The Evils of Psychological Projection: How Souls Are Enslaved

How Parental Projection and Religious Trauma Create the Soul Slave

“the new-born babe is full of the stains and pollution of sin, which it inherits from our first parents through our loins . . “

—Richard Allestree (1676)

There I was, invisible, unseen, as my mother and father projected their “image of a son” onto me. Their false selves conflicted with my true self, whose innocence, like a clear mirror, reflected their inner pain. In the silence of my bedroom, I cried out, “This is not me. I am not bad, I am not guilty.”

My parents’ trauma felt like a dark mist flowing into my soul. Raised in religious authoritarianism (toxic pedagogy), they had to break my will and enforce their thoughts to keep their lies intact—my existence was a threat.

Gradually, I could feel my ‘true-sense’ slipping away as the relentless abuse wore me down. Every night, my growing trauma-shadow would manifest and follow me down the dark hallway, sending shivers down my spine as it stalked me, until I reached my bed, where its red eyes would stare through the window shaded only by a thinly veiled curtain. The night terrors would wake me up shivering in terror as I screamed out for my mother. I learned early on about the indifference of the universe. . .

“Madness, mayhem, erotic vandalism, devastation of innumerable souls—while we scream and perish, History licks a finger and turns the page,”

—Thomas Ligotti

This “thing,” out there, within me, behind and beyond my reach—the invisible monster, stalking my soul day and night, hiding in the shadows—materialized from those giants called parents.

Projection and Reversal

Let’s define a few terms before we go further:

Parental Projection occurs when parents project onto their children what they despise in themselves, failing to see them as separate individuals. They punish the bodies of their children who house their projections.

As one battering mother said,
“Look at her giving you the eye! That’s how she picks up men – she’s a regular sexpot!”

Parental Reversal occurs when a parent adopts a child's role, expecting the child to meet their needs—“you are my little man.” The parent feels ignored if their needs aren't met and punishes the child for not acting like an adult:

“I have never felt loved all my life. When the baby was born, I thought he would love me. When he cried, it meant he didn’t love me. So I hit him.”

Children become containers for their parents’ unconscious trauma. The effects of this abuse are that children struggle to differentiate their parents’ trauma from their own. Their inner world is hijacked. They develop a constant need for attention and approval, feel powerless over others' expectations, and chronically blame themselves. The results manifest on the spectrum of Dissociative Identity Disorder.

Soul Slave

My childhood was a struggle to keep from sinking into the dark waters of the unconscious. For nearly the first twenty years of my life, I fought the ghosts in my parents’ souls—phantoms they projected and reinforced through physical and mental abuse.

I was alive to meet their needs, a slave, forced into obedience through physical abuse, imprisonment (being grounded for weeks at a time), and psychological torture visible in constant verbal abuse and delayed whippings.

For example, my stepfather would make me wait a week until he was ready to spank me. He wanted to get through his work week before whipping me with the belt. I guess it was too distracting. The days I endured in severe anxiety while trying to be a good boy in school were beyond my understanding of what was happening to me. A child does not recognize this treatment as abnormal; they believe they deserve it.

My birth father, who returned after my mother divorced my stepfather, used to spank me and then force me to “be happy and smile,” or he would spank me some more. This torture twisted my facial features for decades as an adult, deforming my smile with grief. It was awful. It took me many years of psycho-spiritual work to purge the trauma from my face. I went through periods where I had to rub the trauma out of my cheeks and forehead.

My parents were under a spell, and I was their demons’ sustenance. They suffered from severe, unprocessed childhood abuse, trapping them in the psychic mirror.

Vampirism and the Psychic Mirror

The psychic mirror reflects an individual's self-image internally. For a healthy person, their inner world is a sanctuary of solace, comfort, wonder, and curiosity. In contrast, a traumatized person’s inner realm is overshadowed by dark clouds and ominous creatures, those dissociated parts turned against them.

For example, a young girl’s feelings align with her imagination, creating a healthy sense of self. When traumatized, however, she becomes trapped in an internal image of herself in pain, leading to the belief “I am not a worthy person,” which reinforces an “image” of unworthiness. It is the images of her memories that have trapped her in time... this is what being trapped in the psychic mirror means.

Vampirism occurs because these emotionally charged self-images, like a magical servitor, need to keep trauma alive to stay active within a person's inner realm. These ghosts rely on psycho-spiritual energy because they are generated by the biological host, no different than Oz and the man behind the curtain.

These apparitions don’t survive on their own; they must feed, and in the case of parents, prey on defenseless children (see The Dark Crystal). It is the innocent whose essence satisfies their hunger. However, their influence extends further as they keep draining those around them who have been somehow «touched» by their presence. These vampires are narcissists, manipulators, and victims who seek sympathy through acts of self-harm. They are the unseen, draining others of attention.

A Life Derailed

Having been brainwashed, soul-raped, and mind-controlled, I was confused and disoriented. I reached the point where I couldn’t function socially. I dropped out of school in seventh grade with Ds and Fs (after being a straight-A student early on) due to the abuse. School administrators let me go early to get me out of junior high. When I got to high school, I dropped out after a few months. I literally couldn’t understand what my teachers were saying because of the constant yelling from my mother. My ears shut down to authority figures.

I experienced two nervous breakdowns and became suicidal by the age of eighteen. I was infected with a virus that drained my soul so completely that I had no sense of self other than the selves of my parents. I was possessed. I had been invaded, kicked out of my inner realm, and stood looking through the eyes of phantoms I knew weren’t me.

I became a puppet of their psychological complexes, a hollow human whose soul had retreated into the unconscious depths. The punishments were too severe, and the twisted mental anguish overwhelmed my consciousness.

The Soul’s Retreat

Fortunately, I never completely lost my sense of self. Somehow, a tiny inner compass remained, and as I embarked on the spiritual path, it grew into a still small voice followed by psycho-spiritual releases that led to a full explosion of energy. My inner child was healed and saved. My seed self was hatched, and the dragon power was released.

Eventually, I banished the giants—my parents.

Until the day my mother died, she was having a relationship with an imagined son in her mind. She never truly saw me. So I avoided her death and funeral to the dismay of my sister, whose last words to me were, “I will hate you forever.”

On my father's deathbed, I looked at him emotionlessly, while my mother accused me of being cold-hearted. She didn't realize I had been mourning his death alone in my apartment for hours the week before. This shows how little my mother truly knew and trusted me.

Despite the outside mortals (onlookers) who babbled sorceries such as “come on, she’s your mother of all things,” I remained firm in the devotion to my inner child. Why attend to someone who loved the son in her mind? It would have been all fake, and at that point, I was beyond tolerating projection, dismissal, and disrespect. There was no connection with the ‘real me’ there, so why bother showing up? I wasn’t interested in feeding their projections, nor did they deserve my presence.

The Path to Reclamation

Years later, I would find myself on a beach, on a moonless night, screaming into the air from my soul that was submerged in the dark unconscious waters. I was left wandering in a world I knew nothing about, suffering terribly from emotional scars and recurring night terrors.

When I entered the spiritual path, I was desperate, like someone paddling to avoid drowning. I did not have a choice; it was do or die. The psycho-spiritual releases that followed revealed the pent-up energy trapped inside. I simply followed the current release after release, each time expanding as I evolved into a mystic and eventually an initiate of the Dragon power (kundalini). I do not say this lightly or for praise. I state it as a fact, like one would proudly declare their rightful inheritance or inner truth. It’s a statement of who I am, regardless of public approval or validation.

The Plague of Ancestral Trauma

Proceeding with this treatise, let’s discuss the religious influence of generational trauma and current statistics, a topic that warrants a separate article.

Looking back to earlier times when the Christian Church invaded ancient cultures, we find the cultural injection of original sin, along with the corruption of the natural world, the rise of patriarchal authority, and the separation from direct divine communion through enforced priesthood.

Nowhere do we find the roots of child abuse more evident than in ideas spawned from biblical doctrine, such as “spare the rod, spoil the child” (Proverbs 13:24) and “I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me.” (Psalm 51:5)

As Richard Allestree (1676) put it:

“the new-born babe is full of the stains and pollution of sin, which it inherits from our first parents through our loins . . “ (1)

And Traugott Konstantin Oesterreich (1930):

Baptism used to include actual exorcism of the Devil, and the belief that the child who cried at his christening was letting out the Devil long survived the formal omission of exorcism in the Reformation. (2)

Even where formal religion did not stress the devil, it was there; here is a picture of a Polish Jew teaching in the nineteenth century:

He derived an intense joy from the agonies of the little victim trembling and shivering on the bench. And he used to administer the whippings coldly, slowly, deliberately . . . he asked the boy to let down his clothes, lie across the bench . . . and pitched in with the leathern thongs In every person there is a Good Spirit and an Evil Spirit. The Good Spirit has its own dwelling-place-which is the head, So has the Evil Spirit-and that is the place where you get the whipping.”(3)

In the history of childhood, Lloyd Demause wrote about the plague of projection throughout the history of generational child abuse.

The child in the past was so charged with projections that he was often in danger of being considered a changeling if he cried too much or was otherwise too demanding. There is a large literature on change-lings,(38) but it is not generally realized that it was not only deformed children who were killed as changelings, but also those who, as St. Augustine puts it, “suffer from a demon . . . they are under the power of the Devil .. . some infants die in this vexation . . .” (39) Some church fathers declared that if a baby merely cried it was committing a sin.

—Lloyd DeMause

The Horrible Truth

The belief that the defective, sinful child justified horrific abuse (along with the torture and burning of witches) throughout the Dark Ages continues to this day, as evidenced by the statistics.

As of 2025, Christianity is the largest religion in the world, with a population of 2.4 billion. This does not imply that Christians are generally child abusers. However, it highlights the issue of hereditary religion, which influences children's minds and programs them with a flawed, shame-based perception of reality. Furthermore, indoctrinating children constitutes child abuse.

But let's not whitewash the obvious. Religious-influenced child abuse is systemic, not always overtly, but covertly, as the infected parent (original sin=self-hate) motivates poisonous pedagogy.

Let’s take a look at the horrid facts of present-day child abuse:

One of the most normalized forms of violence is punitive discipline at home. This violent discipline is a daily reality for hundreds of millions of children. UNICEF 2024 data shows nearly 400 million children under 5—6 in 10 in that age group—face psychological aggression or physical punishment at home. About 330 million are subjected to physical punishment. This stems from social norms; over a quarter of mothers and caregivers believe physical punishment is necessary for raising children. This cultural acceptance is the biggest barrier to change, as it equates violence with proper parenting, blurring the line between discipline and maltreatment and enabling abuse.

Equally, the demonization of sexuality has infected the historical psyche:

The global extent of child sexual abuse is also enormous. The WHO reports that about 1 in 5 women and 1 in 7 men remember being sexually abused as children. When applied to the current world population, these rates lead to staggering numbers of survivors. UNICEF data indicates that 650 million girls and women alive today experienced sexual violence as children, while the estimated number for boys and men ranges from 410 to 530 million.

These sins should be punished rather than understood. This reflects the same fear-based mentality of the obedience meme, “submit to God or suffer eternal torment in hell.” And let me be frank, this orthodox virus leading to the horrific treatment of children is even more widespread in Islam, which is another product of Western orthodoxy—Jesus may love the little children, but the church programs them for population control.

Globally, violence against children is also deadly. On average, violence takes the lives of about 130,000 children and adolescents under the age of 20 each year. The WHO provides a more specific estimate of 40,150 annual homicide deaths in children under 18. These figures, however, are likely significant underestimates, as many deaths resulting from maltreatment are misattributed to accidents such as falls, burns, or drowning.

As the lyric goes, “all you need is love.” It is a simple concept tragically overlooked by the zombie horde. Why? Because it is a small seed in the heart that, if watered and cared for like a garden, grows into an oak tree. It is an organic process, not a slot machine.

I’ll leave you with some words from the movie: Ferngully:

Magi Lune: There are worlds within worlds, Crysta. Everything in our world is connected by the delicate strands of the web of life, which is a balance between the forces of destruction and the magical forces of creation.

Magi Lune: Since the beginning of time, we have been the guardians and the healers of the forest. We have too long forgotten the magic powers of nature. The time has come to call on them again. Remember: all the magic of creation exists within a single tiny seed.

This is what the world needs, one heart at a time.

—Zzenn

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Read Zzenn’s whole story that led to the kundalini metamorphosis:
unSpirital: A Spiritual Journey

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1. Richard Allestree, The Whole Duty of Man (London, 1766), p.20.

2. Demoniacal and Other Among Primitive Races, in Antiquity, the Middle
Ages, and Modern Times (New York, 1930); Grtinewald’s “St. Cyriakus”
shows a girl being exorcised, her mouth being forced open to let the devil out.

3. Shmarya Levin, Childhood in ExHe (New York, 1929), pp.58-59.

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