The same unhealed pain that destroys families also corrupts nations. Whether it’s a manipulative coworker, a corrupt politician, or a lost child turning violence inward — the root is always the same: repressed suffering seeking expression through destruction. Only conscious awareness can stop the repetition.
When people refuse to face their own pain, they turn others into mirrors for it — and then smash the mirror for showing them what they cannot bear to see.
Yesterday, I thought again of the last reenactment I experienced in my workplace — with A, the coworker whose life was a storm of manipulation and lies. I have no doubt she helped send her daughter’s father to prison. She likely provoked and filmed him until she got the “proof” she needed to play the victim. She tried the same tactics with me, but I stayed calm. When she would tell a blatant lie, I simply said, “Really? That’s interesting.” I could see right through her game. She wasn’t after truth — she was after control.
When she first started working here, she told everyone the tragic stories of her family to win sympathy. But those stories weren’t shared for healing; they were tools of manipulation. I tried to reach the human behind the mask — to tell her that it was still in her hands to break the cycle and help her nine-year-old daughter heal before it was too late. Once children become teenagers, the walls of repression are sealed. The window to influence healing closes.
But instead of wanting to heal, she wanted revenge — against anyone who saw her clearly. And like so many reenactors, she self-destructed: she was later caught stealing our Christmas bonuses.
Yesterday, I read ASAWIN SUEBSAENG's article on Zeteo News, “Trump to the Poor: Let Them Eat Ballroom.” The headline says it all. Millions of Americans are losing food aid, yet Trump is building a multimillion-dollar ballroom for his ego.
Read the article.
This, too, is a reenactment — the same psychology, only on a national scale.
The emotionally blind elect leaders who mirror their own inner tyrant, believing those tyrants will only hurt others. But repression always turns inward. Those who vote for cruelty eventually become its victims.
Alice Miller explained this dynamic decades ago:
“Unwanted children are usually mistreated. But there also exist many people who were ‘wanted’ only to play the role of victims their parents needed to take revenge on. … Their children learn this perverted behavior early, and will later do the same; and so this perverse behavior continues for millennia. Unless people are willing to SEE the perversion of their parents and consciously refuse to imitate it.”
— Alice Miller, Free from Lies
And in another passage:
“Women are by no means less aggressive than men... They avenge themselves for cruelty suffered in childhood by tormenting their own children — and society idealizes mothers, calling this cruelty ‘good parenting.’”
A few days ago, I read about another tragedy — this time in Portugal. A 14-year-old boy murdered his mother, a local councilwoman, because she was “very demanding” and “annoying.” He used his father’s gun, memorized the safe code, and even tried to stage a break-in.
Read more about the case.
It’s heartbreaking, but not incomprehensible.
The violence we see in the world — whether in homes, governments, or workplaces — is the echo of unhealed childhood pain. The sadism learned in silence becomes the cruelty acted out in public.
Until we are ready to face the truth of our own childhoods, humanity will keep reenacting its pain — at the office, in the Oval Office, and in every home that refuses to look inward.
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