Since I published A Dance to Freedom on June 17, 2014, I have fought to keep ownership of my story.
Human predators—malignant narcissists, sociopaths, and psychopaths—have constantly targeted me. Their goal? To steal my story and reshape it to fit their narrative in order to keep their false self, their repression, their image, their lies, and their illusions intact.
When I published my book, I became an immediate target. A mob at my workplace tried to destroy me because my story was a mirror—and they hated their reflection. They didn't want truth; they wanted illusion. Just like most parents do with their children, and just like all those who build external empires to avoid the void within.
For much of my life, I wanted to belong: to my family, to a community, to the world. But I always felt like an outsider because my soul refused to reenact the childhood lies everyone else performs. Today, I am grateful I never belonged. I belong to myself.
Here is the fundamental truth I have learned: Once a person has completed integrating their story, no one can steal it.
The Unintegrated Empire: The Elon Musk Example
When someone gains massive wealth, power, or fame without first confronting and fully integrating their story, they remain a prisoner of the false self. Because they never truly owned their story, they spend their lives terrified of the mirror—and eventually, the world, documentarians, and history step in to write it for them.
Elon Musk—the richest man in the world, yet the poorest when it comes to emotional freedom—is a textbook example of this dynamic.
In his documentary Musk, Alex Gibney tells the story that Musk tried so hard to control. Critics analyze him, bloggers dissect him, and the public projects onto him. Musk is left scrambling—deleting tweets, changing narratives, and buying entire social platforms to control the message. But you cannot control a story you never owned in the first place.
The boy who couldn't control his abusive, mocking father now cannot control his own narrative.
Musk has spoken publicly about his father, Errol Musk, describing his childhood as difficult and psychologically abusive. He says the words. He tells the story. But there is no emotion. He speaks without feeling—without trembling, without tears, without indignation.
This is not strength. This is repression.
When a child is abused and cannot feel the pain of that abuse—when feeling it is too dangerous, too overwhelming, too forbidden—the feelings don't disappear. They go underground. They fester. They metastasize. And decades later, they emerge as something else entirely: workaholism, grandiosity, political failures, tweet deletions, and the desperate need to control everything and everyone.
As Alice Miller famously wrote in The Drama of the Gifted Child:
"The grandiose person is never really free; first because he is excessively dependent on admiration from others, and second, because his self-respect is dependent on qualities, functions, and achievements that can suddenly fail."
External power given to us by the world can be taken away overnight. As we witnessed on Tuesday, November third, the voters stripped Trump of power. And while I was working on this very blog post, yet another example collapsed on the world stage of someone who fell into the illusion that power and money would make him untouchable: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang resigned over affairs, including an alleged affair with a spy from China.
We only become truly untouchable when we stop unconsciously reenacting our childhood dramas and resolve childhood repression. Real power comes from knowing ourselves completely and remaining confident that we can handle whatever reality brings. That is true freedom that money and influence cannot buy.
Wound Collectors and the Danger of Escalation
The danger of unresolved childhood repression is not merely personal; when combined with massive power, it becomes a public threat. Malignant narcissists operate as "wound collectors"—they actively store, replay, and nurture every grievance, slight, and perceived wrong, turning them into a psychological arsenal.
Internalizing and Nurturing: Unlike conscious individuals who process conflict and move on, malignant narcissists actively hoard negative experiences, refusing to let go or integrate them.
Weaponizing Perceived Wrongs: They store these "wounds" to justify future retaliation, framing themselves as perpetual victims even while acting as ruthless aggressors.
Paranoia and Destructive Escalation: Driven by the core fear of exposure, their paranoid orientation dictates that they must "get them before they get me." When faced with failure or shrinking power, they reach the most dangerous stage—acting out destructively to reassert dominance and gain a sadistic sense of control over a world they cannot truly command.
Just as in a high-risk domestic dynamic, the period when a malignant figure feels their illusion slipping is precisely when their reenactment turns most explosive. Donald Trump is at this stage.
Alice Miller's Warning: Unfelt Pain Becomes Power Over Others
Alice Miller understood the mechanics of repression better than anyone. In Breaking Down the Wall of Silence, she wrote:
"Even Adolf Hitler never denied that he had been beaten. What he denied was that these beatings were painful. And by totally falsifying his feelings, he would become a mass murderer. That would never have occurred had he been capable of feeling and weeping about his situation, and had he not repressed his justifiable hatred of those responsible for his distress but consciously experienced and comprehended it. Instead, he perverted this hatred into ideology. The same holds for Stalin, Ceausescu, and all the other beaten and humiliated children who later turn into tyrants and criminals."
What he denied was that these beatings were painful.
Musk doesn't deny the abuse. He admits his father was cruel. But watch how he talks about it—flat, detached, almost bored. The words are there; the feelings are not. And when feelings are denied, they don't vanish. They demand an endless supply of scapegoats or poisonous containers to temporarily alleviate childhood repression.
Musk isn't Hitler. He isn't Stalin. But the psychological mechanism is identical: unfelt pain becomes power over others.
As I wrote in
"Abused and otherwise traumatized children are forced to repress their true feelings, unless they’re lucky enough to find someone to comfort them. But because enlightened witnesses (and even helping witnesses) aren’t always readily available, most of us develop what Alice Miller calls a false self — usually for the sake of our parents — only to pay for it later in life. In an article entitled 'The Essential Role of an Enlightened Witness in Society,' Alice Miller writes that 'it seems clear to me that information about abuse inflicted during childhood is recorded in our body cells as a sort of memory, linked to repressed anxiety. If, lacking the aid of an enlightened witness, these memories fail to break through to consciousness, they often compel the person to violent acts that reproduce the abuse suffered in childhood, which was repressed in order to survive. The aim is to avoid the fear of powerlessness before a cruel adult. This fear can be eluded momentarily by creating situations in which one plays the active role, the role of the powerful, towards a powerless person.'
This is how the vicious cycle of parental abuse continues for generations. And in extreme cases, the repetition compulsion can lead to violent atrocities against humanity. 'To his dying day, Hitler was convinced that only the death of every single Jew could shield him from the fearful and daily memory of his brutal father,' Alice Miller writes. 'Since his father was half Jewish, the whole Jewish people had to be exterminated. I know how easy it is to dismiss this interpretation of the Holocaust, but I honestly haven’t yet found a better one. Besides, the case of Hitler shows that hatred and fear cannot be resolved through power, even absolute power, as long as the hatred is transferred to scapegoats. On the contrary, if the true cause of the hatred is identified, is experienced with the feelings that accompany this recognition, blind hatred of innocent victims can be dispelled. … Old wounds can be healed if exposed to the light of day. But they cannot be repudiated by revenge.'
In milder cases, which cover the majority of human beings on this planet, our repression tricks us into believing in the false self until we die with our lies or until something like depression, psychosis, or physical illness jars us out of our illusion. The tragedy of our existence is that most of us aren’t even aware of the fact — or find out too late — that we’ve lost all love and respect for who we really are."
Miller continues:
"The return of the truth only begins to announce itself in the moment that we turn the tables and the word 'spanked' condemns itself as heartless testimony to the disrespect and humiliation inflicted on the child. Only once we have become capable of empathizing with the feelings of the abused child we once were, and reject the mockery and cynicism of our adult selves, do we begin to open the gates to the truth. Only then can we also stop being a danger to others."
Only then can we stop being a danger to others.
Musk is a danger— because he's dangerously repressed. His rockets, his robots, his political spending, his tweet deletions—these are not the actions of a conscious adult. They are the thrashing of a wounded child who never learned to feel. And until he does, he will remain a danger to his employees, to voters, to his children, and to the world.
The Taboo That Protects the Prison
Why don't more people do this emotional work? Because our entire society is built to prevent it.
As Alice Miller wrote:
"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 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."
Read that again. All religions forbid emotional liberation. Not just churches, temples, or mosques—every institution, every family, and every culture that demands obedience over authenticity.
As Miller also reminded us in For Your Own Good: "The enemy within can, at last, be hunted down on the outside."This is the blueprint of poisonous pedagogy. Until we confront childhood repression as the root of human destruction, predators will continue to rely on our silence and our fear of seeing what childhood repression really does to the human psyche.
Consciously feeling your legitimate rage—the rage you were never allowed to express as a child—protects you from acting it out on others. But when you repress it? You become the tyrant. You become the abuser. You become the one who builds rockets to escape a house you can never leave—and teams up with the Trump administration to create a department like DOGE, to steal our data and call it "fighting corruption and fraud" when, in reality, they are the biggest fraud.
AI in the Hands of the Unconscious
This exact dynamic explains why emerging technology like Artificial Intelligence is so dangerous in the hands of unintegrated individuals.
Just as unintegrated public figures rely on external validation to maintain their grand illusions, an unconscious person using AI runs the risk of handing their narrative over to a machine. If a person does not know who they are—living in confusion and looking for external answers—an AI’s output can easily become a substitute for internal reality, leading to deep psychological destabilization.
AI should only be engaged by conscious people who know themselves and have liberated themselves from the emotional prison of their childhoods. Only then can it be used safely as an objective tool, rather than a dangerous hall of mirrors that distorts one's sense of self-worth.
Out of the Prison of Confusion: The Only Escape
To break free from the emotional prison of our childhood, we must find the courage to consciously feel our feelings within the context of our childhood. Not analyze them. Not intellectualize them. Not delete them. Feel them.
I learned what Musk never did: you can't perform your way out of pain.
I consciously felt my feelings—all of them. The rage. The grief. The shame. The fear. I didn't delete them, I didn't tweet them, and I didn't build a rocket to escape them.
I didn't need $474 million to face the truth. I just needed courage.
If you become rich, famous, or powerful before integrating your story, you will lose ownership of it. Others—predators, opportunists, biographers, and ideologues—will tell your story for you to fit their own narrative.
But if you integrate first? No one can steal what you have already made yours. Your story becomes a mirror, not a weapon; a light, not a lure.
Epilogue: A Message to Predators and the Wounded
You can steal words. You can twist facts. You can delete tweets or text messages. You can build rockets, buy companies, and spend $474 million on elections.
But you cannot outrun the wounded child inside of you. You cannot algorithmize healing. And you cannot steal an integrated soul.
I have done the emotional work. My story is mine—and you will never own it.
Survival Tip for the Rest of Us: Don't let your life become a subroutine in someone else's trauma loop. Feel your feelings—not in your head, but in your body. When you do, you will finally be free.
Read A Dance to Freedom: Your guide to liberation from lies and illusions.
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