Occupied: When a Parent Colonizes Their Child’s Inner World
By Michael Kelman Portney
Some people grow up in homes. Others grow up under occupation.
Occupation doesn’t always look like tanks and soldiers. Sometimes, it looks like a parent who never lets you finish a sentence. A parent who rewrites your memories, reinterprets your motives, mocks your boundaries, and installs shame like spyware in your mind.
In a healthy home, the parent fosters the child’s autonomy. They might not agree with everything you say or do — but they give you space to become someone. They serve as scaffolding until you’re strong enough to build yourself.
But in a home under psychological occupation, the parent believes that your independence is a threat. Your truth must be denied. Your freedom must be managed. Your development must be shaped into something that keeps them comfortable — even if it means warping who you really are.
That’s not parenting. That’s colonization.
Signs of Psychological Occupation by a Parent
1. They don’t listen to understand — only to control
Every conversation becomes a battleground. You’re either defending your choices or justifying your existence. It doesn’t matter if your tone is calm or emotional. Their response is preloaded with defensiveness and distortion. They already know what role you’re supposed to play, and any deviation from that script is treated as mutiny.
2. Your emotions are reclassified as threats
If you cry, you’re "manipulative." If you’re angry, you’re "abusive." If you go silent, you’re "withholding love." Every feeling is framed as an attack on them. There’s no room for emotional authenticity — only emotional loyalty to their needs.
3. They redefine your reality
"That never happened." "You’re too sensitive." "You’re imagining things."
You begin to question your own memory, your own instincts, your own grip on the truth. That’s gaslighting at scale. It’s not just a lie here or there. It’s a structural campaign to overwrite your version of reality with one that keeps them blameless.
4. You’re made to feel guilty for asserting needs
Need privacy? You’re secretive. Need respect? You’re ungrateful. Need space? You’re abandoning them.
Autonomy becomes a punishable offense. Every move toward independence is reframed as a betrayal.
5. They triangulate
Your other family members are drawn into the drama. They’re coached, recruited, or manipulated to enforce the dominant narrative. You become the "problem child" — when all you’re doing is waking up.
Suddenly, your relatives have "concerns." Your siblings are distant. The story has spread before you had a chance to speak. That’s not just dysfunction. That’s regime-level disinformation.
The Strategy of Colonizers: Why They Do It
It’s rarely just about you. It’s about power.
Parents who psychologically occupy their children often have unresolved trauma, narcissistic injury, or a core belief that control equals love. You stepping outside their narrative threatens the very structure they’ve built to protect themselves from shame.
You’re not just disobeying them. You’re defecting from their regime.
And in these systems, truth is treason.
Let’s be even more precise: they aren’t trying to destroy you. They’re trying to manage you. Contain you. Keep you as a supporting character in their story. And when you try to become the author of your own life, they respond like any empire losing its colony.
They clamp down. They wage psychological warfare. And they call it love.
Symptoms of Being Occupied
Chronic guilt, even when you’ve done nothing wrong
Exhaustion from every interaction
Feeling like you have to “prove” your version of events constantly
Isolation from allies who might validate your story
The need to rehearse every conversation in your head before you say it
Shame for simply existing as yourself
Feeling like your parent is always watching, even when they’re not around
The compulsive urge to apologize, defend, explain, or appease
These symptoms aren’t neuroses. They’re the psychological residue of occupation.
A Note on Neurodivergence: When the Occupier Calls It Defiance
If you’re autistic or otherwise neurodivergent, the occupation often comes with a specific twist: your difference is pathologized.
They don’t want to understand your brain. They want to normalize you.
What they call "rudeness" might be your directness. What they call "selfishness" might be your sensory boundaries. What they call "manipulation" might be your need to express distress in a different way.
And when you try to explain? They say you're "playing the victim."
Your diagnosis becomes another weapon in their arsenal — either dismissed entirely or held against you as proof that you are the problem.
This isn’t just ableism. It’s an attempt to erase your way of being from the home.
Breaking Free: The Path to Liberation
You don’t win a psychological occupation by negotiating with your captor. You win it by building a sovereign state inside yourself that they don’t get to govern anymore.
1. Call it what it is
Not "difficult parenting." Not "tough love." Not "generational trauma."
Occupation. Name it to reclaim it.
2. Exit the narrative
Refuse the role they’ve written for you. Whether that’s the black sheep, the sick one, the failure, or the rebel. Burn the script.
They’re not the author of your story anymore.
3. Assert your reality
You’re not obligated to be “fair” to someone who’s distorted your life for their comfort. Speak plainly. Speak truthfully. Document it if you need to. But stop doubting your clarity.
The truth doesn’t need permission.
4. Establish sovereignty
Build boundaries like borders. Issue psychological visas. Enforce your emotional laws. Anyone who won’t respect your independence doesn’t get access to your country.
You don’t owe anyone citizenship in your nervous system.
5. Find your allies
You’re not alone. There are others who’ve lived under similar regimes. Compare notes. Share war stories. Find solidarity. That’s how you rebuild — together.
And if your family turns on you for speaking out, let them. It only proves that the regime was real all along.
Final Thought
If your mother’s behavior has made you feel like you don’t get to own your mind, your choices, your truth — that’s not an exaggeration. That’s a hostile occupation. It’s not just abusive; it’s a violation of your right to exist as a free human being.
It doesn’t matter if she never hit you. It doesn’t matter if she claims to love you. It doesn’t matter how many people she’s fooled.
The occupation ends when you say it does.
And waking up is the first act of revolution.
You didn’t destroy the family. You just stopped living under martial law.
Now build the country you want to live in.
