The Golden Child Syndrome

Compliance with abuse leads to the loss of identity in individuals and society... and so much more

In the narcissistic abuse realm, we talk about the roles of the Golden Child and Scapegoat in an abusive family. However, this can also apply to a workplace or other social system. These roles are part of the dynamics of an abusive relational matrix. We can see the same in society. This has become even more clear in the recent years.

The scapegoat is where the family's (or society’s) sins and shame are tossed. The scapegoat becomes the focus of the problem, instead of the abuser or the abuse. Those who do evil are always in need of a scapegoat so they don’t have to take accountability or feel the guilt of their malevolent actions.

The scapegoat often reacts or fights back, so the abuser/s (and their enablers) can point the finger at this behavior as the focus of the problem. The scapegoat is shamed, devalued, punished, ostracized, criticized or otherwise told they’re not good enough.

Some people think it’s much better to be the Golden Child than the scapegoat. But life is not fun for the Golden Child either. There are long-term consequences for complying with and enabling abuse and tyranny. These consequences affect not only the individual enabler but also the society.

Let’s look at the parallels between what happens in the family system and society. In society, the government is the authority figure like the parents are in a family.

What is a Golden Child?

This is the one who receives a lot of pressure for compliance and is rewarded for being a trophy image that makes the family look good on the outside. The Golden Child follows the rules and is the example to be followed. This compliance brings temporary relief but comes with a lot of distress in the long-term.

The Golden Child will get love, approval, validation and acceptance only when they’re meeting the demands of the narcissistic parent/s. Sometimes compliance isn’t rewarded with anything but the temporary absence of abuse. This means that the kid learns to continually adjust to the increasingly absurd rules in order to keep getting these intermittent rewards.

The narcissistic parent/s will use triangulation in order to create a sense of competition between the children, setting the bar for getting love and approval through compliance. The one who complies the most is awarded the status of Golden Child.

The Golden Child becomes an extension of the narcissistic parent/s. This child will often get used for abuse by proxy against the other kids in the family.

The Golden Child will get programmed with the belief of being special or exclusive. This can create a sense of entitlement and false confidence in one’s talents or skills.

The Golden Child is usually the one who says they had an amazing childhood when they’re still unable to pierce the denial about their dysfunctional family system of abuse and/or neglect.

The Golden Child gets programmed to sacrifice their own needs, thoughts, opinions, feelings and perception of reality when these do not align with the abusive parent/s.

Due to the intermittent reinforcement of receiving praise and rewards only when they comply (and even still, not every time), the Golden Child will develop an obsession with compliance in order to get the reward. This will become part of their identity. They learn that in order to be considered a “good person”, they must comply, even if it’s harmful to themselves or others, or against their innate sense of right and wrong.

The Golden Child gets programmed to default into a state of denial when there is abuse and evil present in the environment. While the child may not have the verbal or cognitive ways of identifying what’s happening, the Golden Child grown up as an adult will develop much more sophisticated methods of denial by rationalizing and minimizing the abuse.

The Golden Child learns to avoid rebellion and individuation in order not to betray the expectations of the parent/s, who expect the kid to remain infantile and dependent, even into adulthood.

One of the Golden Child’s main survival mechanisms is people-pleasing behavior, which develops into codependency patterns, serving the control addiction of the narcissistic parent/s. They often learn to satisfy others’ needs at the expense of their own. They can lack the ability to set boundaries and say no because it will mean a loss of praise, approval and validation as well as the peace in the relationship or environment.

In other cases, the Golden Child can grow up to become manipulative and controlling, using others to meet their needs and disregarding others' right to their own individual identity, opinions, perspectives of reality and needs. This becomes a narcissistic form of self-preservation.

The Golden Child loses their identity and sense of self in order to meet the expectations of the narcissistic parent/s. They can become addicted to outside praise, validation and approval. This creates a tendency to sacrifice their individual identity for the family identity when they're praised by the family for being compliant with the family’s ideology.

The Golden Child is taught to measure their self-worth based on accomplishments and praise. Since their self-esteem is others-directed, they often defer to people-pleasing behavior in order to avoid feelings of shame, while yearning for other people to fawn over them. This form of false self-esteem can also create a sense of inferiority and unworthiness when other people get praise for accomplishments or rewarded for compliance. The more manipulative ones will put a lot of emphasis on image management so they can always look good to others, even if that image is a total lie.

The Golden Child will develop a hypersensitivity to criticism and fear of failure or not being good enough. This can show up even when they do accomplish something. The narcissistic parent/s will often praise the kid in one breath and subtly devalue them in the next. This way the child learns that it’s never enough and they always need to work harder to gain the reward. That creates a deep sense of insecurity. They’ll develop a terrifying fear of not being perfect and that can even create an inability to admit mistakes because it will mean falling in the perception of others. The Golden Child will often feel self-directed frustration and anger when they don’t measure up to the expectations of others.

Without self-awareness, confronting the truth and working on self-healing, the childhood programming for Golden Child Syndrome gets transferred from the dynamic with the narcissistic parent/s to other abusive authority figures in adulthood (ie: government, partners, bosses, society, etc.).

We can see the Golden Child Syndrome in any tyrannical society:

• When people go along with the abusive expectations, demands and non-sensical rules of tyrants even when they disagree or the measures are harmful

• When people compete for the most perfect citizen award

• When people virtue-signal their compliance (ie: posting about their social distancing actions, wearing masks in selfies, posting photos of their kids in masks, taking vaxxies after getting injected with experimental drugs, posting photos of their kids getting injected with the experimental drugs)

• When people minimize, rationalize or otherwise make excuses for the abuse of tyrants who are rewarding them for compliance

• When people overestimate their own skills or abilities (such as critical thinking) or the righteousness of their compliant actions

• When people lose their minds upon being confronted with uncomfortable evidence about the lies and deception coming from government, science, medicine, academia, corporations, private organizations, etc., because it challenges their self-image of goodness and perfection for conforming with tyranny

• When people pretend that nothing is happening in order to avoid losing status, privileges or resources

• When people sacrifice reality, reason, facts or even their life for the praise or favor of others

The meme of the Golden Child Syndrome in society:

In media, we see examples of promoting the Golden Child Syndrome. The praise of vaccine selfies, AKA vaxxies, is one of the most obvious.

The article states the Golden Child motivation, "If social pressure works to increase vaccine uptake, then selfies are a good way to subtly sway people who may be on the fence to get the vaccine shots."

Another headline says it’s “a good thing,” therefore implying it’s what good people do.

Celebrities were recruited to promote the Golden Child Syndrome. Be cool like us.

The Golden Child seeks praise and reward, then gets used as an example to coerce compliance and conformity from others who want to get praised and rewarded.

Someone in the article above commented,"I tweeted out my own vaccine selfie and was met with a widely congratulatory response.”

There are classic Golden Child “you’re special” messages of grandiosity in hashtags that were created to promote the injections like, #ImABigShot.

The article also stated that vaxxies were used as "a tool to broadcast being part of an exclusive group.” Some sites even offered formal selfie stations because,"they may help get more shots in arms,” and they’re described as,"evidence that selfies can sometimes be selfless".

Partly with the goal of curbing vaccine hesitancy, some vaccine sites are making it easy for people to take and share selfies by setting up a backdrop similar to what one may see at a red carpet event.

One person in the article "likened the cheering and energy at the vaccine site to that of a rock concert".

Unfortunately for those who complied, the praise was short-lived, as it is for any Golden Child.

Now the tyrants are raising the bar. Canada recently announced that they’re no longer using the phrase “fully vaccinated” and instead changing the language to "up to date". Canadians will be required to get another dose every nine months in order to get, and maintain, that stamp of approval.

The goal post for praise and approval keeps moving, just like how the Golden Child will never be enough for the demands of their narcissistic parent/s.

The societal Golden Child gains a false sense of self-esteem and self-worth from the social praise for compliance.

Many people are finding a new identity in the praise they're getting for being a Golden Child in society.

For some, it may be the praise they've been used to working for since childhood in their own families.

For others, it can be the praise they never got in childhood. Now they finally found an opportunity in which they can receive the praise and reward from others by complying and following the rules of being a "good citizen" and "doing your part for society".

We could all fall into this trap of seeking social approval if we aren’t careful.

Admittedly, I was erroneously gaining some of my self-esteem through the YouTube following that I built from 2016 until 2020. By 2019, the cracks in that illusion began as I started noticing the subtle abuse taking place on YouTube. They started penalizing my videos for “sensitive content”, which is an incredibly arbitrary term, one which makes it difficult to even understand what are the rules exactly. Other times my videos would get penalized for “violence,” just for speaking about abuse in no particularly graphic way.

By the time the covid tyranny was becoming clear in 2020, I started getting a gnawing feeling in my conscience that I needed to walk away from those platforms due to the censorship, propaganda and other forms of information control and gaslighting like the shadow banning. Posting content on the mainstream platforms started feeling like another abusive relationship. I was done appealing and asking why my content was getting penalized. In life I had already learned that begging abusers to stop abusing me only leads to powerlessness. I knew the only sane solution was to walk away.

Yet I was feeling torn because I was also realizing that it would mean letting go of the false sense of esteem that I had gained through the praise and approval of my subscribers over the years. I was well aware of what happens to people who speak up about abuse in an abusive system because I already saw it happen in my own family and several other work and social environments. Even though one might think that an audience of people learning about narcissistic abuse (like my social media platforms) would be the first people to call out the abuse in the world, that’s not at all what happened. I knew I would be scapegoated for speaking up, even by people who had praised me over the years. I also knew there was a risk of losing everything I had worked hard to build.

I was tormenting myself with this inner conflict for quite a few months. I had written an email to my newsletter list in April 2020 with my perspectives on the global narcissistic abuse and the trajectory I saw it going. Then I moved countries, repatriating to USA where I am a citizen and could feel more comfortable with the discomfort of dissidence. Once I got myself somewhat rooted here for the storm, I posted a few things on my Instagram and Facebook pages in the autumn of 2020 about the Stockholm Syndrome taking place in society. In private, I was talking with my friends about it daily. But publicly, I was barely dipping my toes in, still mostly floundering in cowardice and silence.

I didn't have the courage to take a bold stand publicly until someone called me out. In late 2020, a girl on Instagram commented on one of my posts, asking why nobody in the narcissistic abuse community was addressing the worldwide abuse. She wrote,

What I see is the very people who helped me understand I should never stay silent in the face of abuse, staying silent in the face of abuse. Yes, we will be scapegoated for speaking out. We know this from our own childhood experiences. We also know that when we stay silent in the face of abuse, the abuse will only escalate and that is exactly what we are seeing today. There are many doctors, lawyers and activists risking everything to speak up. I find it confusing and heartbreaking to see the opposite in the very community where I learned that I never again had to tolerate or keep quiet when someone abused me or others.

I replied, “You’re right.”

She lit a fire under my feet and I’m so grateful she did. I was stuck in my own fear and cowardice and no one else in my life was calling me out. I needed to read this cold water to the face so I could find my ladyballs and the words to start speaking about it.

Of course, speaking the truth about the global deception and lies meant that some of the very people who once had such great things to say about me would turn to hate me and call me all sorts of names for not promoting the narrative and complying as a good Golden Child does. I knew I would lose clients, customers and subscribers, and that I did. My website continues to be targeted. These were consequences that I decided I was willing to live with. The only other option was to sacrifice my integrity and kill a part of my conscience in order to remain quiet about the abuse and manipulation that I was witnessing around the world, in false hopes that my silence would somehow protect me.

I finally resolved the inner conflict and started directly speaking about it. The comments immediately started rolling:

"You're OUT OF LINE here".

"You're not qualified to post dangerous thoughts like this."

"This is an abuse of your power."

"You need to check yourself."

“You’re a narcissist/psychopath who lacks empathy, the very thing you’re teaching us to avoid.”

“I wish you would stop spreading fear.”

“Stay in your lane. You’re not a doctor or scientist. Leave it to the experts.”

The interesting thing was that I’d already heard all of these same things over the years from people who hated me for talking about narcissistic abuse (perhaps because they felt called out) or people who told me that I was unqualified to speak of such things since I’m a holistic coach and not a therapist, psychologist or psychiatrist.

Another interesting thing was that for every negative comment or email I received, there were 20+ more with positive comments, thanking me for saying what they also see happening. This is something that didn’t happen in my family or any of the abusive social and work environments where I took a stand against the abuse. It was pleasantly surprising. Perhaps this is one of the perks of larger social systems.

In my personal and professional experience, I’ve noticed only a small percentage of people in abusive systems have the courage to speak up about the abuse because this requires individuating from one’s dependence on the abusive system, which will certainly punish or ostracize those who dare to speak the truth.

Speaking the truth about abuse in an abusive system will always make you a scapegoat of the abusers and their enablers. You can go from being a Golden Child to a scapegoat in an instant for taking such a stand.

I've been both the Golden Child and Scapegoat, and I can tell you that both roles suck. Neither is better. They may use you as a scapegoat, but at least you’ll know in your heart that you did what was right, standing in your identity, integrity and truth.

It's a lot more fun to get praised than punished, devalued, cancelled and smeared. But that kind of praise also comes with a BIG price which is often overlooked in the moment of instant gratification.

This Golden Child status appeals not just to those with an unhealed Golden Child Syndrome from childhood, but even to some bitter and resentful scapegoats who finally see an opportunity to get the praise they never got in their family or other social system. It can be something of a reflexive reaction. Social media posts reveal that a lot of people are hungry for social reward.

Compliance leads to reward in an abusive system, yet it comes at the grave expense of one's sense of self.

Over time, the Golden Child Syndrome leads to a complete loss of identity and sense of self. Only an emptiness and shell of the original person remains. This is because over time, the person will sacrifice their identity and sense of self in order to gain the praise (or at least temporarily avoid) the abuse.

In Germany after WWII, people lost their identities. Some of them admitted to their families on the deathbed that they knew what was happening but chose to turn the other way. It was easier and they thought it was safer. So they pretended things were fine and complied, often unknowingly becoming enablers and accomplices to the crimes.

In the 1930s and 40s, people were disappearing and there were rumors of people getting tortured and killed at the camps. Still the bystanders were silent. Now in the 2020s, here we are again, where people are collapsing, many of them dying suddenly and mysteriously. Some countries are already reporting alarming increases in non-covid, all-cause mortality recently. Still the media is silent. So are many people who work in agencies, organizations and corporations where they have access to this information. Same with those who work in medicine, first response, funeral homes, medical billing, etc. who also have direct contact with this information.

Pretending damages the heart. The heart is also the seat of courage.

It takes courage to speak the unpopular truth and risk social rejection. This can feel like death to the mammalian part of our nervous system which seeks safety through social connection. The longer you pretend everything is okay when it’s not, the more difficult it is to resuscitate your courage.

The awesome thing is that courage can be contagious.

I’m grateful for the young woman who called me out on Instagram, challenging me to speak up. I’m grateful for the brave doctors, scientists and lawyers who started speaking up first, such as America’s Frontline Doctors, Dr. Michael Yeadon, Dr. Zev Zelenko, Chris Martenson, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, and Dr. Reiner Fuellmich. I’m also grateful for the artists who took the courageous lead early on. The comedian JP Sears was one of the first social media influencers to start publicly speaking about these unpopular topics in 2020, using comedy to avoid censorship. The singer Jimmy Levy, who calls himself “the most censored singer in the world,” broke the silence through his music when Jimmy teamed up with Hi-Rez, a hip-hop artist. Together they create fantastic music that helps to change the world during these times of tyranny.

As Dr. Mattias Desmet says from his academic studies in totalitarianism, it’s important for citizens to keep speaking the truth in order to weaken the mass formation in society and minimize the destructiveness of the masses.

There are a lot of people working in industries who are witnessing first-hand evidence of the lies but not speaking up.

There are also a lot of influencers and other culture leaders who are silent. Many people with large social media followings know something is wrong, that we are being lied to and deceived, yet they pretend like it’s not happening or try to be diplomatic.

There’s a lot to lose, that’s no joke. There’s also a lot of self-doubt because none of us really know exactly what’s going on. There’s a lot of pressure to feel like you have to have all the definitive answers or the right credentials if you’re going to say something. You don’t have to know everything, no one does. You don’t have to be an expert to have an opinion and something important to contribute to the conversation.

Whenever injustice takes place, few are guilty, but all are responsible.
Indifference to evil is more insidious than doing evil itself.
~ Rabbi Abraham Heschel

I was a coward at first too. I regret not speaking up sooner because my silence was enabling the evil. So now I’m going to pay it forward and call you out, as I was called out, and into action.

If you sense something is wrong, yet you’re struggling with the inner conflict of speaking up, I am encouraging you to reconsider the long-term cost of remaining silent, pretending or lying about it.

Remember, it’s the enablers that maintain an abusive system, thereby becoming accomplices to the crimes.

What you should do to constrain evil is to take on the moral burden that produces atrocity in the world on to yourself. Solzhenitsyn's advice was to start by not lying. His diagnosis was that it was the willingness to knowingly deceive yourself and other people that generated and supported the totalitarian catastrophe and that your primary obligation was to cease participating in that. That places the deceiver in your own heart and puts on you the moral weight of engaging in that battle in the psychological or spiritual space.

~ Jordan Peterson

One of the self-defeating thoughts that may be holding you back is, Who am I to speak about this? You are a citizen and you have the right, dare I say the responsibility, to share your perspectives about what you see happening in your country and to check whether your own actions or inactions are enabling the evil.

One of the first things you’ll hear from abusers and their enablers if you speak up about the covid tyranny is, "You're not a doctor. You’re not qualified and you don’t have any right to speak of such things.”

If that’s what’s holding you back, then let’s look at what happens when a doctor speaks up.

Doctors have been smeared, censored, shamed, had their medical license threatened or revoked, and even lost their jobs for speaking up during the last 2+ years.

A client of mine is a doctor in Australia, where there are really severe penalties for medical professionals challenging the narrative. She contacted me after hearing me speak with the Berlin Corona Investigative Committee about the abuse dynamics that lead to compliance with tyranny. The good doctor was also realizing that something is very wrong with what’s been going on in medicine but she didn’t know what to do.

At the time, this doctor was struggling in the inner conflict, to speak or not to speak, due to the threats to her medical license and livelihood. When we spoke the first time earlier this year, she was feeling torn between her conscience and the consequences of speaking the truth. She had already seen colleagues in Australia have their medical license revoked, people who can no longer call themselves doctor because they spoke the unpopular truth. That is not a small price to pay. Yet her conscience eventually won the inner conflict and she decided she couldn't live with the lie any more.

After she broke through that dilemma, she decided to start speaking up with an anonymous statement about the trends that she's been seeing in her patients post-jab as well as some important reminders about the Constitution and the first tenet of medicine, which is, "Do no harm". Her statement was read by a Stephen Kelley, a New South Wales police officer who served for 28 years and resigned last year due to the NSW police commissioner’s mandate on vaccines. Earlier this year, he asked for doctors to come forward and speak out, so she contacted him and he’s reading the doctor’s statement here.

We spoke again recently and the doctor said what's surprising her now is the amount of irrational anger that people (even medical professionals) feel if you bring up the jab injuries or the dangers of the jab due to all the deaths and adverse reactions that people are having. She said, of all the medical treatments that she's seen people turn away over decades working in medicine, including chemotherapy, there has never been a topic so inflammatory as this jab.

This doctor told me that she is finding the silence around the jab injuries quite disturbing. She's witnessing the stonewalling that happens from her colleagues when she brings it up. “As soon as you get close to truth, people immediately cut you off and shut down the conversation.” She also noticed the silent treatment and other related forms of passive aggression from colleagues who freeze her out if she speaks about the jab injuries. She said, "It's like we aren't to talk about it.” Anger is indeed one way of shutting down a conversation and scaring people into silence.

This dynamic is like in an abusive family where there is a pedophile. When you speak up about the abuse that happened to you, people immediately cut you off, literally move their body away from you, spread rumors about you, tell you nothing happened to them (therefore implying your story can’t be true), or they start gushing about what a great person your grandfather, uncle or whoever the pedo was. Even the family members who were once close to you, often start punishing you and abusing you for speaking such things that aren’t to be spoken in an abusive system. It's disgusting the level of enabling that people will do in order to keep the sins and shame of abuse hidden so they can maintain the image they want to believe of the family. The silence and stonewalling assure that the one who carries the burden is not the abuser but rather the victim, who becomes the scapegoat of the crime.

The doctor’s colleagues told her not to go down the "misery hole." It's interesting how when you talk about abuse that's happening, or happened, people will say things like "I wish you wouldn't spread fear" or "you're so negative" because they do not want to hear the ugly truth which disrupts their wishful thinking and childish fantasy of idealization, whether about their family, country or government.

Other doctors I have talked to said they know there are are more doctors who see the lies but are putting their heads down. Surely there are a lot of doctors, scientists, lab technicians, those working in insurance companies, hospitals, medical billing, funeral homes, IVF clinics, and lots of others who have access to information revealing lies that we’ve been told and evidence of the devastating fallout of the injectables, which appears to only be increasing over time.

Dr. Sucharit Bhakti, who has spent decades practicing, teaching and researching medical microbiology and infectious diseases, made a speech at a medical symposium in December 2021, pleading to his colleagues in medicine to discontinue administering the dangerous experimental injectables.

In his call for humanity addressed to physicians around the world who have played a central role in driving the covid narrative, Dr. Bhakti said:

Physicians who participate in the vaccination program: search for the truth in your souls. Are you acting out of conviction? Have you attempted to weigh out the evidence for and against the administration of the gene-based agents? Early in the vaccination campaign you may have believed that injecting gene-based COVID products served the best interests of your patients. This Symposium has however irrefutably documented that that stance is no longer viable.

The potential of the so-called vaccines to trigger self-destruction is now revealed. Continuance of their application will be equatable with intended infliction of bodily harm. You, medicinal professionals of the world, can and must stop this immediately. Can you bear the thought that your next injection could wipe out the hopes and happiness of an innocent child? Blood that you may have on your hands can still be washed off. But new blood will remain on you until the Day of Judgment. 

Physicians, we call upon you to decline to participate in the harm of your patients. Resist the hijacking of medicine by politics, and take patient care and patient safety back into your own hands. 

Colleagues: we cannot both be right and it is our implicit duty to come together and seek the truth. Come, colleagues, convince the world of your honourable stance by accepting our challenge. We await you any time, any day, anywhere.  

In that speech, Dr. Bhakti also made a calling to the rest of us who are not doctors:

And, finally, to our fellow members of the human family: we call upon you to stand up for your rights, and the rights of those you love – your freedom, your bodily autonomy, your right to live, speak, move and work freely, without medical coercion, intimidation, or fear of reprisal. 

For once you give those rights away, they will not be given back. You will be sentencing your children and the generations to come to an existence in a world of darkness, to a life devoid of empathy, of love, of humanity. A life no longer worth living. 

I’ve been watching a bunch of movies and documentaries about WW2 and the aftermath in order to mine for insights about what is happening now and where this will go. One of the movies, Taking Sides (2001), was based on the actual interrogations that took place in the post-war denazification investigation into the German leaders in industry, education, law, art and culture.

As the U.S. Army Major was being prepared in Berlin to lead the tribunal for German artists in the investigations, his supervisor was showing him reels of the people. He said to him, “The leaders couldn’t have done it alone. It’s these people, they gave all the help that was needed, willingly.”

The movie focuses on one particular suspect, a music conductor, whose defense is that art is separate from politics. After questioning him and many of the Berlin orchestra, the enablers had similar defenses. At first they all said things like: “I have no interest in politics, I’m a musician.”

Eventually the Major finds that they all knew something was wrong but they were terrified cowards so they pretended. The young German assistants to the investigation began to feel sympathy for the enablers, telling the American Major that he has no idea what it was like to live through it so it’s easy to pass judgment.

It can be terrifying to speak the truth about abuse. But it only gets worse over time the longer we are silent.

If more people would break the silence in their communities and talk to anyone who is willing to listen, if people in industries witnessing evidence of lies and fraud would speak up, if leaders in art and culture (including social media influencers) who know something is wrong would speak up… this racket could end quickly and before it expands to other areas of human life.

Yet as history shows us, we usually prefer the false security of silence motivated by our cowardice. Eventually a time will come when it’s too late and we cannot speak. Germany started in 1933 as very similar steps took place to the events post-2020. It got really bad by 1938, continually escalating until 1945. That’s a long time to suffer and it came with a tragic body count. We are already 2+ years in, and due to technology, the timeline is moving much faster now.

If your defense is that you’re not political, then I’ll take this opportunity to remind you that this isn’t about politics, just as it wasn’t really back then either. It’s about humanity.

There is still time to speak up, though perhaps not long. That window is closing.

It can be tempting to remain silent in order to not lose the Golden Child status. This is, however, a survival mechanism giving a false sense of safety that will only lead to long-term suffering for the individual, and in this case, also the society.

What if you recognize the Golden Child Syndrome in yourself?

1. Self-reflection — Start weighing out what really matters to you. Is it more important to you to not risk losing some income, popularity and followers for speaking up? Or will it bother your conscience more for the rest of your life knowing that you didn't speak up when it most mattered? What will you tell your kids and grandkids one day when they ask what you did during this time in history? Worshiping authority leads to a loss of identity. Who are you when you aren't getting praised for following the rules and the narrative?

2. Self-esteem — This form of self-regard must be developed from inside, not externally from other people. Evaluate where your self-esteem is coming from. It's not about what others think of you. It's not about being admired by people or having many options of friends or lovers or even having a large social media following. That's just an illusion of self-esteem based on what is external. Chasing other people's esteem of you will lead to people-pleasing and self-sacrifice.

3. New boundaries — If you’re looking back and realizing that you’ve been doing people-pleasing behaviors, behaving cowardly and swallowing the truth in silence in order to maintain status, relationships, friendships or false security, you’ll realize that your self-worth has has also suffered. That means it’s time to start setting new boundaries to protect what really matters to you so you can raise your self-worth and remember who you are.

4. Repent — If you realize that you’ve strayed from your values, morals and integrity then you’re going to notice the burden of shame and guilt that you’re carrying. It’s important to first acknowledge the mistakes and sins you’ve committed as a human being. This involves an analysis of your conscience and motives. Let yourself feel the remorse for acting against your conscience, for your regrets and failures, for having abandoned your true self and alienated yourself from your Creator. Make a conscious commitment in action to stop the maladaptive behaviors you’ve become addicted to, which cause you to act against your own conscience and what you know is right. Make right any wrongdoings or harm that you may have done to yourself and others. Have compassion with yourself in this process. This will lead to true liberation and spiritual healing.

You’re free to choose conformity with tyranny or integrity in the truth and what you know is right in your conscience. Either way, pain will be inevitable. You need to decide which pain you can live with.

If you speak up, there’s gong to be the immediate pain of losing income, subscribers, friends, clients, customers and more. You’ll read nasty comments or hear these words spoken directly to you, even from people you thought were your friends. Down the road, you'll be able to look back and have the satisfaction of knowing you did the right thing, albeit not the easy thing, and the sacrifice was worth it.

If you don’t speak up now, you’ll avoid the temporary pain in exchange for the long-term pain that you’ll have to carry the rest of your life, then passing on that burden to your kids and grandkids.

Who do you want to be and what legacy do you want to leave?

It’s your choice.