When Ideology Possesses the Family
The Parent as Witness and Victim
Republished with permission from Jason’s substack.
Something Has Entered the Room
There’s a moment—often quiet, often private—when a parent realizes something has changed. Not just in their child, but in the atmosphere of the home. It’s as if something foreign has entered the room. Something invisible, but heavy. It doesn’t speak in full sentences, but it has a language. A rhythm. A command. It stirs confusion, tension, and silence. It rearranges trust.
You can’t name it at first. But you feel it. You feel it in the pauses. In the new vocabulary. In the discomfort that creeps into once-effortless moments with your child. You feel it when the air in the house starts to thicken—not from conflict, but from something unnamed and uninvited.
It’s not simply grief. It’s not simply fear. It is something else entirely.
A possession.
Something ideological. Something spiritual. Something designed to displace—not just beliefs—but bonds.
Ideological Possession.
You Don’t Just Observe It—You Carry It
What makes ideological possession so devastating is not just what it does to your child—but what it does to you. You don’t just watch. You carry. You internalize. You wrestle. You replay conversations in your mind over and over, trying to find the moment it began. Trying to find the right word that might bring them back.
You become both witness and victim.
This is what many parents struggle to articulate. Not because they lack words, but because the experience itself is unspeakable. You see your child repeating phrases, shifting identities, mirroring groupthink. But what hits harder is the internal rupture: the way your own body begins reacting. The tightening of your chest when you’re told to “just affirm.” The nausea after reading another article instructing you to be silent and supportive, or risk being labeled unsafe.
It is as if something sacred has been interrupted—and you’re not allowed to say so.
You begin to lose track of your own instincts. You question your gut. You wonder if your memory is distorted. And yet, something deep within you keeps whispering: this isn’t right.
And still, no one around you seems to notice what you feel. Friends parrot the same slogans. Schools echo the same narratives. Professionals speak in scripts. The collective response seems more rehearsed than real. And that makes you feel even more alone. Disconnected. Like something has taken up space inside you that was never meant to be there.
Identity Fusion: When Your Child Becomes the Ideology
One of the most disorienting aspects for parents is watching their child fuse with an ideology. It’s no longer a perspective—they’ve become it. Their language, their reactions, their mannerisms—all seem downloaded from a collective hive mind. Every question is met with rehearsed outrage. Every boundary you offer is framed as violence. There is no curiosity, no humility, no invitation to explore nuance.
Your child hasn’t just adopted a belief. They’ve merged with it. The ideology doesn’t live beside them—it lives through them.
This is identity fusion. And it doesn’t just blur the lines between person and ideology—it erases them. The child is no longer navigating beliefs; they are being navigated by them. It becomes impossible to know where your child ends and the programming begins.
This transformation doesn’t just shift the child’s inner world—it restructures the family. Love becomes conditional. Acceptance becomes transactional. You are either “with them” or “against them.”
And if you do not conform—you become the villain in your own child’s story. Their inner circle is trained to see you not as loving, but as harmful. Not as thoughtful, but as oppressive.
The Cult Parallel: A Parent’s Private Hell
For many parents, the experience echoes something disturbingly familiar—like watching a loved one fall into a cult. The resemblance isn’t theoretical; it’s visceral.
You witness your child change in real time. Their personality, their language, even their facial expressions begin to shift. They speak with certainty, but the words feel borrowed. They begin to cut off anyone who doesn’t reinforce their new worldview. Their relationships narrow to those who “understand,” while everyone else is painted as dangerous, unenlightened, or abusive.
The literature on cult involvement speaks to this precisely. Families describe feeling as if they’ve lost someone who is still physically present. This is called “ambiguous loss”—a term used when a person is physically alive, but psychologically or relationally gone. And the worst part? You are left holding the weight of this loss, without a death, without a goodbye, without a ritual.
You are watching your child be reprogrammed by something that doesn’t love them—it uses them. And you are expected to smile and affirm it.
This isn’t just emotional trauma. It’s spiritual theft.
You walk on eggshells, trying not to trigger them. You rehearse how to ask a simple question without being accused. And all the while, your nervous system is screaming. Your instincts are screaming. But no one around you will validate what you see. Because to do so would be to question the ideology. And that, you’re told, is dangerous. Their inner circle is trained to see you not as loving, but as harmful. Not as thoughtful, but as oppressive.
The Psychic Wound That Has No Name
This creates a wound. But it’s not a wound you can point to. It’s psychic. It’s relational. It lives in the tension between what you feel and what you’re told to ignore. It resides in the fracture between your inner truth and outer silence.
There is a severance that occurs—not just between parent and child—but within the parent themselves. Part of you still knows the truth. Still sees your child. Still remembers who they were before the script arrived. But another part of you doubts. Questions. Silences itself to survive.
And that silence? That inner muting? That’s the cost.
That’s the wound.
You go to bed rehearsing conversations you’ll never have. You wake up with a weight in your chest that doesn’t belong to you, but somehow now lives inside you. You pray that this is just a phase—but some part of you knows better. Some part of you feels the presence of something more enduring.
This isn’t about projecting unresolved trauma onto your child. This is about trying to stay rooted in a storm that’s designed to make you disappear. A storm that calls your love hate. A storm that demands your soul’s silence in exchange for social approval. A storm that gaslights reality—leaving you sitting with the dissonance and the psychological scars.
When Love Requires Disobedience
The tragedy is this: you are still loving your child. Fiercely. Viscerally. You are loving them with your body, your silence, your sleepless nights. You are loving them in the face of accusation. You are loving them while being erased.
But that love is no longer recognized.
Because love, in this new language, means affirmation. Means compliance. Means erasure of your knowing. Your parental responsibility is to hold wisdom, history, reality, and truth—for the ones still trying to understand what any of it means. It means signing a social contract that invalidates your instincts. It means handing over the sacred relationship between parent and child to a doctrine.
But real love doesn’t mean obedience. It means presence. It means discernment. It means anchoring in truth even when the world demands performance. It means holding steady when others drift. It means seeing through the fog and remembering who your child was—who they still are underneath it all.
And sometimes, love requires disobedience.
Sometimes love looks like not nodding. Sometimes it looks like saying no. Sometimes it looks like being exiled by the very people you’d die for.
This is not an act of defiance. This is an act of devotion.
What You Can Do: Holding On to Yourself in the Storm
If you’re in the middle of this—watching your child shift into someone unrecognizable, navigating daily life while trying to preserve your sanity—then you need more than resilience. You need tools to stay tethered to yourself.
This isn’t about fixing your child. This is about protecting your center so you don’t collapse under the weight of what’s happening.
First, ground your body. Ideological possession doesn’t just live in the mind—it creates tension in the nervous system. Trauma-informed practices like somatic experiencing, breathwork, or simply placing your hand on your heart and belly can interrupt the freeze response. Feel your feet. Reclaim the present moment.
Second, strengthen your emotional boundaries. When your child fuses with a belief system, their emotions may spike into rage, blame, or withdrawal. It’s essential not to internalize these reactions as reflections of your worth. Visualize returning what doesn’t belong to you. Speak aloud the truth, even if just in private: “This is not mine.”
Third, connect with others who see clearly. Isolation amplifies distortion. Whether in confidential parent circles, trauma-informed groups, or through one trusted friend—speak. Let your truth be witnessed. One parent described it like this: “The moment I said it out loud—that I felt like my child had been taken over—I finally exhaled.”
Fourth, engage in ritual or meaning-making. When systems fail us, we need soul-based practices to carry the weight. Light a candle. Write unsent letters. Pray, drum, scream in the forest—whatever anchors you in your own lineage and knowing. You are not a technician managing a crisis. You are a parent enduring spiritual warfare.
Finally, get support that honours complexity. Seek out therapists, spiritual mentors, or coaches who don’t parrot affirm-only scripts. Ask the hard questions. Make sure they honour both your child’s soul and your sacred role as a parent. You deserve space to feel, grieve, rage, and reorient—without shame.
This path is not linear. There is no blueprint. But there is you. And you are worth protecting.
You Are Not Alone
If you are a parent walking this path—you are not broken. You are not failing. You are not alone.
You are simply the one still feeling.
You are carrying something unspeakable. A grief that has no ritual. A confusion that has no name. And yet, that weight, that ache, that rupture—it is proof. Proof that you have not been fully possessed. Proof that your soul is still intact. Proof that you still know the difference between love and performance.
And that knowing? It is everything.
That knowing is the ember beneath the ashes. The part of you that hasn’t gone numb. The part of you that remembers.
Stay with it.
Speak it.
Even if your voice shakes.
Even if the world calls you wrong.
Because one day, your child might find their way back. And when they do, they will need to know that someone never left.
I have felt every piece of this article. I am not alone.
Thank you-this is so validating. I'm going to print this out and re-read it periodically for inspiration and strength. Beautifully said!