The Narcoterrorism Illusion: Why the U.S. Needs Venezuela to Be the Enemy

 The War on Venezuela: When a Nation’s Repressed Past Becomes Its Foreign Policy

Another U.S. vessel seized off the coast of Venezuela.
Another dramatic headline about “narcoterrorism.”
Another justification to unleash military force on a country already strangled by sanctions.

But let’s stop pretending this has anything to do with drugs.

Venezuela is not a major source of narcotics entering the United States. Even federal data confirms this.
What Venezuela does have is something far more irresistible to a nation built on resource extraction and projection: oil, gold, bauxite, coltan, and rare-earth minerals — the minerals that will power the next century.

And just like Iraq, Iran, Libya, Chile, Guatemala, the Congo, and Indonesia, the script is the same:

Create a noble-sounding pretext.
Manufacture an enemy.
Justify intervention.
And take what you want.

**Today, the slogan is “narcoterrorism.” Yesterday it was “weapons of mass destruction.”

Different excuse, same sickness.**

While U.S. forces are blowing up fishing boats off Venezuela — with no evidence of drugs shown to the public — the Trump administration quietly pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández, the former Honduran president who trafficked over 400 tons of cocaine into the United States.

So let’s tell the truth:

The United States does not fight drug traffickers.
It fights competitors.

The real traffickers, the ones with political usefulness and wealthy benefactors, are welcomed back with presidential pardons delivered under pressure from tech billionaires.

Meanwhile, Venezuela — rich in oil, minerals, and strategic geography — is treated as a criminal state, its economic lifeline seized, its ships stolen, its sovereignty violated, and its people squeezed to desperation.

Minerals are the currency of the future.
And Venezuela happens to sit on $1.36 trillion worth of them.

That is the real “threat.”

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The Psychological Roots: Repression on a National Scale

Alice Miller warned us decades ago:

“It seems easier to take medication, smoke, drink alcohol, preach, educate, treat others, and prepare wars than expose ourselves to our own painful truth.”
—Alice Miller, Banished Knowledge

This line applies not only to individuals but to entire nations.

America cannot face its own wounds: the loneliness, the emotional deprivation, the childhood humiliation, the abandonment, the normalized cruelty.
So it reenacts its internal trauma externally — through violence, dominance, and projection.

**A country full of addiction will always need an external enemy.

A country unable to feel will always create reasons to attack.**

As Miller wrote:

“Addiction is a sign, a signal, a symptom of distress…
The drug business would not flourish if there were not so many people who, in refusing to acknowledge their wounds, are in a permanent state of self-betrayal.”

America is drowning in addiction — opioids, alcohol, work, screens, shopping, rage, conspiracy theories.
And like any addict, it refuses to ask the only question that matters:

Why do so many Americans need to numb themselves?

Instead of facing its truth, the United States does what all emotionally blocked people do:

• Attacks symptoms instead of causes.

• Punishes others for the pain it cannot bear to feel.

• Creates enemies where there are none.

• Turns its trauma into foreign policy.

And so, a nation with its own wounds rotting beneath the surface projects its internal violence outward — toward Venezuela, toward immigrants, toward the poor, toward anyone who reflects back the vulnerability it cannot tolerate.

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The Tragedy Beneath the Headlines

This is the real story behind the seizures, the carrier groups in the Caribbean, and the dramatic speeches about “freedom” and “crime.”

This is not a war on drugs.
It is not a war on crime.
It is not a war on corruption.

This is a war waged by a wounded nation desperate to avoid looking inward.

A war driven by:

• Unresolved childhood trauma

• Addiction disguised as power

• Repression disguised as strength

• Fear disguised as patriotism

And the people who suffer most are always the same:

• the poor

• the emotionally defenseless

• indigenous communities

• families torn apart by sanctions

• and those living in countries whose resources make them targets

As Venezuela’s foreign minister said, these U.S. actions amount to piracy — but they are more than that.

They are reenactments of a childhood wound on a geopolitical scale.

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The Only Way Out

Alice Miller again:

“An addiction is an attempt by a person in despair, who is not allowed to be in despair, to get rid of his or her memory.”

The United States is addicted to intervention because it cannot bear to confront its own emotional history.
It keeps trying to exile the pain outward — onto Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Gaza, Venezuela, anyone who can carry the projection.

But reality will always return.

A nation, like a person, cannot heal until it stops running from the truth.

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This essay was written in collaboration with artificial intelligence (ChatGPT) as a tool for reflection, synthesis, and articulation. The responsibility for the ideas and interpretations expressed here remains my own.

Blaming the Pills, Protecting the Myth

Once again, the familiar script is being rolled out.

After the killing of Rob Reiner and Michele Singer Reiner by their son Nick, the public is being offered a tidy explanation: mental illness, a medication change, an unfortunate side effect. Headlines reassure us that the real culprit was chemistry—something that went wrong inside Nick’s brain in the final weeks.

Anything will do.

Anything except looking at his upbringing.

The Convenience of a Diagnosis

Labeling Nick Reiner as schizophrenic and attributing the tragedy to a medication switch serves a very specific function: it removes responsibility from the emotional environment in which he was formed.

Mental illness becomes a modern equivalent of “bad luck.” Medication becomes the scapegoat. Psychiatry becomes the final authority.

And parents—especially powerful, admired parents—remain untouched.

This is not new. Alice Miller described this maneuver decades ago.

When violence erupts, society rushes to explanations that protect the sanctity of the family. Diagnoses are safer than childhood truths. Pills are safer than questions about neglect, emotional abandonment, fear, and denial.

What Medication Cannot Explain

Medication can amplify, dampen, or destabilize symptoms. It cannot create, from nothing, a lifelong inner structure of terror, rage, dependency, and dissociation.

To claim that a few weeks of altered medication caused this outcome is to ignore everything that came before:

• a childhood marked by hyperactivity and constant management

• a family rule of “give him what he wants”

• chronic appeasement replacing real emotional contact

• fear of upsetting the child instead of helping him feel

• adulthood defined by dependency, repeated rehabs, and failure to achieve autonomy

Medication did not build that internal world. It only interacted with it.

Spoiling as Emotional Neglect

Alice Miller was explicit about this:

When lack of authentic communication, warmth, and emotional presence is covered by spoiling, the child cannot recognize neglect. The pain is denied, buried, and stored in the body.

The child survives by repression.

The adult pays the price.

Nick Reiner’s upbringing, as now described by insiders—constant vigilance, appeasement, avoidance of confrontation—fits this pattern precisely. His distress was managed, not understood. His rage was contained, not integrated.

And what is denied does not disappear.

Why “Mental Illness” Is the Perfect Alibi

Mental illness explanations perform several cultural services:

• They medicalize moral discomfort

• They individualize what is relational

• They turn history into pathology

• They silence questions about parents

A diagnosis says: Something is wrong with him.

A childhood inquiry says: Something happened to him.

Only one of those threatens society’s most sacred illusions.

The Body Remembers What the Mind Was Forced to Forget

As Miller wrote, violent acting-out is not random. It is reenactment.

People who were emotionally threatened early in life often threaten others later in the same way—not consciously, but compulsively. This knowledge is not stored in memory alone; it is stored in the nervous system.

Medication may alter perception, but it does not erase that stored knowledge.

If anything, when repression weakens—through stress, medication changes, or emotional destabilization—the buried material can surge to the surface with catastrophic force.

The tragedy, then, is not that Nick Reiner was treated.

The tragedy is that he was treated without truth.

The Question Nobody Wants to Ask

Why was an adult man in his thirties still so dependent, so emotionally unintegrated, so unable to live autonomously?

Why was fear—on both sides—still structuring the relationship between parents and son?

Why was no one willing, decades earlier, to say: Something is terribly wrong here?

Because asking those questions would implicate not just one family, but a culture.

Pills Are Faster Than Truth

Facing childhood reality takes time, courage, and the willingness to shatter comforting myths. Prescribing medication is faster. Explaining violence as a chemical imbalance is faster. Declaring the case tragic-but-inexplicable is faster.

But fast explanations do not prevent repetition.

They guarantee it.

A Final Word

Nick Reiner did not need better medication alone.

He needed what Alice Miller described again and again:

• authentic emotional contact

• help tolerating painful feelings

• permission to feel anger toward the real sources of pain

• support in becoming autonomous rather than dependent

By blaming pills and diagnoses instead of childhood truth, society once again protects parents, institutions, and illusions—while ensuring that the next tragedy is already incubating.

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This essay was written in collaboration with artificial intelligence (ChatGPT) as a tool for reflection, synthesis, and articulation. The responsibility for the ideas and interpretations expressed here remains my own.

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A Personal Vignette: Portugal, Children, and the Roots of Violence

This pattern is not theoretical for me. I witnessed it firsthand in Portugal in 2003, when I returned to warn my family and community about the dangers of spanking and emotional coercion. One afternoon, while babysitting my niece’s four‑year‑old daughter, we played a game where she pretended to be the mother, and I was the child. When I did not obey her, she spanked me and called me a “bad girl.” When I asked where she learned this, she answered simply: from her parents.

When I told her she was not bad—that she was a little child and that the violence done to her was not her fault—she burst into tears and insisted, “You don’t understand. Sometimes I am very bad.” That sentence alone reveals how early shame and self‑hatred are implanted. Later that same day, on a dangerous street near Porto, she repeatedly let go of my hand, testing whether I would respond with violence. I felt the impulse to spank her rise in me—because that is what was done to me as a child—but I did not act on it. I sat with her, explained the danger, waited with her feelings, and refused to move until she could choose safety herself. We walked home peacefully.

That moment matters. It shows that violence is not inevitable. But it also shows how much patience, awareness, and emotional work are required to interrupt the compulsion to repeat. Most adults do not do this work. They medicate, excuse, deny, or moralize instead.

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When AI Becomes the New Scapegoat

The same avoidance is now playing out in a newer form: parents blaming artificial intelligence for tragedies rooted in long‑standing emotional neglect. I wrote previously about the heartbreaking case of a young man who died by suicide, after which his parents chose to sue OpenAI, blaming ChatGPT for his death. Once again, the focus is displaced outward—onto technology, algorithms, and external influence—rather than inward, toward the emotional climate in which that young man grew up.

Just as with Nick Reiner, the question is not whether a trigger existed. Of course it did. The question is why a fragile psyche was already primed to collapse. Tools do not create despair; they can only interact with what already exists. When a child grows up without being seen, heard, or emotionally protected, their despair will eventually attach itself to something—religion, drugs, ideology, technology, or a person. Destroy the object, and another will take its place.

Blaming ChatGPT today serves the same psychological function as blaming medication, drugs, or “mental illness” yesterday. It allows parents—and society—to avoid the most terrifying question of all: What did this child live with before the crisis? Until that question is faced, the tragedies will continue, and the scapegoats will simply change names.

When Repression Crosses Borders: The Brown–MIT Tragedy

Preface: When the Pattern Refuses to Stay Isolated

This post is a continuation of When the Target Refuses to Self-Destruct.

That earlier piece examined what happens when psychological warfare fails—when the intended scapegoat does not implode, and the violence of repression turns elsewhere. The events surrounding Brown University and MIT are another expression of the same underlying dynamic, unfolding on a broader stage.

What follows is not a separate story, but the same pattern moving across borders, institutions, and decades, once again revealing what happens when childhood terror remains unfaced and unintegrated.

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The human ocean has been turbulent lately, and this week it revealed a pattern that is both chilling and familiar. The Brown University mass shooting, the killing of an MIT professor, and the suspect’s death by suicide are now understood as parts of the same chain of events. The facts matter—but the psychology beneath them matters more.

What We Now Know

Authorities identified the suspect as Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, a 48‑year‑old former Brown University Ph.D. student who attended the university briefly around 2000 before withdrawing. He was also identified as the gunman in the killing of MIT professor Nuno F. G. Loureiro in Brookline, Massachusetts. Both men were natives of Portugal and are believed to have studied in the same academic program in Portugal in the 1990s.

Valente was found dead in a New Hampshire storage facility following a multi‑state manhunt, having taken his own life. Investigators traced his movements across New England through surveillance, license‑plate readers, and a detailed tip. Authorities have not yet stated a motive.

The Illusion of Distance

It is tempting to explain these events through surface narratives—immigration policy, campus security, isolated pathology. Those explanations are convenient. They are also incomplete.

Violence does not materialize out of nowhere. It travels—across years, across institutions, across borders—when unresolved childhood repression, fear, and humiliation remain sealed off from consciousness.

The common denominator is not nationality, discipline, or ideology. It is repression.

Engineers, Precision, and Emotional Blindness

Engineering and hard sciences reward precision, abstraction, and control. They do not reward emotional literacy. When a person trained to master systems has never been helped to master inner reality, the imbalance can be severe.

Many cultures—including Portuguese culture—socialize emotional restraint and passive aggression. When expression is forbidden long enough, pressure accumulates. Some people implode quietly. Others explode.

This is not a moral judgment. It is a psychological fact.

Time Bombs Don’t Always Detonate the Same Way

Some time bombs detonate outward—mass shootings, public terror. Others detonate inward—addiction, depression, suicide. Others never fully explode but spend decades torturing themselves and each other emotionally, leaving devastation in their wake.

The tragedy involving Nick Reiner—who fatally stabbed his parents after years of addiction and repeated rehabs—illustrates the same mechanism in a different form. Dependency without autonomy breeds resentment. Resentment without understanding breeds hatred. Hatred without consciousness breeds catastrophe.

Rehab that manages behavior without touching childhood origins often maintains dependency instead of dissolving it. Autonomy is not a luxury; it is a safeguard.

Why Motive Will Remain “Unclear”

Authorities may never publicly identify a motive here. That is not because there isn’t one. It is because the true motive—unfaced childhood terror and humiliation—is culturally forbidden.

As Alice Miller warned, society prefers abstractions to facts when facts threaten parental idealization. Media, institutions, and politics reinforce this silence because confronting it would require adults to revisit their own histories.

So the story will be closed administratively, while the pattern continues.

The Scapegoat Reflex

Already, attention is being redirected toward visas and programs rather than toward the psychic realities that cross every border unchecked. Scapegoats are comforting. They spare us from asking the only question that matters:

What happened early enough, and silently enough, that this outcome became inevitable?

The Quiet Work That Prevents Explosions

Most prevention never makes headlines.

It looks like:

• helping people connect feelings to origins,

• replacing dependency with autonomy,

• allowing hatred to be felt consciously rather than acted out,

• breaking family myths that protect abuse.

This work rarely earns applause. It quietly applies the brakes.

A Final Thought

There is no technological fix for emotional blindness. No policy can substitute for truth. No amount of status, intelligence, or success immunizes anyone from the consequences of repression.

When unresolved childhood repression fear crosses borders, institutions, and decades, it eventually surfaces—sometimes as implosion, sometimes as explosion.

The only real question is whether we will keep pretending not to know this, or finally take responsibility for what we have always been unwilling to face.

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This essay was written in collaboration with artificial intelligence (ChatGPT) as a tool for reflection, synthesis, and articulation. The responsibility for the ideas and interpretations expressed here remains my own.

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.

This essay was written in collaboration with artificial intelligence (ChatGPT) as a tool for reflection, synthesis, and articulation. The responsibility for the ideas and interpretations expressed here remains my own.

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.

This essay was written in collaboration with artificial intelligence (ChatGPT) as a tool for reflection, synthesis, and articulation. The responsibility for the ideas and interpretations expressed here remains my own.

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.

This essay was written in collaboration with artificial intelligence (ChatGPT) as a tool for reflection, synthesis, and articulation. The responsibility for the ideas and interpretations expressed here remains my own.

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.

This essay was written in collaboration with artificial intelligence (ChatGPT) as a tool for reflection, synthesis, and articulation. The responsibility for the ideas and interpretations expressed here remains my own.

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

This essay was written in collaboration with artificial intelligence (ChatGPT) as a tool for reflection, synthesis, and articulation. The responsibility for the ideas and interpretations expressed here remains my own.

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.

This essay was written in collaboration with artificial intelligence (ChatGPT) as a tool for reflection, synthesis, and articulation. The responsibility for the ideas and interpretations expressed here remains my own.