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.

When the Body Reveals the Truth: A Reflection on Tatiana Schlossberg’s Essay and the Inheritance of Repression

This week, a reader and correspondent, David, reached out to me after reading Tatiana Schlossberg’s essay about her leukemia diagnosis. He was struck by a quote in which she confessed that, all her life, she had tried to be “good,” never upset her mother, and felt guilty that her illness would now make her mother sad.

David found these words shocking — as we all should. But they are not surprising to me. They reveal the tragic emotional inheritance that so many carry, generation after generation, without ever naming it.

I didn’t read Tatiana’s full essay because I already knew what I would find:
a sad, disconnected story with no resolution — a story shaped by a lifetime of emotional repression. A story in which the body finally presents the bill for the truth the mind has buried.

As Alice Miller wrote:

“The body does not understand moral precepts. It fights against the denial of genuine emotions and for the admission of the truth to our conscious minds. This is something the child cannot afford to do; it has to deceive itself and turn a blind eye to the parents’ crimes in order to survive. Adults no longer need to do this, but if they do, the price they pay is high.”

Tatiana’s words show us a child who never learned to exist as herself, only as the caretaker of her mother’s emotional world. She believed it was her job to protect her mother from sadness, anger, or disappointment — a complete inversion of the parent-child relationship. And now, in adulthood, she still feels responsible for her mother’s feelings, even to the point of guilt over her own illness.

This is not love.
This is repression.

The Endless Reenactment of Generational Trauma

Tatiana’s story is not hers alone. Her family has been reenacting unresolved trauma for decades. Her mother, Caroline Kennedy, was only five years old when her father, President John F. Kennedy, was assassinated. That childhood shock — compounded by emotional invisibility — becomes the silent blueprint for generations.

And last year, Tatiana gave birth to a child who will now grow up emotionally and physically abandoned by a mother who is engulfed in her own unresolved pain. This is not about blame. This is about truth. A child cannot receive what a parent never received.

They are trapped in an endless loop of reenactments, where each generation repeats the emotional blindness of the one before.

Without consciousness, trauma becomes destiny.

When Experts Diagnose Trauma but Preserve Repression

David also asked about Gabor Maté’s When the Body Says No. I haven’t read it. I don’t feel compelled to. I already know the landscape it traverses, a landscape Alice Miller mapped decades earlier with incomparable clarity and courage — yet Maté rarely, if ever, speaks her name.

Even the title of his book echoes hers: The Body Never Lies (2005).

Maté, like many professionals today, offers accurate diagnoses but misguided solutions. They identify childhood trauma, yet when it comes to healing, they guide people right back into the tools of repression: meditation, yoga, 12-step spiritualizing, psychiatric drugs. These may soothe symptoms, but they never confront the emotional truth.

They teach people once again to manipulate and suppress their feelings — which guarantees that the repetition compulsion will continue.

As I’ve written before, and as my own life has proven:

It is not the trauma itself that destroys us — it is the repression of our authentic feelings.

Illness as the Body’s Final Cry for Truth

Autoimmune diseases, rare cancers, mysterious chronic conditions — these are not random events. They are the body’s rebellion against a lifetime of emotional denial. When a child lives in an environment where their truth is too dangerous to express, the body absorbs the unuttered pain.

As adults, we are no longer helpless children.
But many continue to live as if they are.

Tatiana’s guilt, her self-erasure, her inability to express anger, grief, or disappointment — these are not personality traits. They are survival mechanisms. And survival mechanisms carried into adulthood become destruction mechanisms.

Some destroy their health.
Some destroy others.
Some destroy the next generation.

The Courage to Break the Cycle

I see in Tatiana’s essay what I have seen across my entire life and in every human story I’ve ever studied through the lens of Alice Miller: unresolved childhood pain, unexamined loyalty to parental illusion, and the tragic belief that being “good” is the path to love.

Being good is not the same as being authentic.
Being obedient is not the same as being alive.

The body never forgets this difference.

If we want to heal — truly heal — we must stop protecting our parents' illusions and start protecting our inner child’s truth. That is the path to freedom. Anything else is another turn in the cycle of reenactment.

I wish Tatiana and her family no harm. I wish them consciousness.
But consciousness cannot be borrowed or inherited.
It must be chosen — often in the face of enormous fear — to face and consciouly feel our repressed, painful emotions.

As long as society rewards repression and elevates the voices of those who keep people asleep, tragedies like these will continue. But the roots are not unknown. Alice Miller named them clearly decades ago. The human body reveals them even when the mind refuses.

The truth is always there, waiting.
The question is whether we are willing to see it.

Terrorism Is the War of the Poor — and War Is the Terrorism of the Rich

How Childhood Repression Creates a World Where Everyone Loses

The phrase “Terrorism is the war of the poor, and war is the terrorism of the rich” has echoed in my mind for years. Every time another tragedy erupts in the human ocean — a bombing, a shooting, an invasion, a retaliation — I see the same tragic truth repeating itself:

The emotionally blind reenacting their childhood wounds on the world stage.

In 2017, this insight struck me after watching a video about terrorism that was circulating online. Today, it resonates even more deeply, now that I’ve lived through the psychological warfare of a workplace mob, now that nations have become more volatile, and now that digital manipulation has replaced religion as the new global poison.

“All religions are poison — in some, the poison is more potent than in others.”
The poison is not faith. The poison is the lie — the lie that children must tolerate cruelty, obey blindly, and numb themselves to their own truth.

Children raised on lies grow into adults who cannot see reality clearly.
And emotionally blind adults are the perfect raw material for terrorism and war.

---

The Terrorism of the Poor: Retaliation by the Emotionally Blind

The poor, the disenfranchised, the rising generations of young men who feel humiliated, unseen, and powerless — they are the easiest to manipulate.

Rich sociopaths lay the trap.

Emotionally blind young men fall into it.

The poor who turn to terrorism believe they are fighting injustice, defending honor, protecting their people. But what they’re really doing is reenacting childhood:

• the humiliation,

• the rage,

• the powerlessness,

• the unresolved pain that was never witnessed and understood.

They mistake the abuser.
They attack the wrong target. 
And in their desperation, they become tools for the powerful.

Just as emotionally abused children often imitate their abusers to survive, emotionally blind adults imitate the violence that was once used against them.

This is why religion is never the cause — it is only the costume and a tool for manipulation.

As James Warren said:
“Terrorism is always political and can easily dress itself in the cloak of religion.”

Religion is a convenient excuse.
A convenient enemy.
A convenient script for the emotionally blind.

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The Terrorism of the Rich: Manufactured Enemies, Manufactured Wars

Here is the part society never likes to hear:

The real terrorists sit in boardrooms.

They do not strap bombs to their bodies.
They strap bombs to economies, nations, and populations.

They manipulate the poor into retaliating.
Then they use that retaliation as justification for more war, more surveillance, more power, more money.

Terrorism is the war of the poor,
and war is the terrorism of the rich.

And both sides are emotionally blind.

Both sides reenact the same childhood wound:
the desire to punish, to dominate, to “win,” to feel powerful at any cost.

After my own experience with the sociopaths at my workplace of nine and a half years, I understood this dynamic in a visceral way:

Abusers provoke reactions so they can call their victims “evil.”

This is the entire architecture of terrorism and war.

Marie-France Hirigoyen describes this perfectly in Stalking the Soul — the invisible violence that leaves no external wounds, the manipulation that pushes victims into desperation so the abuser can point and say:

“See? She’s unstable. She’s dangerous. She’s the problem.”

This is exactly what happens on the world stage:

• The rich provoke.

• The poor react.

• The rich cry “terrorism.”

• The cycle begins again.

And the emotionally blind public believes the lie every time.

---

When Society Is Too Emotionally Blind to See the Game — Everyone Loses

The rich abusers at my job wanted me jailed, dead, or institutionalized. They wanted me to act out their transferences and projections so they could justify destroying me.

They failed — I didn’t become one of them.

 But when one of them, a bank robber, ended his life in a police standoff, they all went silent, just as powerful nations do when their own crimes come to light.

Emotional abusers depend on two things:

1. The silence of the crowd

2. The emotional blindness of their victims

The same dynamic fuels terrorism and war.

The real danger is the system, not the individuals caught inside it.

Emotionally blind societies reward sociopaths and punish truth-tellers. They call the abuser “leader” and the victim “crazy.” They cheer for war and condemn the retaliation they helped create.

As Hirigoyen wrote, emotional abusers drag everyone into their orbit, contaminate moral values, and aim to corrupt the other so the evil becomes “normal.”

This is the logic of war.
This is the logic of terrorism.
This is the logic of emotional repression.

There is no winning for the emotionally blind.

Only bleeding.

---

The Only Escape: Emotional Clarity and Breaking the Cycle

Alice Miller taught us that liberation comes only through truth — through breaking free from childhood repression, refusing lies, refusing manipulation, refusing to carry the poison into the next generation.

The poor will stop being recruited into terrorism only when they heal.
The rich will stop engineering wars only when they face their own childhoods.
Society will stop collapsing only when we stop rewarding emotional blindness.

When society lets sociopaths win — everyone loses.

The cycle of terrorism and war is nothing but childhood trauma reenacted across generations. And until humanity faces this truth, it will continue repeating the same tragedies, calling them “politics,” “religion,” “foreign policy,” or “national security.”

But the root is always the same:

The war between the wounded inner child and the truth they were forbidden to feel.

The Manufactured Morality of Billionaire AI: Why Elon's “Grok Study” Is Propaganda, Not Ethics

 The Manufactured Morality of Billionaire AI: Why Elon's “Grok Study” Is Propaganda, Not Ethics

By Sylvie Imelda Shene
November 2025

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The New Illusion: “My AI Is the Only One That Values All Lives Equally”

Elon Musk is once again performing for the emotionally blind crowd on X — this time claiming that a mysterious “study” proves Grok is the only AI that weighs all human lives equally.

Convenient, isn’t it?

A study nobody can see,
conducted by researchers nobody can name,
funded by sources nobody can trace…

…and the conclusion just happens to glorify Elon’s own AI while discrediting all others.

This isn’t ethics.
This isn’t science.
This is public relations dressed up as moral superiority.

And too many people are falling for it.

---

**Who Benefits From This “Study”?

The Oldest Question in Propaganda**

Whenever the powerful wave a study in our faces, the first questions any emotionally awake person asks are:

Who funded it?
Who designed it?
Who benefits from the results?

Because real science does not begin with a conclusion, then search for data that confirms it.

But propaganda does.

And this is classic PR psychology:

• Create a problem (“other AIs are biased and dangerous”)

• Paint yourself as the savior (“Grok is the only equal-life-weighing AI”)

• Boost your brand as the world’s moral authority

• Use the illusion of ethics to consolidate control

This is not new.
It is exactly what abusive parents do:

“I am the only one who loves you.
I am the only one you can trust.
Everyone else is dangerous.”

Elon is not innovating here.
He is reenacting.

---

Bias in AI Is Not an Algorithmic Issue — It’s a Human Issue

Elon says:

“Grok weighs human lives equally.”

Beautiful words.

But meaningless if the humans building, funding, and deploying AI do not weigh human lives equally.

Bias doesn't start in the model.

Bias starts in:

• the childhood wounds of the engineers

• the emotional repression of the CEOs

• the political agendas of the corporations

• the blind spots of the powerful

• the hatred and fear they refuse to feel

• the illusions they force the world to swallow

Alice Miller said it with devastating accuracy:

“The body remembers the cruelty of childhood long after the mind forgets.”

And the body expresses that cruelty through:

• policies

• technologies

• laws

• “studies”

• companies

• AI models

No machine can hide what the creator has not healed.

---

Elon’s “Equal Lives” Messaging Is Not About Ethics — It’s About Branding

Grok doesn’t need to be better.
It just needs to appear morally superior.

This is how authoritarian personalities sell themselves:

• I am the only truthful one.

• I am the only ethical one.

• Only I can protect you.

• Everyone else is corrupt.

When someone claims their creation is the only unbiased, only moral, only fair system — it’s not moral purity.

It’s narcissistic grandiosity masquerading as integrity.

And people fall for it because they want to believe in a savior — just like children idealize their parents to survive.

---

Why This Is Dangerous: The Emotional Blindness of the Masses

The emotionally blind applaud Elon as the new “guardian of equality” because it makes them feel safe.

People don’t want to question the powerful.
They want to follow them.

They want to be told:

• who is good

• who is bad

• what to trust

• what to fear

• who will save them

This is why propaganda works.

It gives the illusion of clarity to those terrified of looking inward.

---

**What Truly Weighs Human Lives Equally?

Emotional Freedom — Not AI**

If the world truly wants an AI that values all human lives equally, it must start with humans who value all human lives equally.

And humans cannot do that while carrying:

• repressed pain

• unresolved rage

• unprocessed trauma

• childhood wounds

• patriarchal conditioning

AI is not the problem.
Humans are.

Until humanity confronts its emotional repression, all technology will reflect the sickness we refuse to face.

As I wrote earlier this week:

“Bias in AI begins with the emotional repression of the humans who train it.”

And Elon, with all his intellect, is no exception.

---

Conclusion: Beware of Men Who Claim Moral Purity While Building Machines of Power

When billionaires praise their own AIs with conveniently timed studies, the world should worry — not celebrate.

Ethics without emotional awareness is just another illusion.

Technology without childhood healing is just another weapon.

And a man who cannot face his own pain will never build a machine that can heal the world.

Outonecer: When a Predator Performs Wisdom in Autumn

Every autumn brings a shedding of illusions — except for those who refuse to face their truth.

This week, I learned that Dr. Júlio Machado Vaz, the psychiatrist who sexually abused me when I was a vulnerable 17-year-old, has released another book, Outonecer. A soft, poetic, nostalgic memoir written in a tone of “lucidez” and “amor.” A book packaged as introspection.

But introspection without accountability is just performance.

It is astonishing — though not surprising — how many abusers reinvent themselves in old age as gentle philosophers, wise grandfathers, and sentimental storytellers. They write about seasons, memories, fear of aging, music, animals, and even artificial intelligence, while carefully omitting the truth:
the lives they harmed,
the trust they violated,
and the young women whose emotional wounds they deepened.

The Spanish Journalist Who Told the Truth

In 2015, a Spanish journalist, Elena Cabrera, published an article titled Abusos en el diván: la transgresión silenciada (“Abuses on the Couch: The Silenced Transgression”). She courageously exposed what many do not want to see: sexual abuse committed by trusted doctors and therapists.

She included my story — my sexual abuse by Dr. Júlio Machado Vaz — and the article was published in a major Spanish outlet.

That article quietly disappeared from the internet.

I have no doubt his lawyers pressured the platform to erase it.
But truth has a way of surfacing again.

Here is the excerpt she wrote about me, translated from Spanish:

“When the press reported the accusations against Dr. Criado, the Portuguese Sylvie Imelda Shene was reflected in what they were saying. In her book ‘A Dance to Freedom’, published in the United States in 2014, she claimed to have been the victim of sexual abuse by the renowned psychiatrist and sexologist Júlio Machado Vaz. In the 70s, Shene went to a young doctor, Machado, to help her overcome childhood trauma. ‘His methods made me worse,’ she says in her blog, where she also says that it took her 20 years to acknowledge that he had been the victim of sexual abuse. Referring to the case of Matilde Solís, Shene asks if ‘Portugal will also someday find the courage to investigate Machado Vaz.’”

Cabrera continued by noting that Júlio Machado Vaz has long been a celebrity in Portugal — a commentator on radio and television, author of books, Vice President of the Portuguese Society of Clinical Sexology — and that one of his own students, psychiatrist João Vasconcelos Vilas Boas, was later tried for raping a pregnant patient.

These patterns don’t occur in a vacuum.

The Persona of Tenderness, the Reality of Abuse

The synopsis of Outonecer reads like the memoir of a gentle, reflective man contemplating his memories, grandchildren, animals, travels, and the seasons of life.

But as Alice Miller wrote with surgical precision:

“We cannot really love if we are forbidden to know our truth…
We can only try to behave as if we were loving, but this hypocritical behavior is the opposite of love.”
— Alice Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child, p. 23

This “as if” personality — the illusion of love, the illusion of sincerity — is exactly what predatory therapists hide behind.

When I was 17, I was suffering from childhood trauma. Instead of treating the wound, he used my vulnerability for his own gratification. Like most teenagers who are abused by adults, I blamed myself, shoved the memory down, and carried the shame for decades.

He went on to build a celebrity persona — talking about love, relationships, sexuality, introspection — while the truth remained buried beneath polished sentences and theatrical gentleness.

That is not love.
That is not introspection.
That is not healing.

That is emotional camouflage.

The Illusion of Wisdom in Old Age

In Outonecer, he writes:

“Sei que não sou eterno. Mas hoje ainda estou vivo, lúcido e capaz de amar.”
(“I know I am not eternal. But today I am still alive, lucid, and capable of loving.”)

The public laps up these lines because they want to believe in wise men.
They want to believe in healing through poetry.
They want to believe aging brings clarity.

But clarity comes only through facing the shadow, not decorating it with beautiful metaphors.

A man who was truly lucid would acknowledge the harm he inflicted.

A man capable of love would not have abused a vulnerable teenager.

A man capable of introspection would confront his past before writing about the seasons of life.

Instead, we get performance. A last harvest of an emotionally blind public eager to be comforted by illusions.

Autumn Comes for All of Us — and So Does Truth

I am 66 years old now. I have lived long enough to know that truth eventually pushes to the surface, no matter how many lawyers, publishers, or public personas try to bury it.

Dr. Júlio Machado Vaz is in the autumn of his life, writing about love and memory.
I entered the autumn of mine, telling the truth.

One is performance.
One is liberation.

I survived him.
I healed what he exploited.
And I will continue to speak so that younger women do not spend decades trapped in silence as I did.

Because autumn may come quickly — but truth arrives with its own season, and it never misses the harvest.

The Fire That Keeps Burning: Hong Kong, Grenfell, Guatemala, Afghanistan, and the Global War on Truth

By Sylvie Shene

There is a fire burning across humanity — a fire far more dangerous than the flames that consume buildings.
It is the fire of lies, illusions, and the violent punishment of anyone who dares to speak the truth.

This week, Hong Kong’s deadliest high-rise inferno in years killed at least 94 people and left hundreds more missing.
The fire spread across seven towers — a horror that should never have been possible in a modern city.

But it was possible for the same reason the Grenfell Tower burned in 2017.
For the same reason, Guatemala was shattered by a CIA-sponsored coup in 1954.
For the same reason, I was targeted and psychologically attacked at my job of nine and a half years after publishing A Dance to Freedom.
For the same reason, Elon Musk now uses his massive megaphone to distort truth, sow chaos, and manipulate public perception.

The pattern is universal:

1. Profit over life

2. Image over truth

3. Punish anyone who exposes the illusion

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Hong Kong and the Price of Denial

The Hong Kong blaze turned entire apartment towers into vertical prisons.
Flammable cladding, blocked escape routes, locked rooftops, construction debris — the same criminal negligence we saw at Grenfell.

Because when corporations cut corners, governments look away, and the public is kept quiet, the human cost becomes unbearable.

But this is what happens in societies trained from childhood to obey illusions instead of confronting truth.

---

Grenfell: A Warning Ignored

Grenfell Tower showed the world what happens when truth-tellers are silenced.
Residents who questioned fire safety were threatened, bullied, and branded “troublemakers.”

Two women who raised alarms — Nadia and Mariem — were even threatened with legal action for daring to question the system that later burned their neighbors alive.

The rescuers who entered the building described finding 42 bodies in a single room.

Why?
Because the people in power preferred the appearance of “revitalization” to the reality of safety.

Just like the wealthy prefer to preserve their illusions rather than face their childhood wounds.

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The CIA’s Coup in Guatemala: The Machinery of Psychological Warfare

On June 27, 1954, the U.S. government — with the CIA’s full force — overthrew Guatemala’s democratically elected president, Jacobo Árbenz. They replaced a democracy with decades of terror, torture, and genocide.

All to protect American corporate profits.

This is the same machinery of psychological warfare used today — not just abroad, but inside the homeland, in workplaces, on social media platforms, and in the news cycles that manipulate public perception.

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I Saw This Machinery Up Close — at a Gatehouse

One of the sociopaths who orchestrated the mob attack on me at my job was a former CIA operative.
He was well-trained in psychological warfare.
He truly believed he could break me — the “little woman” in the gatehouse.

But a mind that has freed itself once cannot be enslaved again.

In 2015, I wrote about seeing him while cat-sitting:

“He, too, was confident that they could get me to self-destruct with their mind games. I looked at him, and I waved. He looked, went pale, put his hand up, and drove away — deeply uncomfortable because he knew what they did to me was evil.”

When the truth stands calmly in front of someone who tried to destroy it, the illusion collapses.

They can’t hide from their own cruelty anymore.

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Elon Musk: A Megaphone for Half-Truths and Manufactured Confusion

And now we see the same pattern with Elon Musk.

With one repost, he spreads half-truths and distortions about asylum vetting and Afghanistan’s chaotic withdrawal — conveniently omitting facts that don’t serve his narrative.

He knows exactly what he’s doing:
Manipulate perception.
Stoke division.
Confuse the public.
Trigger emotional reactions instead of conscious reflection.

Here are the facts Musk avoids:

• George W. Bush started the war in Afghanistan

• Donald Trump set the withdrawal deadline

• The shooter was vetted and granted asylum during the Trump administration

• The chaos of the exit was built on 20 years of lies, not on a single administration’s decisions

Why can’t a man as intelligent as Elon connect these dots?

Because he doesn’t want to.

Chaos benefits him.
Division benefits him.
Confusion benefits him.
A traumatized society is easier to manipulate.

And deep inside, like all emotionally repressed men with immense power, he is reenacting his childhood drama — trying to control the world the way he was once controlled.

This is not about politics.
It is about psychology.

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The Same Fire, Again and Again

Hong Kong’s towers.
Grenfell Tower.
Guatemala.
My workplace.
America’s foreign wars.
Elon’s propaganda.

It is all the same fire spreading through different buildings.

A fire started in childhood — whenever a child learns that telling the truth gets them punished, and participating in illusions gets them rewarded.

Those children grow up to become:

• politicians who lie

• executives who cut corners

• media figures who distort

• billionaires who manipulate

• neighbors who stay silent

• coworkers who participate in mobbing

• engineers who ignore safety warnings

• governments who choose power over life

This is why humanity keeps burning.

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The Only Fireproof Material Is Truth

Every society that silences truth-tellers eventually pays the price.

And the price is always human lives.

Whether in a burning tower, a collapsed democracy, a destabilized country, or a workplace that devours its own employees — repression always comes home to roost.

Illusions can’t save us.
Only truth can.

When the Wounded Child Takes Over: From Our Workplaces to the National Stage

When the Wounded Child Takes Over: From Our Workplaces to the National Stage

By Sylvie Shene

Yesterday, as I reflected on a situation with my young coworker, I realized how much clarity can be mistaken for a lack of compassion. But the truth is the opposite. What looks like detachment is, in reality, the deepest form of understanding — knowing exactly where someone is in their psychological development, and knowing that you cannot save a person who has already sealed their emotional doors shut.

The Hero Role: A Trap, Not a Strength

My coworker is only 21. She reminds me painfully of my sister, MI, and my niece Marie — born into dysfunction, carrying adulthood before her brain has even finished developing. Both fell into the “hero” role early:

• taking care of chaotic parents

• absorbing family drama

• believing control equals safety

• wearing a mask of superiority to hide terror

• projecting confidence while internally collapsing

At 21, I wish someone like me had crossed my path — not to rescue me, but to witness me, to help me see. No one who wants the naked truth should have to wait decades before discovering Alice Miller.

But the tragedy is that you can only reach someone who wants to be reached, and a person stuck in the hero/victim cycle is not open to feedback, only affirmation. They see anyone who holds a mirror as a threat.

As Alice Miller wrote so accurately:

“Don’t give such information to anybody who does not ask.
They would kill you rather than accept the truth of their childhood.”

In my coworker’s case, the “killing” is not literal — but she could harm my peace, my job, or my reputation if her wounded child feels exposed. I’ve seen this dynamic before. My niece Marie launched a smear campaign against me when I refused to be her accomplice in a revenge fantasy. That’s what happens when you challenge the illusions of someone who is emotionally blind.

Childhood Repression: A Time Bomb

What saddens me most is how early I can see the walls forming around her. Her superiority glance — the one narcissists give without realizing it — isn’t personal. It’s armor. It’s fear pretending to be power. It’s a child trying to survive a world she has no tools to navigate.

I don’t judge her.
I feel for her.

But I’ve learned: those with dangerous childhood repression often look for a scapegoat when their illusions crack.

And this pattern isn’t limited to individuals. It happens at the level of nations.

Because a wounded child who never heals becomes an adult capable of destroying themselves and others.

Which brings me to the tragedy that unfolded yesterday in Washington, D.C.

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The National Guard Shooting: Another Wounded Child Explodes

The suspect who shot National Guardsmen near the White House is an Afghan national — married, with five children — who drove across the country to carry out his attack.

Every detail in the news story screams of unprocessed trauma:

• a turbulent migration history

• CIA work

• political displacement

• cultural exile

• the weight of five children

• unresolved childhood wounds

• pressure, fear, identity collapse

People don’t wake up one morning and commit an act like this.
They implode.

They reenact the traumas buried alive in their bodies.

They become the very danger they once escaped.

And worst of all?

They leave behind new children who will now inherit grief, instability, and the cycle of emotional blindness.

Five small children.
Five futures forever altered.

As I always say:

The more unconscious people are, the more children they have.

The human ocean is full of time bombs — adults who were never allowed to feel or understand their pain. And when these wounds explode, they don’t just ruin one life — they ripple outward:

• families destroyed

• communities shaken

• nations manipulated

• policies tightened

• fear weaponized

Already, the administration is adding 500 more troops to Washington, D.C. You don’t need a crystal ball to see where this is heading. Violence is oxygen for leaders who need chaos to justify control.

Just like in families, unhealed wounds reenact themselves on the national stage.

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A Warning From Alice Miller — For All Levels of Society

What I see in my coworker, in Marie, in the suspect, and in politicians feeding off fear is the same root:

unfelt childhood pain becomes adult destruction.

People who never had someone witness their suffering:

• cannot witness others

• cannot regulate emotions

• cannot tolerate feedback

• cannot love 

• cannot handle reality

• cannot stop reenacting

• cannot stop looking for scapegoats

This is why the world is the way it is.
Not because of “evil.”
But because of repression.

The wounded child grows up — but never heals.

And then the world pays the price.

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The Only Real Solution

As Alice Miller said:

“You can only heal yourself, and this is much, very much.”

I can’t save my coworker.
I couldn’t save Marie
I can’t save anyone who doesn’t want to see.

All I can do is witness, speak the truth, and stay grounded — so I don’t become anyone’s scapegoat or anyone’s collateral damage.

What I wish, more than anything, is that the world would learn what I learned:

• suppression becomes sickness

• repression becomes violence

• projection becomes destruction

• childhood pain becomes political crisis

And until society is finally ready to see the wounded child behind the adult mask, we will keep watching tragedies unfold — in workplaces, in families, and in national headlines.

People make you crazy only when you try to rescue them.
People destroy you only when you threaten their illusions.
And people heal only when they choose to face their own painful truths.

History is not repeating — it is re-enacting.
The Trump administration is already using yesterday’s tragedy to justify harsher immigration policies. But this moment didn’t appear out of nowhere. It began decades ago with illusions, interventions, and unresolved trauma on a global scale.

In 2021, I wrote about the U.S. abandoning Afghanistan and warned that the "illusion of freedom" America sold would explode the moment it became too costly to maintain. And today, those consequences are coming back — not because immigrants are the problem, but because repression always returns through the weakest, most vulnerable link.

The wounded child — whether in a family, a workplace, or a nation — becomes a time bomb when no one dares to face the truth.

The chickens are coming home to roost.
Not because of immigration.
But because of decades of illusion, denial, and repression.

Read the full reflection from 2021 → sylvieshene.blogspot.com/2021/08/afghanistan.html