On Christmas Day, someone tried to hoover me back into her emotional prison.
She failed.
In my last email to her, I was explicit: it would be the final time I communicated. I meant it. Boundaries are meaningless if they are negotiable, and I no longer negotiate my emotional freedom.
Hoovering is a manipulation tactic used to “suck” a person back into a toxic dynamic once the manipulator senses loss of control. It often appears disguised as concern, dialogue, misunderstanding, or hurt feelings. In reality, it is driven by fear: fear that the target will escape and stop serving as a container for unresolved pain.
Here is the message she sent me, translated from Portuguese:
“Good afternoon Imelda! Merry Christmas to you.
I would very much like to speak with you about the posts on your blog about my family.
If you muster the courage, please call, as you are mistaken about my character.
When you told me you were a therapist, I believed you and told you my story up to 2005, when you returned to Arizona.
I await your contact.”
Let’s dismantle this message calmly and factually.
“I would very much like to speak with you about the posts on your blog about my family.”
This sentence asserts entitlement.
I have the right to my thoughts, my feelings, and to express them on my blog.
I do not use real names. I protect anonymity. No one is obligated to agree with my writings—but no one has the right to police my inner world or dictate what I may see, feel, remember, or articulate.
Control disguised as dialogue is still control.
“If you muster the courage, please call, as you are mistaken about my character.”
This is projection.
By framing my refusal to engage as a lack of courage, she attempts to reverse roles. If I don’t comply, she can later say I was “afraid.”
In reality, courage is walking away from people who blame others for their pain, who cannot self-reflect, and who try to trap others in emotional labor so they don’t have to confront their own childhood repression.
Refusal is not cowardice.
Refusal is clarity.
“When you told me you were a therapist, I believed you…”
This statement is demonstrably false.
I never told anyone I was a therapist.
She told others that I was her therapist. My only mistake at the time was not correcting the lie immediately. When I published A Dance to Freedom in 2014, I made it unequivocally clear that I am not a therapist and that I do not want to be one.
I stated this explicitly in the introduction of my book (pages 15–16) and later reinforced it again publicly:
“I’m not a therapist, and I don’t want to be anyone’s therapist. But I do want to help people as a friend would, by sharing my experiences and explaining how Alice Miller helped me heal when everything else failed.”
There is a reason I made that boundary explicit.
People who want therapists often don’t want truth—they want containment without responsibility.
Why Hoovering Happens
Hoovering happens when someone senses they are losing access to:
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a “poison container” for unresolved childhood trauma
When that access is threatened, the manipulator escalates—through guilt, accusation, moral pressure, or feigned vulnerability.
Christmas and holidays are prime times for hoovering. Emotional symbols are weaponized.
The Bigger Picture: Violence, Power, and Childhood Repression
This same psychological blindness shows up everywhere—on a much larger scale.
The media keeps pretending that external stressors alone create violence:
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a difficult career
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pressure to perform
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money
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fame
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technology
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addiction
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mental illness
But pressure does not create violence.
It only activates what was already there.
I dropped out of school in seventh grade after being unjustly failed by half a point in physics. I loved that class. I left angry and disillusioned—and I never returned.
Yet I did not become violent.
To this day, I don’t like professors, and frankly, I hope most of them get replaced by AI—but disappointment did not turn me into a killer.
Because disappointment alone doesn’t do that.
Money Doesn’t Heal. It Enables Repression.
A Chinese billionaire boasting about having over 100 children is not evidence of success—it is evidence of profound emotional blindness.
Likewise, parents who throw money at their children while keeping them dependent are not loving. They are avoiding accountability.
Nick Reiner received $10,000 a month, lived rent-free, had everything provided—and remained emotionally infantilized. His parents never fostered autonomy. Resentment grew. Reality arrived. And they, like so many parents, searched for external demons to blame.
Alice Miller was different.
She acknowledged her own mistakes as a young mother. That honesty is precisely why her work has depth and integrity. Most parents never reach that threshold.
The Uncomfortable Truth
Everything we become is connected to childhood.
Not every victim becomes an abuser.
But every abuser was once a victim.
This is not opinion.
It is observable reality.
Yet society would rather pathologize, medicate, distract, scapegoat AI, blame ideology, or point fingers at “stress” than confront the original wound.
Because facing childhood truth requires mourning.
And mourning terrifies people more than violence.
Final Boundary
I am done being available as an emotional prison guard.
I am done correcting projections that others are unwilling to examine.
I am done explaining boundaries to people who experience boundaries as abandonment.
My work is public. My position is clear. What others do with that information is their responsibility.
This is what courage looks like.
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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