Out of the mouth of babes

It has been an unsettling time in our world. I am not a fan of the word “gaslighting”, but there certainly seems to be a war underway to shape our internal narrative regarding what is “safe” and what our future holds.  

The news is screaming about AI threats, while those in power call it a hoax. We are supposed to power through economic fears and rising costs assured by those who have no financial restrictions. The conspiracy machine cranks out new threats at dizzying speed to keep us off balance.

A stressed population is a highly pliable population. This isn’t conspiracy, it’s sociology. When you flood people with a constant diet of fear, they grow weary and don’t know what to think or feel. When people are fed fear continuously, something deep in the human system begins to malfunction. Eventually, this leads to fear fatigue as we become just too tired to react, our ability to access long-term thinking and creativity crumbles and discernment goes offline.

This is the moment people stop reacting not because they don’t care, but because they can’t. Once the ability to discern truth collapses, people become vulnerable to external narratives, especially loud or simplistic ones. This is why fear is such a powerful force. It doesn’t just change behavior, it changes perception.

We were born with the ability to feel our way through life.

Many years ago, my ex-husband was watching a football game while our youngest daughter played nearby. He started whooping and hollering about the “assets” of the cheer leaders. She jumped on her dad and started hitting him with her tiny fists. “Why do you look at other women when Mommy is the prettiest woman in the world?”

While I appreciate her words, she as not reacting to his focus, she was reacting to how his actions made her mother feel. At the ripe old age of five she had no knowledge about how marriages are supposed to function; but she knew one person was deliberately provoking a negative reaction in another person, and her instinct was protection, and more importantly correction.

A few weeks later I overheard her older sister ask a devastating question of her aunt. “Aunt Shelia, why does my daddy treat my mommy so bad?”

She wasn’t confused about what she saw. She was confused about why it was allowed to happen. Her question was an attempt to reconcile what she felt with what she saw.

That was the wake up call I needed to say enough! This is not what I want to model for my children. The constant fear had caused me to ignore my own innate instincts.

Our small children saw a pattern, felt the impact, and named the truth. They did it without hesitation because children don’t yet second‑guess what they feel.

As we grow, we begin to second guess what our instincts clearly broadcast. My ex-husband kept telling me that what I saw, felt, and knew, was wrong. I wanted, needed, to believe him because it kept the peace even though it required me to override my intuition. I slipped and fell into survival mode. Survival mode has a limited vocabulary and shrinks the world we inhabit. In my mind, keeping the family intact was the best thing for my daughters. What I failed to recognize the damage being done by modelling a father who was physically present but emotionally absent. It’s a reflection of how survival mode narrows the field of vision so completely that what feels protective in the moment can quietly create patterns we never intended.

When you live inside a shrinking world long enough, the boundaries of what feels “normal” shift. Survival mode is not weakness; it’s adaptation. One sentence from a wise person masquerading as a child was enough to snap me out of survival armed with the courage to reclaim who I was supposed to be.

I don’t regret or blame those circumstances; they gave me the training required to enter a world of gas lighters and misogynists armed with a greater understanding of the mechanics of fear.  

When you understand the mechanics, you know the first step is to erode the family connections. You create the atmosphere that tears relationships apart, whether it’s in a household, a workplace, a political movement, or a cultural narrative. Attack the connections that keep that person strong.

Then you move on to history, bad guys were misunderstood, elections were stolen, medicine harms, science lies and the media is corrupt. Once a person is disoriented, they become easier to influence, not because they’re weak, but because their internal compass has been overloaded.

It’s not my intention to tell anyone what to think. I am describing how thinking can be shaped when fear, confusion, and emotional erosion are used as tools. I am not telling people what to believe. I’m reflecting on how belief can be shaped when we feel vulnerable.

I am offering a reminder, that clarity and understanding can only be accessed from within. The system that offers truth has always existed with in us. The internal guidance system every human is born with, the one my daughters were still using when they saw what I was enduring. They saw truth, when my heart was is in a holding pattern of trying to maintain peace and the status quo.

What I am saying, those who seek power through fear always begin by converting human emotion into a resource. When someone wants power, they don’t need your agreement; they need your emotional engagement.

Clarity lives inside, understanding lives inside, truth lives inside. No system, personal or global, can take what you refuse to trade. Because in the Light, We are All Love.