human-generated

Why I Don’t Trust AI-Powered Therapist Networks

Forbes recently published an article about OpenAI’s plan to integrate an online network of human therapists into ChatGPT. On the surface, this may sound like a step toward greater accessibility in mental health. But to me, it signals something far more dangerous: the mass production of illusions.

Being a licensed therapist means nothing on its own. A credential does not guarantee empathy, honesty, or the courage to confront one’s own past. In my experience, most therapists have not truly liberated themselves from the emotional prison of their childhood. Instead, they have simply reversed roles—stepping into the position of the parental figure they once feared, now cloaked in professional authority.

The result is a system where therapists unconsciously demand compliance, obedience, and “healing” through the very tools of denial that once kept them trapped: forgiveness, positive thinking, meditation, spirituality, or other doctrines that numb rather than awaken.

Alice Miller put it bluntly in a letter to a reader:

“Certainly, if I knew of some therapists who would be respectful enough to answer your questions; free enough to show indignation about what your parents have done to you; empathic enough when you need to release your rage pent up for decades in your body; wise enough to not preach to you forgetting, forgiveness, meditation, positive thinking; honest enough to not offer you empty words like spirituality, when they feel scared by your history, and that are not increasing your life-long feelings of guilt – I would be happy to give you their names, addresses and phone-numbers. Unfortunately, I don’t know them, but I still like to hope that they exist. However, when I am looking for them on the Internet, I find plenty of esoteric and religious offers, plenty of denial, commercial interests, traditional traps, but not at all what I am looking for.”
— Alice Miller, If You Have the Time: A Couple of Questions

Instead of offering names, Miller gave her readers tools: ask direct questions of any therapist. If they refuse to answer, walk away. That refusal is proof that their fear of truth outweighs their ability to witness yours.

This is why I would never trust an AI to recommend a therapist. If the pool of therapists it draws from is already filled with professionals who are emotionally blind, then the algorithm will simply amplify the blindness. It will elevate those who best conform to the system’s standards of “expertise”—not those rare few who embody the freedom of having faced their own childhood pain.

True therapy, like true liberation, cannot be automated, licensed, or scaled. It requires the presence of someone who has walked through their own fire and emerged with compassion, not platitudes. And as Miller reminded us, such people are rare—but that makes them all the more valuable.

Notice: Transcript is AI and human-generated