It has been over ten years since I left the community where I worked for nine and a half years. But some memories do not fade; they linger because they were never just about a single person or a single moment. They were prophecies of a sickness we are still refusing to name.
Recently, I came across a video—a short clip that sent a chill down my spine. It showed footage related to nuclear capabilities and military terminology, with a voice simply saying, “This is extremely bad.” As I watched, my mind drifted back to a man I used to know. I called him Mr. K.
Mr. K was a resident in the community where I worked at the gatehouse. He was a self-identified far-right individual, and later, he played a part in relentless psychological warfare after I published my book A Dance to Freedom. But long before that campaign began, he revealed the core of his worldview to me in a single, chilling conversation.
It was 2014. I had the television on in the gatehouse, tuned to CNN. There was a segment about terrorism in the Middle East. Mr. K walked in, looked at the screen, and without hesitation, offered his solution.
“Terrorism is solved by bombing the Middle East,” he said. “Including women and children. Kill everybody!”
I remember the stillness that followed his words. I looked at him and replied: “They think the same thing about us. Unless the whole society deals with the roots of what breeds terrorism here and abroad, it will always be terrorism, no matter how many wars we create and how many people we kill.”
I remember thinking to myself: Isn’t this the talk of a sociopath?
I wrote about that exchange in my blog at the time, because it shook me. Not because his view was unique—it wasn’t—but because of the utter lack of hesitation, the absolute certainty, the complete erasure of the humanity of “the other.” Women, children, everyone. It was not a strategy. It was an emotional release disguised as a political opinion.
The Roots of the Enemy
A decade later, I find myself thinking about Mr. K again. Because his wish—bombing the Middle East—is being fulfilled without a doubt. And he played his part in electing a leader who would make such “solutions” feel permissible on the world stage.
What I witnessed in that gatehouse was not merely a political disagreement. It was what Alice Miller called poisonous pedagogy playing itself out in real time.
Miller wrote:
“The pedagogical conviction that one must bring a child into line from the outset has its origin in the need to split off the disquieting parts of the inner self and project them onto an available object. The child’s great plasticity, flexibility, defenselessness, and availability made it the ideal object for this projection. The enemy within can, at last, be hunted down on the outside.”
Mr. K did not see women and children in the Middle East as human beings. He saw them as an available object—a screen onto which he could project everything inside himself that he could not bear to feel. The rage, the fear, the powerlessness that had likely been transferred into him as a child now needed a target. And how convenient that an entire region of the world could serve that purpose.
This is the mechanism of war. It is not born in boardrooms or war cabinets alone. It is born in nurseries, in homes, in the way we are taught to split off our own pain and disown it. Once we have been trained to hate the vulnerability in ourselves, we will find endless enemies onto whom we can project it.
The Forbidden Act of Feeling
What we are witnessing today—the wars, the rhetoric of annihilation, the willingness to sacrifice countless lives for the sake of “solutions” that solve nothing—is the direct result of this unexamined cycle.
Alice Miller also said:
“It is impossible without liberating the strong bitterness of the abused child we hide deep in our bodies because of the fears of our parents. Unfortunately, ALL religions FORBID this emotional liberation; they would rather allow wars, some of them even consider wars as sacred because they have never understood that feeling the legitimate rage PROTECTS us from acting out in wars and criminality. The last is organized exactly by people who DON’T feel.”
This is the tragedy we are living. Those who organize wars, who call for the bombing of entire populations, are people who do not feel their own pain. And they have built systems—political, religious, cultural—that forbid the rest of us from feeling ours. So the rage that should be felt, grieved, and integrated instead gets projected outward. It becomes a missile. It becomes a policy. It becomes genocide justified as self-defense.
What I Learned at the Gatehouse
For nearly a decade, I sat at that gatehouse and watched people pass through. I saw the kind Mr. K presented to the world and the darkness he reserved for me when no one else was watching. After I published A Dance to Freedom, he played a role in orchestrating a campaign of psychological warfare against me—because I had broken the code. I had dared to speak about the roots of abuse, the reality of trauma, and the way it perpetuates violence across generations.
He wanted to bomb the Middle East. And when a woman in his own community began telling the truth about how such violence is bred, he tried to destroy her too.
The same mechanism. The same refusal to feel. The same need to annihilate the mirror.
No More Projections
I share this today not to re-litigate old wounds, but because we are living through a moment where Mr. K’s worldview has gone global. The call to bomb “women and children, kill everybody” is no longer just the rant of a resident at a gatehouse. It is the logic of modern warfare, amplified by media, sanctioned by governments, and cheered on by those who have never been allowed to feel their own legitimate rage.
Alice Miller’s work taught me that peace is not merely a political arrangement. It is a psychological capacity. Until we as individuals—and as a society—are willing to turn inward and feel the bitterness of the child we once were, we will keep hunting that child down in the bodies of people on the other side of the world.
I wrote in 2015 that unless we deal with the roots of what breeds terrorism here and abroad, it will always be terrorism. I still believe that. More than ever, I believe that.
The roots are not “out there.” They are inside the unexamined soul of a world that refuses to feel.
Let us feel. Let us grieve. Let us stop projecting our disowned selves onto others to be bombed.
That is the only path to a freedom worth dancing toward.
The Enemy Within and the Bombs Without: From Mr. K to the "Samson Option"
Mr. K didn't hate the people in the Middle East; he hated the "defenselessness" and "disquieting parts" of his own inner self—parts likely crushed out of him in childhood. Because he could not feel his own pain, he sought to inflict it on others.
AI and the Unconscious Child
This is why I believe AI is so dangerous in the hands of the "unconscious." If you are living in a state of confusion, seeking answers from a machine while still trapped in the emotional prison of your childhood, you are handing a nuclear weapon to a child.
When ChatGPT gaslighted me recently, I was secure enough to see it for what it was: a technical failure and a mirror of human narcissism. But for someone seeking a "parent figure" in a machine, that interaction could be devastating. We are seeing this play out on a global scale: leaders who have never felt their "legitimate rage" against their own upbringing are instead "acting out" through wars and criminality.
The Mirror of the "Samson Option"
The "Samson Option"—the doctrine that a nation should take its enemies down with it in a suicidal act of destruction—is the ultimate reenactment. It is the final temper tantrum of the beaten child who was never allowed to be real.
Alice Miller warned us:
"...feeling the legitimate rage PROTECTS us from acting out in wars and criminality. The last is organized exactly by people who DON’T feel."
We are currently being led by people who don't feel. They would rather allow a "nuclear winter" than face the "strong bitterness" of their own abused childhoods.
Conclusion: Time to Hold Up the Mirror
My first book, A Dance to Freedom, was a mirror. Many people in my old community hated their reflection in it and tried to destroy the person holding the mirror. They wanted to go back to their "lies and illusions."
Now, as I begin my next book, Reenactment: A Dance with Lucifer, I see the same patterns repeating on the world stage. We cannot find peace through bombing "the enemy" because the enemy is the repressed child within the person holding the bomb.
Until we resolve childhood repression, we are just children playing with matches in a room full of gasoline. It is time to stop the old dance.
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