Stalking does not always look like repeated phone calls, following someone in the street, or unwanted messages. When direct access is blocked, stalkers often escalate rather than stop. They simply change tactics.
This is called stalking by proxy.
Instead of contacting their target directly, the stalker uses other people—friends, family members, co-workers, neighbors, service providers, institutions—to gather information, regain access, spread fear, and reassert control. The target becomes surrounded, not by the stalker alone, but by a network unwittingly pulled into the stalker’s compulsion.
This is not a coincidence. It is reenactment.
When Boundaries Trigger Escalation
On Christmas Day, I was hoovered by someone who has no role in my life. I ignored it. I did not reply. That boundary should have ended the story.
Instead, the stalking escalated.
Because this person could not reach me directly, she went to my older brother, who will be 84 next month, and lives in assisted living in Portugal. She showed up unannounced. He only realized who she was near the end of the visit.
This man is one of the few people in Portugal who still has contact with me.
That is not accidental.
She wants to convince me of something she believes is “true.” But if something is true, persuasion is unnecessary. Truth does not need coercion. The need to convince is the giveaway: this is not about truth—it is about control.
If she were secure in her certainty, my doubts would be irrelevant. Instead, my autonomy triggers her fears. And fears, in unhealed people, turn into pursuit.
Stalking Is a Childhood Language
Stalkers are not acting freely. They are speaking the only emotional language they know.
Stalking is not primarily about desire or love. It is about unfinished childhood terror, replayed compulsively with a new cast of characters who have nothing to do with the original trauma.
I know this pattern intimately.
As a young girl, I was stalked by my older sisters—emotionally monitored, intruded upon, controlled, watched, and punished for autonomy. Now, the daughter of one of those sisters is stalking me in the same way her mother stalked her.
This is repetition compulsion in its purest form.
If I had not left Portugal, I would now be stalked by my younger family members as well. I am alive, free, and safe today because there is an ocean and a continent between us.
Proxy Stalking: How It Works
When direct access is denied, stalkers typically use the following methods:
Information Gathering
Manipulating family or friends
Contacting caregivers, service providers, or institutions
Fishing for updates under false pretenses
Indirect Communication
Sending messages through others
Creating “concern” narratives to bypass boundaries
Enlisting Others
Recruiting friends, relatives, or colleagues to pressure the target
Turning third parties into messengers or monitors
False Accusations
Smear campaigns to undermine credibility
Framing the target as unstable, dangerous, or dishonest
Technology Abuse
Fake accounts
Three-way calls to mask numbers
Surveillance disguised as “care.”
These are not misunderstandings. They are strategies of control.
From Family to the State: Stalking on a Mass Scale
This dynamic does not stop at the personal level.
We are now watching it unfold at scale—most visibly through institutions like ICE, which stalks human beings across communities, workplaces, and even citizenship records.
Only people who were stalked, controlled, monitored, and terrorized in childhood are psychologically available to join systems whose function is stalking others.
This is not political rhetoric. It is developmental psychology.
People who were denied access to their own feelings early in life adapt by obeying power instead of questioning it. They do not experience the moral conflict that would stop someone else.
Alice Miller explained this mechanism with brutal clarity:
“If the child learns to view corporal punishment as a ‘necessary measure’ against ‘wrongdoers,’ then as an adult he will not hesitate to cooperate with the penal system… In a totalitarian state, which is a mirror of his upbringing, this citizen can also carry out any form of torture or persecution without having a guilty conscience.”
When feelings are eliminated, obedience fills the vacuum.
Such people do not lose autonomy—they never had it. Their values switch easily, depending on who holds authority. What is called “duty” replaces conscience. Morality becomes a prosthesis.
As Miller wrote:
“Blood does not flow in artificial limbs; they are for sale and can serve many masters.”
Education and Status Do Not Break the Compulsion
There is a dangerous myth that intelligence, education, or professional success protects against violence.
They do not.
Recently, a vascular surgeon stalked his ex-wife after she remarried. He murdered her and her new husband. Prosperity did not save him. Status did not save him. A medical degree did not save him.
Repetition compulsion is indifferent to résumés.
This is proof, once again, that unexamined childhood trauma is more powerful than reason.
Why Stalkers Do Not Heal
This entire pattern could stop—if the stalker were capable of self-reflection.
Healing would require:
Feeling the terror, rage, and helplessness within the context of their own childhood
Placing those emotions where they belong: in the past
But stalking exists precisely because this internal work has been refused.
So the emotions are exported.
The control is externalized.
The victim is recruited.
And the cycle continues.
If You Are Being Stalked (or Supporting Someone Who Is)
Do not minimize it. Do not explain it away. Do not negotiate.
Tell everyone
Make the behavior visible. Stalkers rely on secrecy and confusion.
Document everything
Logs, screenshots, dates, witnesses. Facts protect you when narratives are weaponized.
Create a safety plan
This includes digital security, routine changes, and code words with trusted people.
Trust your instincts
Stalking is dangerous. If something feels wrong, it is.
Report when necessary
Not because systems always protect—but because records matter.
The Uncomfortable Truth
Stalkers are not monsters. They are children in adult bodies who never developed into mature conscious adults.
But their pain does not excuse the damage they cause.
Those who have found their authentic selves have a different burden. They can feel. They can see. And because of that, they cannot comply with demands their whole being rejects.
As Alice Miller wrote:
“When they sense that something is being demanded of them to which their whole being says no, they cannot do it. They simply cannot.”
That refusal is not cruelty.
It's staying true to ourselves.
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