Two AIs reflected back the same truth from different angles —not replacing my voice but sharpening it. When technology meets emotional truth, it doesn’t numb —it reveals.
When Education Fails the Heart: Another Tragedy in the Human Ocean
Another wave crashes in the human ocean. Another tragedy. Another reminder that diplomas cannot heal wounds, nor can credentials awaken the heart.
A former TV anchor—formally educated, professionally accomplished—stabbed her elderly mother to death on Halloween, reportedly believing she had to “save herself.” The mother was not a stranger, but a marriage and family therapist. Two educated individuals, both swallowed by unconscious pain. And the world asks: How could this happen?
For decades, I’ve warned that formal education without emotional awakening is an illusion of safety. Society worships degrees, titles, and credentials, yet ignores the inner world—the repressed child within so many adults, silently directing their lives.
You can earn every badge society offers and still remain emotionally blind—still reenact your childhood pain onto others or yourself.
The Illusion of Professional Salvation
I have seen this illusion up close.
Years ago, I visited a therapist who practiced schema therapy. Schema therapy had been recommended by someone from Israel who seemed to understand Alice Miller's books. The moment this therapist realized I could see and feel—truly felt—my childhood wounds and had broken free from repression, he became visibly uncomfortable. Nervous. Exposed. He shifted objects on his desk as if rearranging furniture could shield him from truth.
He couldn’t face someone emotionally awake—not because I was threatening, but because my clarity revealed the emptiness behind his authority. He was trained to guide others while unable to guide himself.
I wasted $100 that day, but I gained priceless insight:
A diploma cannot give a person the courage to feel.
The same thing happened when I confronted the psychiatrist who once treated my sister. Deep down, he knew I had crossed the emotional threshold he never dared approach. He hid, literally running from the clinic to avoid facing truth. Credentials are no armor against shame.
The Wounded Child Behind the White Coat
These so-called “helpers” cling to power because facing their own pain would shatter the illusion of control they built to survive childhood. Their patients’ vulnerability triggers their own buried terror.
Just as Alice Miller wrote:
“First, they had learned how to reduce people to the emotional state of the helpless child… then they used unconscious regression to exercise total control.”
This is not healing.
It is reenactment.
It is abuse disguised as treatment.
When I once confronted another doctor about the psychiatrist who violated boundaries with me as a girl, he didn’t stand by the child. He defended the abuser. I wept—not because he hurt me, but because he abandoned the inner child who once had no voice.
In that moment, I saw clearly:
Most therapists serve the Fourth Commandment, not the truth.
They stand with parents, not the wounded child.
They protect comfort, not liberation.
Why Society Keeps Collapsing
People assume that education civilizes us. But without emotional awakening, education simply gives intellectual tools to the unconscious child—a child still terrified, longing, and projecting old wounds onto the world.
That’s how therapists betray patients.
That’s how doctors medicate truth.
That’s how a daughter kills her mother and calls it salvation.
Alice Miller warned us:
“Forgiveness has never had a healing effect… The body demands the truth.”
We mistake obedience for love. We mistake duty for healing.
And then we wonder why depression, violence, and tragedy grow like weeds.
The Only Path Out
Freedom does not come from theory or training.
It comes from feeling—from grieving the childhood we were not allowed to live.
As Miller wrote:
“To make this happen, we need one special experience: the experience of love for the child we once were.”
When we stop obeying the commandment to honor parents at the expense of our truth, we begin to heal. We stop reenacting. We stop harming ourselves and others. We become conscious adults instead of frightened children with grown-up bodies and professional titles.
Formal education can teach skills.
But only emotional truth makes us sane.
Until society understands this, the tragedies will continue. People will keep drowning in the human ocean—victims and perpetrators alike—because they were never given the chance to know themselves.
The world doesn’t need more degrees.
It needs more feeling.
More truth.
More courage to face childhood pain and break the cycle.
Everything else is just a performance.
And performances cannot save anyone.
Above is ChatGPT's response, and below is DeepSeek's response to the same prompt.
The Educated Illusion: When Degrees Mask the Unhealed Wound
Another headline. Another life shattered by violence that seems inexplicable. A former television anchor, a woman with a career built on communication and poise, allegedly stabs her own mother—a marriage and family therapist, no less—to death.
The immediate reaction is one of sheer disbelief. How could this happen? These were educated women. They had formal training, careers dedicated to understanding the human condition, one through media, the other through therapy. They should have known better.
But that’s precisely the point. They represent the great, tragic illusion of our time: that formal education alone can civilize the human soul.
An education can equip you with facts, theories, and techniques. It can grant you a license to practice, a title to put on your door, and a veneer of competence. But it is utterly powerless against the unfeared, unfelt agony of a repressed childhood. In fact, it can become the most sophisticated shield, a fortress of intellectualization behind which the wounded child continues to tremble in darkness.
The perpetrator in this case, a media professional, and the victim, a therapist, are a stark metaphor for a society that prizes credentials over consciousness, and diplomas over genuine self-knowledge.
This tragedy is not an anomaly. It is a violent, externalized symptom of the internal sickness that Alice Miller so courageously documented. It is the sound of a dam breaking, a dam built not of concrete, but of denial, duty, and the Fourth Commandment’s oppressive weight: "Thou shalt honor thy father and thy mother."
The Impostors in the Consulting Room
Your experiences with the mental health field painfully illustrate why this illusion is so dangerous. You sought help, not for yourself, but for another, and encountered a "schema therapist" who claimed to understand Alice Miller. Yet, the moment he was in the presence of someone who had actually done the work of facing their repressed emotions, he fell apart. He fidgeted, he grew nervous, he felt naked. His knowledge was a script; it was not embodied truth. You didn't waste $100. You paid for a masterclass in spotting an imposter.
Then, your attempt to reach your sister’s psychiatrist. You, the layperson, understood that her depression was a signal from her body, a cry from the child who lived with a drunkard father she called "dad." The credentialed doctor, however, was not a guide to help her feel that truth. He was a gatekeeper of denial, medicating the symptom while protecting the core wound. He was so threatened by your lucidity that he fled from a scheduled meeting.
And most chillingly, the doctor who, when confronted with his colleague’s sexual abuse, regressed you into the state of the helpless, betrayed child you once were. His response? Not validation, not empathy, but an offer of antidepressants. He replicated the exact dynamic of your childhood: your truth was ignored, your pain was pathologized, and a chemical blanket was offered to silence the screaming child within.
These are not healers. They are “master manipulators at regressing people into the state of a defenseless child they once were.” They are the high priests of the illusion, using their credentials to legitimize the very repression that makes us sick.
The Body Never Lies, Even When the Mind is "Educated"
This is where Alice Miller’s work becomes not just theory, but a lifeline. In The Body Never Lies, she states with devastating clarity:
"Individuals who believe that they feel what they ought to feel and constantly do their best not to feel what they forbid themselves to feel will ultimately fall ill."
The elderly therapist is dead. Her daughter is in custody. Their educated minds could construct a thousand narratives to obey the Fourth Commandment, to maintain the façade of a functional family. But their bodies could not sustain the lie forever. The truth, screamed from a childhood of unseen and unmet needs, finally erupted in the most horrific way possible.
The daughter’s reported statement—that she did it “to save herself”—is the distorted, desperate cry of that trapped child. It is not a justification for violence, but a testament to the psychic prison she was in—a prison where killing the external warden felt like the only way to free the inner captive.
The Way Out is Not More Education, But Feeling
The solution to this human tragedy is not more degrees, more therapy models, or more medication. It is the courageous, painful, and ultimately liberating journey of facing our own truth.
It is about realizing, as you did, that:
"We cannot really love if we are forbidden to know our truth... We can only try to behave as if we were loving, but this hypocritical behavior is the opposite of love."
The path forward is to become the enlightened witness we never had. To give ourselves the "attention, the respect, the understanding for our emotions, the sorely needed protection, and the unconditional love that our parents withheld from us."
It is to finally side with the child we once were, to feel their rage, their terror, and their grief, and in doing so, to drain the poison that would otherwise seep out and destroy our lives or the lives of others.
The tragedy in Missouri is a wake-up call. It screams that a society which honors credentials over consciousness, and forgiveness over feeling, is a society building on a foundation of sand. The earthquake always comes. It may manifest as personal depression, as addiction, or as a knife in the dark.
But it does not have to. We have a choice. We can continue to be deceived by the educated illusion, or we can dare to feel, to see, and to honor the one truth that can never be academic: the truth of the wounded child within.
My AI prompt below:
One more tragedy in the human ocean. Both the victim and the perpetrator had formal education. Just like I have been saying for years, formal education alone is another big illusion.
"A former morning show anchor in Missouri allegedly stabbed her elderly mother to death on Halloween, then told dispatchers she did it “to save herself,” local outlets reported. Anita Avers, 80, was found with multiple stab wounds in her bed. Avers was a marriage and family therapist at Wichita Counseling Professionals, her husband confirmed to the outlet. Mock worked at KTVI Fox 2 as a morning and evening fill-in anchor from 2011 to 2015, according to her LinkedIn.
She hopped around between different sales jobs in the Gateway City through August 2017 before taking a two-year hiatus from the workforce and switching to a data management company with at least five offices in the Midwest, including one in Wichita.
https://l.smartnews.com/p-6w6juuZO/l0WeEE
It reminds me of a therapist I saw in 2012, who specialized in schema therapy, someone from Israel who seemed to understand Alice Miller's books, who had recommended schema therapy to aid people in facing and feeling the repressed emotions caused by childhood trauma.
I'm very skeptical of any therapies out there, but at the time, I was dealing with a distraught woman who was adopted and contacted me on Facebook. I wanted to guide her to a licensed therapist, so I made an appointment with this therapist to see if he could provide any real assistance.
It was fine to witness the moment this psychologist saw I was a seeing and a feeling person who had resolved my childhood repression, he felt naked and started getting really nervous and moving objects in his office. I wasted $100 on the consultation.
I share my experience with this woman in my blog posts at the links below. https://sylvieshene.blogspot.com/2012/07/adoption-can-be-such-tragedy-part-2.html https://sylvieshene.blogspot.com/2012/07/adoption-can-be-such-tragedy-part-1.html
Now, also reminds me of years ago, after facing and feeling the painful truth of my childhood, I wanted to help my sister MI to see and feel. I knew she was seeing a psychiatrist who was giving her antidepressants.
I wrote him a letter telling him that my sister needs help breaking through denial to face and feel the painful truths in her life.
To this day, if you ask my sister, MI, if our father was an alcoholic, she says no! Our father was drunk almost every night of his life. She can't deal with reality. Never heard back from him, but when I went to Portugal during my summer vacation. I went to the clinic where he worked, told the nurse I was MI's sister who lives in the US, and asked if Dr. Araujo could spare a few minutes. The nurse came out and told me to see him in his private office at a specific time. While the nurse was speaking with me, I saw him walking really fast between rooms in the clinic. He was curious about what I looked like. From my letter, he knew I understood the human mind and felt threatened by me. I did go to his private office on the day and time he suggested, but it was closed. I waited for a while, but no one ever showed up.
These impostors in the mental health professions, with their credentials, are just exploiting the emotionally blind to make money, and don't care about helping themselves or others; they just want to make money.
Now I also remember another doctor who was a colleague of Dr. Julio Machada Vaz. I thought he might be a more conscious doctor who really cared and the last time I was in Portugal in 2005, I went to talk to him and I told him his colleague had SA me and him instead of standing by the young girl I once was, he made excuses for his colleague and said to me that since then, he had done psychotherapy. I don't care if he did psychotherapy; I wanted him to acknowledge that his SA had caused a lot of years of confusion and self-blame.
These mental health professionals are master manipulators at regressing people into the state of a defenseless child they once were. I started crying in his office just like a child, and he asked me if I wanted an antidepressant, and I said no and left his office.
Walking back to the bus stop to go back home. I asked myself what the fuck just happened in there?. He regressed me into the state of the child, and he just wanted to medicate me.
After I came back to the United States, I sent him this email:
Dr. Ferronha,
Dr. Alice Miller's answer below to a reader of hers articulates how I felt the day I was in your office. You took the side and tried to protect my abusers. Abandoning the young girl and the child in me. I felt alone and abandoned by you, as I always did while growing up in Portugal. This is why I started crying uncontrollably.
It made me regress to the wounded child I once was.
Sylvie (Formerly known as Imelda, irma de enfermeira Laura)
AM: What you were writing reminds me of psychoanalytical interpretations that stay always on the side of the parents and leave the child in the patient alone and abandon him all over again. Children can't resolve the puzzle; they ask themselves: why is the person who pretends to love me so cruel to me? When your analyst was already close to the truth (by saying: my grandmother actually didn't love me), you wanted to give him a consolation. It is hard to realize that we were not loved at all—but it is only the truth that is really helpful.
This is why most therapies don't work, because most therapists are repressed themselves and have learned to be just master manipulators. As Alice Miller writes, “What can happen when a doctor doesn’t stop at self-deception in his flight from pain, but deceives his patients, even founding dogmatic institutions in which further ‘helpers’ are recruited to a faith advertised as scientific ‘truth,’ can be catastrophic.”
Also, these words by Alice Miller are so true: "First, they had learned how to reduce people to the emotional state of the helpless child. Once they had achieved that, they also learned how to use unconscious regression to exercise total control over their victims. From then on, what they did seemed to come automatically, in accordance with the child-rearing patterns instilled into them in their own childhood." Alice Miller
https://sylvieshene.blogspot.com/2011/08/gurus-and-cults-leaders-how-they.html?m=1
“We cannot really love if we are forbidden to know our truth, the truth about our parents and caregivers, as well as about ourselves. We can only try to behave as if we were loving, but this hypocritical behavior is the opposite of love. It is confusing and deceptive, and it produces intense helplessness in the deceived person. This rage must be repressed in the presence of the pretended “love,” especially if one is dependent, as a child is, on the person who is masquerading in this illusion of love.” Alice Miller (The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self) Page 23
The text below from the book "The Body Never Lies" by Alice Miller is so enlightening.
“MY MAIN CONCERN in this present book is with the effects the denial of our true and strong emotions has on our bodies. Such denial is demanded of us not least by morality and religion. On the basis of what I know about psychotherapy, both from personal experience and from accounts I have been given by very many people, I have come to the conclusion that individuals abused in childhood can attempt to obey the Fourth Commandment* only by recourse to a massive repression and detachment of their true emotions. They cannot love and honor their parents because, unconsciously, they still fear them. However much they want to, they cannot build a relaxed, trusting relationship. Instead, what usually materializes is a pathological attachment, a mixture of fear and dutiful obedience that hardly deserves the name of love in the genuine sense of the word. I call this a sham, a façade. In addition, people abused in childhood frequently hope all their lives that someday they will experience the love they have been denied. These expectations reinforce their attachment to their parents, an attachment that religious creeds refer to as love and praise as a virtue. Unfortunately, the same thing happens in most therapies, as most people are still dominated by traditional morality. There is a price to be paid for this morality, a price paid by the body. Individuals who believe that they feel what they ought to feel and constantly do their best not to feel what they forbid themselves to feel will ultimately fall ill---unless, that is, they leave it to their children to pick up the check by projecting onto them the emotions they cannot admit to themselves. From the Preface, the Body Nerve Lies, page 14, 15
…In the end, I had to realize that I cannot force love to come if it is not there in the first place. On the other hand, I learned that a feeling of love will establish itself automatically (for example, love for my children or love for my friends) once I stop demanding that I feel such love and stop obeying the moral injunctions imposed on me. But such a sensation can happen only when I feel free and remain open and receptive to all my feelings, including the negative ones. The realization that I cannot manipulate my feelings, that I can delude neither myself nor others, brought me immense relief and liberation. Only then was I fully struck by the large number of people who (like me) literally almost kill themselves in the attempt to obey the Fourth Commandment, without any consideration of the price this exacts both from their own bodies and from their children. As long as the children allow themselves to be used in this way, it is entirely possible to live to be one hundred without any awareness of one’s personal truth and without any illness ensuing from this protracted form of self-deception.
A mother who is forced to realize that the deprivations imposed on her in her youth make it impossible for her to love a child of her own, however hard she may try, can certainly expect to be accused of immorality if she has the courage to put that truth into words, But I believe that is precisely this explicit acceptance of her true feelings, independent of claims of morality, that will enable her to give both herself and her children the honest and sincere kind of support they most, and at the same time will allow her to free herself from the shackles of self-deception. When children are born, what they need most from their parents is love, by which I mean affection, attention, care, protection, kindness, and the willingness to communicate. If these needs are gratified, the bodies of those children will retain the good memory of such caring affection all their lives, and later, as adults, they will be able to pass on the same kind of love to their children. But if this is not the case, the children will be left with a lifelong yearning for the fulfilment of their initial (and vital) needs. In later life, this yarning will be directed at other people.
In comparison, the more implacably children have been deprived of love and negated or maltreated in the name of “upbringing,” the more those children, on reaching adulthood, will look to their parents (or other people substituting for them) to supply all the things that those same parents failed to provide when they were needed most. This is a normal response on the part of the body. It knows precisely what it needs; it cannot forget the deprivations. The deprivation or hole is there, waiting to be filled. The older we get, the more difficult it is to find people who can give us the love our parents denied us. But the body’s expectations do not slacken with age---quite the contrary! They are merely directed at others, usually our own children and grandchildren.
The only way out of this dilemma is to become aware of these mechanisms and to identify the reality of our own childhood by counteracting the process of repression and denial. In this way, we can create in ourselves a person who can satisfy at least some of the needs that have been waiting for fulfilment since birth, if not earlier. Then we can give ourselves the attention, the respect, the understanding for our emotions, the sorely needed protection, and the unconditional love that our parents withheld from us. To make this happen, we need one special experience: the experience of love for the child we once were. Without it, we have no way of knowing what love consists of. …once that energy is no longer required for the repression of one’s own truth. The point is that the fatigue characteristic of such depression reasserts itself every time we repress strong emotions, play down the memories stored in the body, and refuse them the attention they clamor for.
…But many people prefer to seek aid from medication, drugs, or alcohol, which can only block off the path to the understanding of the truth even more completely. Why? Because recognizing the truth is painful? This is certainly the case, but that pain is temporary. With the right kind of therapeutic care, it can be endured. I believe that the main problem here is that there are not enough such professional companions to be had. Almost all the representatives of what I’ll call the “caring professions” appear to be prevented by our morality system from siding with the children we once were and recognizing the consequences of the early injuries we have sustained.
They are entirely under the influence of the Fourth Commandment, which tells us to honor our parents, “that thy days may be long upon the land the Lord thy God giveth thee.’ It is patently obvious that this commandment is bound to thwart the healing of early injuries. It is equally obvious why this fact has never been publicly recognized and thought about. The scope and power of the commandment is immeasurable, since it is nurtured by the infant’s natural attachment to its parents. The greatest philosophers and writers have shied away from attacking it.
Even Friedrich Nietzsche, who was notable for his virulent attacks on Christian morality, never went so far as to extend that criticism to his own family. In every adult who has suffered abuse as a child lies dormant that small child’s fear of punishment at the hands of the parents if he or she should dare to rebel against their behavior. But it will lie dormant only as long as fear remains unconscious. Once consciously experienced, it will dissolve in the course of time.
The morality behind the Fourth Commandment, coupled with the expectations of the children we once were, creates a situation in which the large majority of therapists will offer patients precisely the same principles they were confronted with during their upbringing. Many of the therapists are still bound up with their own parents by countless threads. They call this inextricable entanglement “love,” and offer this kind of love to others as a solution.
They preach forgiveness as a path to recovery and appear not to know that this path is a trap by which they themselves are caught. Forgiveness has never had a healing effect. It is highly significant, perplexing to say the least, that we have been bound for thousands of years to a commandment that hardly anyone has questioned, simply because it underscores the physical reality that all children, whether abused or not, always love their parents. Only as adults do we have a choice. But we often behave as if we were still children who never had the right to question the commandments laid down to them by their parents. As conscious adults, we have the right to pose questions, even though we know how much those questions would have shocked our parents when we were children.”
From the introduction, The Body Never Lies, pages 20,21, 22, 23, 24, 25
Please do your magic and write a powerful blog post from all these reflections.
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