Or the boy that nobody truly tried to understand? Sometimes I wonder whether we spent more time managing behaviour than understanding where it came from.” It was my first internship as a social worker. The file was already waiting for me. Diagnosis: Autism. The parents had brought in their fifteen- or sixteen-year-old son. School refusal. Severe bullying. Conflicts at home nobody knew or talked about. His rabbit was his only real friend. Nobody seemed surprised by that. I was. Because one question immediately came to mind: What does it mean when a fifteen-year-old boy trusts a rabbit more than people?

The solution seemed obvious. Place him in a residential youth care facility with more than twenty-five adolescents. Many had problems with light or sound, so did the boy. Behavioural goals. Weekly evaluations. Municipality reports. Protocols. Interventions. Everything was carefully organised. Except his story. Every morning the same routine. “Good morning! It’s a beautiful day!” The first week he replied politely. The second week less enthusiastically. After a few weeks… Nothing. One morning the staff member repeated it again. “Good morning! It’s a beautiful day!” He looked at me. Quietly. Then he said, “This isn’t real, is it?” He walked away. That sentence has stayed with me ever since. Every now and then there were multidisciplinary meetings. His parents. The psychiatrist. The personal mentor. Care workers. By then I was usually asked to join as well. Not because I was experienced. I was only a second-year intern. Over time, he gradually withdrew into his bedroom, preferring to spend more and more time alone with his rabbit. It seemed to become the only place, and the only relationship, where he still experienced a sense of safety. In those residential homes, every week revolves around evaluation: room inspections, cooking, cleaning the shared living space, and constant feedback on whether you did it “right.” The boy was described as “unmotivated,” yet there were ongoing conflicts in almost every group about these household tasks.

I was often asked to coordinate these groups because staff had run out of ideas. Instead of supervising from a distance, I simply started cleaning myself, and so did the young people. The same happened with the boy. Working together, he was perfectly capable of completing the tasks. The same applied to many other activities, cooking, repairing a bicycle, fixing a flat tyre. The boy was capable of far more than people seemed to realize. I learned that the foundation is set by example. When you roll up your sleeves first, the group usually follows. After a while, I no longer had to initiate it. Young people would come to me and say, “Don’t worry, I’ve already taken care of it.” Leadership begins with modelling the behaviour you want to see.

But afterwards, another staff member would often take him aside to point out what he had supposedly done wrong, even though we had just cleaned it together. I often wondered whether the constant monitoring was creating more resistance than responsibility. How many of us, at the age of fifteen or sixteen, were genuinely motivated to keep everything perfectly clean? And isn’t it true that everyone has a different standard of what “clean enough” means?

In the meantime he had stopped talking to almost everyone else. Without me sitting beside him, he often wouldn’t speak at all. His parents kept asking, “Why doesn’t he like it here?” The meetings almost always focused on one thing. His behaviour. He stayed in his room. He refused conversations. He became angry when the staf knocked on his door. He didn’t cooperate. He displayed aggression. His aggression wasn’t acceptable. Week after week… The discussion was about what was wrong with him. Almost nobody asked what had happened before he ever entered the institution. Meanwhile, daily life followed the protocol. Staff knocked on his bedroom door at fixed times because the schedule required it. Eventually he stopped opening the door. One day someone entered anyway. He became angry and slammed the door shut.

The report? Aggressive, unacceptable behaviour. I remember thinking: “Or maybe someone had just entered the only place where he still felt safe.” I didn’t have a treatment plan. I didn’t have a special technique. So I did something very simple. I stopped following the timetable. Sometimes I knocked in the afternoon. Sometimes in the evening. “Hey… how are you?” He would come out, we played basketbal for example, he talked. No behavioural goals. Soon he would only talk to me and my colleague who did the same, who felt the same way. We both tried to change the culture, but it was nearly impossible because of rigid protocols, bureaucracy, and the way professionals are trained during their education. Other colleagues asked, “How do you do that?” Honestly? I tried to explain, but I think trust is build in the beginning. Once a young person sees you as a threat, it becomes very difficult to rebuild trust and turn the relationship around. Something still didn’t add up. During team meetings I repeatedly heard, “He’s not very intelligent.” Really? So I started making phone calls. Schools. Teachers. Certificates. Educational records. To my surprise, he had started at a higher educational level than I had. How had we concluded that this boy wasn’t intelligent? I reached univercity eventualy., didn’t finish the school because I was done spending endless years proving myself without earning money, So why they thought he wasn’t intelligent? The story simply didn’t fit. Nobody knew why he was the way he was.

Then another story slowly emerged. Years of severe bullying. Humiliation. An older brother who constantly bullied and intimidated him whenever the parents weren’t around. Parents who repeatedly sided with the brother. He was called stupid. Worthless. Eventually he didn’t even want to go home during weekends anymore. Without going into detail, what happened behind closed doors was extreme. and now another question entered my mind. What exactly were we treating? Every week, his main caregiver sat down with him with the same notebook and newspaper job advertisements.

“Wouldn’t this be a nice job for you?”

He rarely responded. Most of the time, he simply stared out of the window. Week after week, the same conversation. Eventually, he stopped attending the meetings altogether. At one point, a colleague and I stopped talking about behavioural goals. Instead, we talked about ourselves. How we had chosen our own education. What kind of work we enjoyed. No pressure. Just a normal conversation. Slowly he began talking about what interested him. Eventually we found a vocational programme that suited him.

But there was one problem. He didn’t want to enrol. At first I didn’t understand why. Then it suddenly clicked. This wasn’t about motivation. This was about safety. He had been bullied for years. Walking into another unfamiliar school probably felt like walking back into the same nightmare. So I suggested something different. “Let’s not enrol today. Let’s just go and have a look.” We drove there together. He quietly walked around the building. Looked at the entrance. The classrooms. The corridors. He was scanning the environment. Orientating himself. Trying to answer one question: “Is this place safe?” Only after he had explored the school did his body seem to relax.

Only then did he say, “I think I could study here.” And only then did we enrol him. Years later I still think about that rabbit. People saw an autistic boy carrying a rabbit. I saw a teenager whose safest attachment seemed to be an animal. A rabbit doesn’t judge. A rabbit doesn’t bully. A rabbit doesn’t humiliate. A rabbit doesn’t choose your brother over you. Sometimes an animal becomes the safest relationship a child has left. That deserves our attention before we immediately reduce the story to behaviour.

Questions I still ask myself Before discussing behaviour…Before discussing diagnoses… Before writing another intervention plan… Shouldn’t we first ask:

What happened inside this family? Why did his mother consistently speak in the third person about what others were doing wrong, while his father remained almost completely silent during the meetings? What might those interaction patterns reveal about the family’s relational dynamics? ⁠Why was a rabbit his only trusted companion? Why did he trust one person but not the system? ⁠Why did he need to inspect an entire school before he felt safe enough to enrol? Were we witnessing autism alone…

•⁠ ⁠Intra-Familial Perimeter: Boundary Calibration?: What long-term relational dynamics within the early family environment prevented the nervous system from developing a stable internal sense of safety and object constancy? Why did he exclusively establish eye contact, share smiles, and engage in humor with an un-scheduled intern with zero agenda, while completely looking away and disconnecting from the senior professionals who approached him with standardized, textbook protocols learned from manuals on “How to Speak to Autistic Clients”?
•⁠ ⁠The Non-Human Safety Connection: Why did a non-judgmental bond with a rabbit become the only reliable attachment relationship capable of providing a sense of emotional safety?
•⁠ ⁠Reality Testing Through Environmental Scanning: Why did he first need to physically inspect the school environment before his nervous system felt safe enough to consider enrolling?
•⁠ ⁠The Etiology of the Nervous System Lockdown: Was this primarily the result of a congenital neurodevelopmental condition, or could it also reflect the physiological adaptation of a nervous system shaped by years of chronic fear, bullying, and relational trauma?
•⁠ ⁠The Institutional Amplification Question: To what extent can institutional routines, standardized interventions, and highly structured environments unintentionally reinforce defensive survival responses in already traumatized adolescents?
•⁠ ⁠…or were we also witnessing years of chronic fear, humiliation and survival?

Why was this young man expected to meet two parallel sets of learning goals at the same time, one imposed by school and another by the residential institution to satisfy municipal care requirements? At the same time, he was living in a house with more than twenty-five adolescents, surrounded by constant noise, tension, and sensory overload. How could anyone reasonably expect that combination to promote recovery?

By then I had already left the organisation. Later, a former colleague told me he had dropped out of school once again. Eventually, he was transferred to another residential facility. During the final meetings, his mother primarily blamed the institution for what had gone wrong. Looking back, I couldn’t help but wonder whether the system had simply placed more and more pressure on a young person who had already reached his limit.

The biggest lesson I learned during that internship wasn’t about autism. It was this: Behaviour is often the final chapter of a much bigger story.

If an adolescent’s gaze avoidance emerges after child maltreatment and markedly diminishes within a safe holding environment offering consistent emotional mirroring, what evidence distinguishes autism from a learned interpersonal threat response, or their coexistence?

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PBC & PAN Theory — Pressure System Psychology

I chose the name Pressure System Psychology because I kept seeing how invisible pressures shape decisions. Across families, schools and organisations, expectations, protocols and interpersonal pressures can constrain autonomy in children, adolescents, adults and professionals alike. How freely are we choosing when the pressure itself remains unseen?

The foundations of PBC-PAN began taking shape several years ago, driven partly by my growing concern about shortcomings in the Dutch care system. Similar concerns kept appearing in reports from other countries: child maltreatment, youth aggression, long waiting lists and debates about overmedicalisation. These recurring themes sharpened my question: how much distress could we prevent by recognising harmful environments and pressures earlier?

That question also shapes PBC-PAN’s opposition to reducing people to diagnostic labels. In my view, psychiatry must confront its own role in creating this problem: an expanding catalogue of hundreds of labels that now circulate as identities, coaching businesses, merchandise and commercial partnerships. When a diagnosis becomes a brand, whose interests does it serve?

Consider an adolescent starting an internship, only to hear: “Oh, another autistic person, we really don’t need this.” Before that young person has demonstrated a single ability, the label has already shaped expectations. Who helped create a culture in which a diagnosis arrives before the person?

I don’t believe that “overdiagnosis” exist; every person seeking help is communicating something. A diagnosis may be misplaced, but the distress still deserves attention. Behind every question, behind every discomfort, there is a story.

PBC-PAN therefore seeks to understand people through their development, relationships and environments, examining each person, family and case individually. The aim is to recognise patterns without reducing anyone to a label, assigning fixed roles or encouraging stigma and polarisation.

A central research question follows: could recurring patterns and rhythms of interaction help make otherwise hidden psychological abuse behind closed doors more observable and, ultimately, measurable?

I ended up in a garage, Not because I was dangerous, but because the violence around me had nowhere else to go. living in it for more than fifteen years, believing it was normal.

They tested me when I was a child.
The results said I was slow, below average.
But the truth was simpler: I wasn’t safe enough to think.

Years later, I proved what so many children could prove if given safety. I reached the highest level of education anyway, like many others. After a long road through classrooms. From working as a mechanic, to standing in front of classrooms, running a business I entered the care sector, and everywhere, I saw the same silent pattern:
children labelled as problems, when they were only products of unsafe systems.

Three psychiatrists were once involved with the family.
Several social workers came and went.
No one ever saw how severe it really was.
Looking back, it could have been so simple.
Everything was visible, if only someone had asked one question deeper, looked one second longer.

That was when I started asking myself: how could they all miss what was so obvious from the inside?

The GP sees physical symptoms; the family dynamics may remain invisible. The social worker sees fragments, without a consistently applied method for mapping cumulative relational pressure. The psychiatrist arrives late and so does a DSM-centred response when prevention has already failed. Children and adolescents may be removed from the family and enter youth care while the familial pressures remain insufficiently investigated and child maltreatment goes unrecognised. An ADHD or autism diagnosis does not establish that anyone has adequately assessed what is happening at home.

Across 49 studies involving 38,332 people, retrospective accounts of childhood maltreatment showed high stability over time (Coleman et al., 2026). Stability does not establish the accuracy of every account, but how damning is it that, in 2026, assumptions of inherent unreliability still need challenging? How often has questioning someone’s memory replaced investigating their childhood?

Apparently, we can classify the individual in considerable detail while leaving the environment remarkably vague. In 2026, carefully mapping someone’s childhood and family relationships should hardly be a revolutionary proposal.

In my 2025 book, I discussed potentially inaccurate diagnostic labels and suspected misdiagnoses where child maltreatment had been overlooked. Professor Julie Nordgaard has voiced concerns about diagnostic reliability, following a study reporting only 55% agreement between clinicians assessing written psychiatric cases. The UK review chaired by Professor Peter Fonagy now also warns of increasing risks of misdiagnosis in ADHD and autism assessments.

During my exploratory work in 2024, I began questioning diagnostic stability; my hypothesis is that disagreement may be even greater in pressured, real-world assessments than in written vignettes. Time constraints, state-dependent symptom expression, and incomplete, overlooked developmental histories may compound diagnostic uncertainty, particularly when pressured speech or what I describe as “trauma language” is interpreted without its relational context. The testable question is whether assessment pressure increases diagnostic disagreement and the risk of overlooking maltreatment.

Psychiatrist Awais Aftab distinguishes diagnostic errors from the medicalisation of ordinary experience. Psychiatrist Derek Summerfield, affiliated with King’s College London goes further, arguing that psychiatry’s biological foundations remain shallow: most psychiatric categories are symptom clusters, syndromes, rather than biologically validated diseases. Apparent ADHD symptoms may instead reflect anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, personality disorders or longstanding, stress-prone character traits. There may be much more going on than the label suggests.

Professor Jim van Os (UMC Utrecht) has demonstrated for years that individual genetic variances exert an entirely negligible influence on the manifestation of psychopathology, completely breaking away from the obsolete DSM to forge an independent path within the Dutch healthcare landscape. He explicitly points out that many of these fragmented classifications are fundamentally meaningless; because everything overlaps with everything else, an apparent case of ADHD might just as easily be unmapped NPD. Jim van Os has also warned that people can leave mental healthcare more damaged than helped.

In my book, I described an adolescent who told me he had faked symptoms to obtain a DSM diagnosis as a way to escape abuse at home. He understood that an ADHD or autism diagnosis could improve his chances of receiving support and priority for housing. He even laughed about having figured out a way through the system. What does it say about access to safety when a young person feels they must appear disordered to be protected?

I have conducted interviews with young people who received ADHD/ASD labels and who now, in adulthood, have understood that child maltreatment had taken place.

Then I met a boy. He had lived through what I once tried to forget: child maltreatment. The World Health Organization (WHO) describes a global problem with potentially lifelong consequences for health and development. Yet the long-term relational and psychological damage is often overlooked. Now NOS reports that Veilig Thuis, the Dutch domestic violence and child maltreatment reporting service, can no longer cope: reports keep rising, cases are becoming more complex, and investigating what happens behind closed doors takes time they do not have. Even reported danger ends up on a waiting list. Many of the adolescents I have spoken with asked me the same question: “Why are we treated as the problem when our parents are the ones doing this to us?”

So the boy asked me if I wanted to write a book. I told him no. I had left it behind. But his question stayed. It forced open the silence. That’s how the PBC-PAN-Theory began, not as an academic pursuit, but as a survival map written backwards.

Following my own fractured relationship, I found it profoundly fascinating to track and structurally resolve the persistent trauma dreams and nightmares regarding parental figures that rapidly reactivated within the system. Within an object-relations framework, these nocturnal panic states are not random biological glitches; they are the automated, late-life activations of the frozen childhood Imaginary Army surfacing the moment the adult holding environment collapses. By systematically decoding how these internalized parental introjects continue to dictate affect and neural signaling decades after physical separation, I was able to map the exact escape coordinates for the Child Compass, turning my own psychological warfare into an objective, replicable roadmap for autonomy.

Slowly, fragments returned, metaphors, patterns I’d seen but never named. Pawns. Compasses. Boomerangs. During my internship, I had already intuitively used what I would later call the Boomerang Theory on several occasions with children who were being bullied. It seemed to help at the time, even though I had not yet named or formalised the approach.

They weren’t just ideas anymore; they were a language. The language I had needed as a child, and the one he needed now. During my exploratory work, I began to notice how metaphors such as the pawn and the boomerang could spark curiosity and invite people to explore pressures within their home and wider social environment. “Imaginary Army” proved particularly engaging in these conversations: explaining “army” through a familiar reference such as Call of Duty could spark immediate recognition and curiosity. “Calibration” offered another accessible metaphor, like adjusting a game’s controller sensitivity or a camera’s focus until the settings suit the situation.

A child, adolescent may not understand the term “ego defence,” but can more readily say, “My army defence went up.” I also began using “army defence” in my exploratory notes as shorthand for the protective responses we were discussing. The phrase felt natural and gave us a shared language for exploring moments when they felt the need to protect themselves. These familiar terms seemed to provide an entry point for discussing pressure, boundaries and possible choices. Drawing together on a shared moodboard helped turn abstract experiences into visible patterns that we could discuss and refine. Using the compass to explore possible choices appeared to support autonomy and boundary-setting.

In several cases, participants reported that their hyperventilation subsided after clarifying conflicting beliefs and expectations, potentially reflecting reduced cognitive dissonance and perceived pressure.

I began developing the conceptual framework for my book before becoming aware of David Elkind’s 2025 paper or his established imaginary audience construct. I released the foundational book in June 2025, only to subsequently encounter his definitive paper published later that year mapping the cognitive developmental hierarchy of ego defenses.

When I first reviewed his text, my immediate reaction was complete disbelief, it felt like an absolute clinical joke. How was it structurally possible that my independent prospective mapping, written entirely backwards from the raw survival story had arrived at the exact same systemic intersection as one of the world’s most eminent developmental psychologists?

Years earlier, I had already begun documenting a recurring interactional pattern within households that appeared to function as closed relational systems, a pattern I later termed “inverted peekaboo.” Through self-observation and observations of others, I had conceptualised a threatening internalised audience that I later called the imaginary army. Encountering Elkind’s work subsequently helped me recognise conceptual overlaps with these independently developed ideas, while several earlier observations became understandable as possible examples of ego defence mechanisms.

Encountering Elkind’s work subsequently helped me recognise conceptual overlaps with these independently developed ideas, while several earlier observations became understandable as possible examples of ego defence mechanisms.

By splitting David Elkind’s Imaginary Audience into a Safe Audience and an Unsafe Audience, this model connects chronic environmental threat directly to sudden behavioral explosions. This specific differentiation is exactly what allowed me to understand where that aggression originated revealing precisely who carries it and why an individual can explode from 0 to 100 out of absolutely nowhere.

This led me to bring Piaget’s developmental perspective, particularly object permanence as a conceptual reference for inverted peekaboo, together with Elkind’s adolescent egocentrism constructs and Freud’s account of ego dynamics within my own theoretical framework.

I believe David Elkind’s work on the imaginary audience is more relevant than ever in 2026, particularly to understanding young people’s experiences of social media, shame and perceived judgement. In my view, it deserves renewed attention in research on the current youth mental health crisis, including depression and pressures surrounding identity and belonging. Does the imaginary audience David Elkind function here as a substitute for dopaminergic homeostasis? What is the neuroendocrine impact of binary interaction (likes and dislike) on the reward system? This structural defense does not simply fall from the sky out of nowhere. The Personal Fable is meticulously assembled long before it manifests on digital feeds; it is engineered step-by-step through a lifetime sequence of severe childhood environmental pressures, loyalty conflicts, and cumulative interactional counter-pressures. When an infant’s home life is fundamentally unstable, primitive splitting, as conceptualized by Melanie Klein and Otto Kernberg is forcefully activated to protect the fragile ego from total annihilation.

The PBC-PAN Boomerang Projection Feedback Cycle: What you reject, you repeat. What you repeat, you understand. What you understand, you transform.

The Boomerang Projection Feedback Cycle (including possible dynamics of projective identification) and Imaginary Army concepts build on foundational work in developmental and clinical psychology, including Urie Bronfenbrenner’s ecological understanding of human development within nested environmental systems.

It further connects with Karl Friston’s work on the brain as a continuously adapting system, constantly responding to uncertainty, prediction, and changing environmental demands. Classical psychoanalytic and developmental foundations, such as Sigmund Freud’s early structural concepts and Jean Piaget’s cognitive-developmental theory (Piaget, 1952), alongside Karpman’s Drama Triangle (Karpman, 1968) and Elkind’s Imaginary Audience (Elkind, 1967).

PBC-PAN reframes them through a preventive, child-centred lens. PBC-PAN advances this lineage by making the underlying mechanics structural and measurable: shame cycles, internalised threat, anticipatory fear, role pressure, and repeated behavioural loops.

While the framework was initially conceptualized as a preventive intervention specifically engineered for children and adolescents, the lifespans architecture demonstrates a much deeper neuro-developmental reality. The vast majority of severe adult relationship conflicts, systemic polarization, and sudden aggression cycles do not originate in adult biology; they are in many times the late-life, automated activations of unresolved threat structures built during childhood, buried deep within the unconscious mind.

This enables early identification of manipulation, silence, and trauma dynamics, linking childhood environments to lifelong outcomes.

This allows practitioners to recognise ”manipulation” patterns, silence structures, role assignment and inherited trauma before these dynamics crystallise offering, for the first time, a framework that connects the child’s outer environment to the internal processes that drive long-term outcomes.

PAN describes where the pressure comes from by mapping the external environment, social context, and systemic pressures. PBC describes what you do with that pressure by mapping your internal responses, coping strategies, defensive mechanisms, and behavioral patterns.

PBC-PAN describes a continuous process: input → process → output → reflection → new input. At its centre is the Pawn the person learning, adapting, and navigating throughout childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. PAN connects Prevention (P), awareness of the Audience, Army, and Attachment styles (A), and Network Navigation (N), with each experience informing the next.

Many times unnoticed, emerging from external pressure, roles, pressure and harmful dynamics around the child. Within PBC-PAN, the imaginary audience is differentiated into an audience perceived as safe and one perceived as unsafe, allowing perceived social pressure to be operationalised.

Imagine a football stadium: playing at home with a supportive crowd feels very different from playing away before a hostile one, that is how I illustrate the shift from an imaginary audience to an imaginary army.

The imaginary army represents the threatening counterpart to the safe audience: an internalised public combining imposed messages and critical voices from earlier relationships with anticipated rejection, control, or punishment by others.

This hypothesised social counterpressure can shape behaviour through self-censorship, conformity, avoidance, or defensive responses, even when the audience is not physically present. The imaginary army operates as an internalised crowd of voices, shame and anticipated judgment.

Attachment Style: the early loops of safety, fear, splitting and borrowed identity that shape how the child navigates the system. Network and Navigation: the system around the child, and the internal network they build within themselves.

Two Networks: Outer and Inner. A child lives in two networks at the same time. The outer Network. The abusive or unstable environment: roles, alliances, silence, pressure, triangulation and repeated patterns. The Inner Network. The Imaginary Army, Introjects, internalised voices, fear, shame and evaluation that stay with the child even when no one is speaking. These two layers reinforce each other.

Every external boomerang becomes an internal voice. Every internal voice prepares the child for the next external boomerang. Children do not simply react, they adapt structurally.

PBC-PAN identifies three ways a child can be positioned in the system:

• Direct Pawns: Actively pulled into adult conflicts and emotional loads.
• Indirect Pawns: Not targeted directly, but structurally shaped by constant tension, environmental instability, and silent pressure.
• Imaginized Pawns: The moment the entire external system has permanently migrated inward. The child or adolescent now carries the crushing weight of the Imaginary Army and hostile introjects entirely on their own, behind closed doors.

This mapping connects the external family system directly to the child’s internal logic. Consider the adolescent boy who first asked me to write the book. His cognitive dissonance had reached a catastrophic threshold due to the intense, conflicting pressure of both parents. The institutional care services involved had been completely manipulated and brought under the parents’ influence, mechanically reframing the child himself as “the core problem.”

The breakthrough occurred entirely outside their academic sandbox. The moment the boy was given access to the non-stigmatizing symbols of PBC-PAN visually mapping the Pawns, tracking the trajectories of the Boomerangs, and identifying his boundaries via the Child Compass on a shared moodboard, the invisible reality became undeniable. By structurally counting the frequency of the conflict loops and mapping the systemic pressure, he could precisely articulate what he thought, felt, and experienced. Faced with this absolute clarity of patterned interaction, the care workers finally recognized the severity of the hidden abuse, leading to his rapid, accelerated extraction and placement into safety.

The Boomerang: The Measurable Loop.
The Boomerang Theory makes these exact feedback cycles visible, trackable, and predictable. A boomerang consists of:

• The Throw: Projection, weaponized blame, and emotional pressure.
• The Flight: Systemic escalation, amplification, and cognitive distortion.
• The Return: The inevitable, calculated reaction that strikes back.
• The Count: The structural frequency of the loops over time.

Boomerangs, stress tracking create shame loops and pattern loops. They show structure. That makes prevention possible. The Child Compass is the way out and gives (Direction, Awareness, Boundaries, Autonomy, Choice): Moving away from external control requires rebuilding internal compass points. The Compass is the exit from the system. It gives children: direction, choice, autonomy, emotional distance, orientation. The Compass gives both children and professionals a shared language. PAN connects the full trajectory: the position of the child (Pawn, Prevention) the pattern (Boomerang loops) the internalisation (Imaginary Army) the exit strategy (Child Compass) It transforms invisible dynamics into visible, measurable structures.

These theories give language to loyalty conflicts, systemic conditioning, and what children cannot yet explain. They turn chaotic confusion into absolute clarity.

They help a child say: “I’m not the problem here.”

This is not superficial learning; it is raw, Pavlovian conditioning operating at a biological level. Much like Pavlov’s dog adapting to an automated bell, a child trapped in an unstable family network is systematically trained to read the environment for survival. A microscopic shift in the caregiver’s tone, an icy silence, or a sharp look becomes the unconditioned stimulus of an impending emotional strike.

The child’s nervous system is conditioned to salivate for safety long before the threat explicitly manifests, forcing their biology into a permanent state of threat-monitoring. They do not live in a home; they live inside a continuous, high-pressure laboratory experiment where their identity is structurally broken and rewritten through automated survival responses.

What is often called the abuse cycle is in “many cases”, an inverted peekaboo rhythm. The core problem is not the cycle itself, but the absence of a stable self and the lack of a preventive framework capable of interrupting it. Prevention begins with language: what is not resolved at the source is passed on to the next generation.

The widely discussed “abuse cycle” the predictable loop of love bombing, devaluation, discard, and reconciliation, is not a mystery; it is the late-stage, mechanical re-enactment of an inverted child peek-a-boo rhythm.

In a normative developmental rhythm, the caregiver disappears and predictably returns, teaching the infant object permanence, safety, and tolerable absence. In the inverted peekaboo rhythm, this baseline is fundamentally distorted. The child faces chronic uncertainty regarding the caregiver’s emotional and psychological availability. Instead of being safely held in mind, the child implicitly learns a terrifying developmental rule: “If I do not actively provoke your response, I may cease to exist.”

The systemic roles switch entirely: the child becomes the searcher. The developing infant is forced into a state of chronic vigilance, repeatedly probing and checking for the caregiver’s presence because they can no longer rely on a predictable return. Within a computational neuroscience framework, this structural mismatch between expected reassurance and systemic unpredictability generates massive, recurring prediction errors.

Over many years, this inverted rhythm completely disrupts early affective synchrony, crippling later empathic development and trapping the individual in a devastating paradox: the very person who inflicts the terror also becomes the sole source of emotional relief. When an individual’s biology adapts to this exact sequence in infancy, it is no longer mysterious why escaping an abusive relationship in adulthood feels terrifying. They are not seeking love; they are trapped in a survival loop.

From this parentified, superego-driven position, Karpman’s drama triangle (rescuer, persecutor, victim) and basic survival states (fight, flight, freeze, fawn) follow mechanically. Genuine separation-individuation never occurred. The unresolved Parent-Bound Conflict (PBC) remains frozen at the source, forcing the individual into an unyielding repetition compulsion where this exact developmental trauma is re-enacted across every subsequent adult relationship.

We isolate this exact developmental trajectory in a standard, cross-generational family simulation: The parents exist in a permanent state of high-friction warfare, where the identity-diffused mother continuously deploys the inverted peekaboo rhythm as a tool of marital extortion, repeatedly packed suitcases on the stairs, weaponized threats of immediate abandonment, and a constant rotation of tactical exits and returns. Trapped inside this chaotic laboratory, the developing infant possesses zero biological capacity to escape the Pavlovian conditioning of the threat environment.

Decades later, these exact formatted organisms migrate seamlessly into adult relationship networks, relentlessly replicating their childhood survival loops with complete indifference to gender. When their adult partnerships inevitably collapse under the weight of this uncalibrated trauma, these specific profiles emerge at the top of the algorithmic pipeline inside “Are We Dating the Same Guy” groups.

First, you have to earn the child’s or adolescent’s trust: chronic stress can hinder reflection, which also depends on developmental age. Once there is enough psychological safety, sometimes quickly, sometimes after several conversations, you can often map the family dynamics with them within an hour. Making these patters visible may reduce cognitive dissonance and ease hyperventilation, providing a starting point for safety.

When the defensive superego dominates the psychic architecture, authentic morality collapses into a top-down hierarchical ranking system where judgment replaces connection. The imaginary audience and the imaginary army then function as the ultimate anchoring reference points. Through this profound fantasy defense, the personal fable is constantly reset, defended, and inflated into whatever form necessary to restore a perceived position of absolute superiority and emotional survival.

My work also led me to examine the possible immune effects of child maltreatment, including reported elevations in inflammatory cytokines such as IL-6. Learning difficulties can arise when chronic stress heightens amygdala reactivity and disrupts prefrontal functioning, impairing attention, working memory and cognitive flexibility. Lower test scores and difficulties staying engaged at school may then lead a child to believe they cannot learn, even when those results underestimate their capabilities. Learning can become easier as safety, support and stress regulation improve.

In my experience working with children and adolescents, examining observable relational patterns during conflict provides a more structured way to explore experiences of safety and threat, alongside associated physiological responses. The expression, duration and sequence of these interaction rhythms may vary across contexts, including during conflict and after separation.

I regard the Freud-inspired image as a conceptual starting point for this work. My reading of Mark Solms and Karl Friston suggests that some of Freud’s insights remain very relevant to contemporary neuroscience. Developmental history and possible underlying causes can be explored alongside environmental pressures.

The term “Imaginary Army” has worked particularly well as a conversation starter. The word “army” offers an immediately recognisable image, much like a GP explaining that an army of white blood cells helps the body fight a virus. It gives young people an accessible way to begin discussing otherwise abstract experiences of pressure, judgement and defence.

I also describe the Audience and the available Army as “anchors.” For children, an anchor immediately brings to mind a boat and something they can cast out to hold it steady. Such metaphors offer a concrete point of reference, helping them find words for their experiences.

Within the Inverted Peekaboo framework, imagine someone shifting between Army, Personal Fable and Audience ten, twenty or thirty times in an evening, a pattern that may operate unconsciously in everyday relationships. My working hypothesis is that NPD reflects one underlying mechanism, rather than ten separate labels, with potential overlap with BPD Within this framework, the Imaginary Army is proposed to reinforce the Personal Fable, as illustrated below. Perhaps the most disturbing possibility is that someone behaving sadistically may sincerely believe they are rescuing the very person they are harming. There is more to explore, but the detailed account lies beyond the scope of this discussion.

It remains profoundly fascinating that Sigmund Freud deciphered the core laws of this internal warfare over a century ago; his foundational mappings of the unconscious mind and repetition compulsion accurately predicted the exact somatic and psychic architecture modern science is only now beginning to quantify. However, while Freud’s classical, unconscious complexes, such as the Elektra and Oedipus formulations undeniably drive the underlying psychodynamic architecture of these family networks, we unfortunately have absolutely no practical use for this old Victorian wisdom on the actual youth care work floor. Frontline practitioners cannot de-escalate an aggressive adolescent or identify covert or overt child maltreatment by reciting nineteenth-century psychoanalytic mythology.

If mainstream researchers inside their insulated academic sandboxes wonder how these hidden dynamics can be objectively observed and verified, the empirical trail is remarkably straightforward: analyze the structural interaction rhythms of these mothers across family networks with two or three children. Behind closed doors, these characterological actors systematically deploy a fluid repertoire of three entirely distinct, compartmentalized behavioral faces alternating rapidly between the public “perfect mother” script, the covert manipulator, and the overt persecutor depending on which child or audience they are interfacing with. This operational shape-shifting is not a late-life adaptation; it initializes at a biological level during infancy, where the identity-diffused caregiver projects entirely different, fragmented faces onto the children, forcing their developing nervous systems to split reality into absolute categories of idealized safety and existential threat.

The baseline initialization of this algorithmic failure is driven by a delicate convergence of biology and context. Consider an infant with a highly sensitive, intense temperament: when paired with a caregiver who lacks an integrated internal identity, the maternal apparatus merely functions as a flat, reactionary mirror. Instead of containing the infant’s somatic distress, the identity-diffused mother absorbs the ambient environmental tension multiplied by situational stressors such as family configuration, temporal chaos, chronic noise, and domestic pressure and reflects raw irritation straight back into the crying child, permanently short-circuiting the regulatory loop. Conversely, when a low-temperament infant encounters an integrated caregiver under stabilized environmental conditions, the stimulus is met with stable affective alignment, allowing the mother to predictably mirror empathic containment back into the system.

This systemic fragmentation is precisely why I have always questioned the entire scientific validity of traditional twin studies.

Behavioral genetics and large-scale spectrum research rely completely on the rigid, flat assumption of a “shared environment” to calculate the high heritability coefficients of conditions like ADHD or autism. But the raw operational reality behind closed doors exposes a profound epistemological blindness: if a parent with no stable sense of self presents a radically different, compartmentalized behavioral persona to each of two children from infancy, how can academia possibly distinguish a presumed innate biological vulnerability from divergent developmental responses to two entirely distinct relational microenvironments?

Even monozygotic twins sharing identical genetic sequences are subjected to entirely separate interactive shocks and highly localized, divergent epigenetic stress tracking. The mainstream sandbox arrives late with its static checklists, measuring the distinct somatic and behavioral damage of two completely different rates of neuro-somatic Pavlovian conditioning, and then confidently misclassifies the result as an inherited brain deficit.

Back to the abusive Arena. My hypothesis is that men and women engage in abusive behavior within relationships at roughly equal rates: a possible 50/50 split, without implying equal severity, impact, or responsibility. It is frequently the fatal, mechanical endpoint of a shared, hyper-destructive relationship loop where both actors are locked in a symbiotic object-relations dance relentlessly executing Freud’s repetition compulsion.

Origins: Chapter 3 as the Structural Blueprint

The structural core of the PBC-PAN Theory emerged during adolescence (ages 11–18) the exact developmental window where internal coherence must consolidate while external instability is highest. The foundational concepts: the pawn, compass, boomerang, imaginary audience, and imaginary army, were not abstract theoretical interventions. They were functional, real-time survival mechanics developed to map a closed relational system.

Within this structural blueprint, the systemic components operate via a strict architecture:

• The Source: Represents the parental figures and the early caregiving environment from which a child’s psychological matrix develops.
• The Voice-Oracle: Represents the internalized, automated echo of that environment, continuing to provoke thoughts, intense emotions, and defensive behavioral reactions across the lifespan.

An essential developmental task is learning to distinguish safety from threat and recognise who can be trusted. Yet many children and adolescents have never learned how to resolve conflict constructively or feel unable to express what they truly think and feel. Shame, peer pressure, social comparison and sometimes intense “imaginary audience–army” dynamics can make speaking honestly feel dangerous. When a primary caregiver is hostile or unpredictable, developing autonomy means learning to question the very source on which the child depends for safety.

So back to my family. In this closed family system, shame operates as an absolute regulator. Because conflict occurs entirely behind closed doors, a powerful social illusion is maintained. The outside world functioning as a detached “third eye” perceives a perfectly stable, functional family. As a direct result of this external validation loop, the child’s internal collapse remains completely invisible to the surrounding community, leaving the underlying trauma completely unmapped by conventional tracking services.

From my own experience, and what others have described to me, the “third eye” never disappeared, even when living remotely with no neighbors who could possibly hear anything.

In this case, the household was physically attached to my parents’ large business. The yard bell functioned as the ultimate tool for reality testing; its ringing was the only objective signal that customers were arriving on the property, momentarily forcing the system to recalibrate.

Outside of that bell, the instruction “be quiet, others can hear you” repeated itself automatically during conflict, despite the fact that no one was physically there. Silence was enforced not by immediate reality, but by an internalized fear of exposure. The parents themselves lived in a permanent personal fable of constant threat, an unyielding, paranoid anxiety of being seen and exposed by the outside world.

In this closed system, every individual exists inside the structural architecture of the Army. This lived experience mirrors Elkind’s legacy construct of the Imaginary Audience, but under conditions of chronic domestic threat and behind closed doors, it mutates into the Imaginary Army. a multi-voiced, highly punitive, and evaluative system.

Within this volatile dynamic, the surrounding actors, family members, peers, and authority figures function mechanically as indirect, direct, or imaginal pawns. They do not operate primarily out of deliberate malice, but because they themselves lack a stable internal self, operating entirely within the defensive Audience-Fable and counter-pressure Army dynamic.

Through these carriers, environmental pressure is rapidly externalized and multiplied. Systemic messages such as “they think this about you too” are continuously channeled through the language of humiliation, minimization, and degradation. What superficially appears to the outside observer as multiple, separate voices is, in clinical reality, a single disfunctional system speaking through multiple carriers.

The mathematical result of this architecture is total isolation. Any possibility of the child speaking outward, particularly with vulnerability, is systematically blocked by the network. The entire relational environment is organized to silence, suppress, and contain, until physical restraint becomes entirely unnecessary. The systemic belief “I am the core problem” permanently installs itself from the inside out.

Chapter 3 demonstrates the defining, core principle of PBC-PAN: violence behind closed doors remains globally invisible because it is structurally internalized as invisible violence inside the child’s mind. This profound, automated invisibility is the precise mechanism that drives the catastrophic global scale of the problem.

How often do we hear: “I should have left that relationship sooner.” “If only I had understood what was happening in my family all those years.” “I should have reached out for help ten years earlier.”

And sometimes, we hear nothing at all. By the time we do, it is already too late, and another tragedy has become a newspaper headline.

Developmental Foundations (Ages 0–3): The Distorted Peekaboo Rhythm

Early social development is structurally organized by repeated cycles of presence and absence between infant and caregiver. Everyday interactional games such as peek-a-boo illustrate a foundational relational pattern: disappear – wait – return. Through continuous exposure to this interactive frequency, the child develops what Jean Piaget described as object permanence. The cognitive understanding that the caregiver continues to exist even when temporarily out of sight.

When caregiving is consistent, this external rhythm is internalized as a stable neuro-developmental expectation of safety and return. The infant learns that absence is provisional, that connection survives interruption, and that distress does not signal catastrophic abandonment. This early affective repetition installs the baseline architecture for baseline trust, emotional continuity, and separation tolerance.

However, when caregiving is chronically inconsistent, emotionally unavailable, intrusive, or unpredictable, this regulatory rhythm is fundamentally distorted. Instead of internalizing absence as a tolerable state, the infant registers it as a chronic environmental threat. The implicit developmental directive shifts entirely: rather than predicting a safe return, the child’s biology adopts a terrifying survival rule:

“If I do not actively provoke your response, I cease to exist.”

The present framework conceptualizes this systemic failure as the Inverted Peekaboo Reflex. Under this structural distortion, relational connection can no longer be trusted as a constant; it must be continuously and hypervigilantly tested. What should have stabilized as an internalized rhythm of return mutates into a permanent state of threat-monitoring forcing the child to become the active tracker in a desperate bid to maintain psychological and emotional presence within an unstable system.

The present framework refers to this inversion as the Peekaboo Reflex. Within this model, connection is no longer passively trusted but actively tested. The child begins to rely on small signals, disruptions, or emotional probes to confirm that the attachment figure is still psychologically present. What should have become a stable rhythm of return is replaced by vigilance toward rupture.

Across later development, this systemic adaptation manifests as distinct contact-testing behaviors: sudden tone shifts, tactical withdrawal, micro-disruptions, misplaced objects, probing conflicts, or engineered minor crises. Over time, the individual rehearses an expanding repertoire of strategies designed to force a response and restore a baseline of relational confirmation.

While conventional systems pathologize these behaviors in later life as “manipulation” or “attention-seeking,” the present framework reframes them as automated, survival-driven attempts to re-establish a fractured rhythm of recognition and return. They are not primary bids for dominance, but raw, structural checks organized around a singular developmental question: Are you still there?

The child first attempts external regulation through these structural contact-tests. When these behavioral probes fail to stabilize the relationship, psychic regulation shifts inward toward a compensatory fantasy defense. At this specific baseline, imagination is hijacked for survival. In normative Winnicottian terms, fantasy belongs to a healthy transitional space between inner and outer reality, a domain of play, symbolization, and creative development. Yet, when the holding environment is chronically unreliable, this imaginative capacity hardens into a rigid protective refuge. What began as open play calcifies into defensive fantasy.

This defensive hardening provides the exact clinical key to a catastrophic global phenomenon: the relentless surge in youth aggression. Within modern youth healthcare and institutional care systems, many professionals remain completely blind to the origins of this volatility. The establishment mechanically links every behavioral explosion to individual, static DSM labels, entirely ignoring the underlying Parent-Bound Conflicts (PBC) driving the system.

The empirical proof of this blind spot is visible in daily practice: the moment an individual practitioner provides an authentic, reliable holding environment, the client immediately de-escalates and stabilizes. Aggression is not an intrinsic brain deficit; it is the violent thrashing of a system trying to survive an uncontained threat environment.

Within this child-protective framework, fantasy defense is not understood as mere grandiosity or superficial self-inflation, but as an adaptive inner solution to systemic relational inconsistency. The child turns inward to engineer what the environment failed to reliably provide: continuity, recognition, predictability, or symbolic safety. When the caregiver cannot be counted on to return psychologically, the mind constructs its own substitute forms of presence.

From this perspective, subsequent relational patterns follow a predictable developmental sequence: first the disruption of the baseline rhythm of safety, then the emergence of hypervigilant contact-testing behaviors, and eventually a total reliance on internal fantasy structures as compensatory regulation. The individual is no longer waiting to be seen; they are attempting to secure psychic continuity by any means available, externally through erratic contact-tests, and internally through a rigid, compensatory personal fable.

This internal structure manifests as highly specific savior or grandiosity fantasies. For example, the child constructs a personal fable where they are a mythic figur like Michael Jackson, engineered to rescue, heal, and dominate. However, because object permanence failed to stabilize during infancy, the child is left with a frozen, uncalibrated image of the mother.

The moment the individual is left alone, this structural defect creates an immediate, terrifying void. Because the frozen mother image cannot provide internal reassurance, the psychological void instantly mutates into a hostile, multi-voiced entity: the Imaginary Army. The absolute panic of this internal threat environment forces the ego to retreat once again, collapsing backward into the inflated shield of the personal fable. The individual becomes trapped in a permanent, mechanical oscillation between the terror of the internalized Army and the grandiosity of the compensatory Fable.

The developmental signal underneath this entire sequence remains simple: “See me, so I do not disappear.” Fantasy, in this model, is not the origin of the problem but the child’s solution to unreliable return.

Repeated cycles of approach, shame-collision, and withdrawal train a relational rhythm where the individual increasingly approaches others from a defensive superego stance. What appears as later grandiosity or entitlement is the behavioral residue of a repeatedly rehearsed attachment collision cycle. When negative interpretations dominate, shame responses emerge, and from that moment onward, the child no longer relies on a stable internal image of the caregiver when they are absent.

Compensation begins. The need for external confirmation increases, while sensitivity to visibility and judgment grows. Trapped between the Audience and the Army, the Personal Fable gradually expands and becomes increasingly influential, forcing interpersonal behavior to shift rapidly between the regulatory roles described in the drama triangle.

Crucially, because the brain is trapped in this permanent state of threat-monitoring, this chronic psychological friction inevitably spills over into sensorimotor and somatic symptoms. The nervous system becomes entirely uncalibrated.

The individual develops a severe sensory overload, becoming hyper-sensitive to external triggers like smell, light, and noise. To manage this internal physiological chaos, the system seeks absolute predictability externally. This manifests as an unyielding drive to control the immediate surroundings, resulting in compulsive cleaning rituals, extreme irritation at minor changes, and rigid organizational demands. These are not always separate OCD or sensory processing disorders; they are automated survival mechanisms designed to force order onto an environment when internal safety has completely collapsed.

Ages 7–8: First Pattern Awareness. Children begin recognizing relational structure, systemic inconsistency, emotional directionality, and fairness versus unfairness. Here, the proto-Army forms, not as structured internal voices yet, but as foundational templates of evaluators. Adequate mirroring keeps the emerging self flexible and adaptive; failed mirroring hardens the proto-Army architecture.

Ages 11–13: Ego Structuring and Army Consolidation. This is the highest-impact developmental window, where meta-cognition rapidly accelerates. Children become hyper-aware of themselves through the lens of imagined observers. Elkind identified ages 11–13 as the peak of the Imaginary Audience. The developmental sense of being constantly watched and judged. In stable environments, this cognitive distortion naturally fades. In shame-driven or unstable environments, it intensifies, hardens, and mutates permanently into the Imaginary Army.

This specific window exposes the bifurcation of internalized and externalized shame responses:

• Internalized Shame Profiles: Individuals present with acute somatic overloads, hyperventilation, dizziness, chest tightness, trembling, and panic in socially evaluative spaces. They experience an absolute inability to speak core shame-beliefs (“I am ugly,” “I am disgusting,” “I will fail,” “Everyone sees through me”). Attempts at cognitive self-reassurance fail mechanically because the internalized Army holds a significantly higher emotional and neurological authority than the fragile ego. A minor triggering cue, a passing glance, sudden silence, memory, or comparison, reactivates the Army instantaneously.
• Externalized Shame Profiles & Projective Identification: While Elkind’s Personal Fable (“I am unique/special”) normally acts as a healthy developmental buffer against insecurity, in high-pressure PBC-PAN environments, the system collapses under the weight of the Army. To protect the ego from annihilation, externalizers utilize projective identification as a primary structural defense. They do not merely project their internal shame and threat onto others; they actively behave in ways that elicit, provoke, and manipulate those around them into feeling that exact distress, confusion, or anger. Through conflict testing, triangulation, multi-pawn recruitment, and rhythmic provocation, they force the outer world to mirror their inner chaos.

This mechanical deployment of projective identification explains the sudden, uncalibrated 0-to-100 aggression cycles: the externalizer forcibly overrides the environment to defend the inflated shield of their Personal Fable, temporarily restoring a perceived position of absolute superiority and emotional survival. For internalizers, the Personal Fable collapses in devastating inward waves, leading to chronic withdrawal and self-punishment. For externalizers, the Personal Fable never collapses; it hardens into an aggressive, externalized control system that dictates the entire relational field.

Critical Note: Repairability. Even adolescents who externalize shame via aggressive or manipulative means remain highly repairable during this specific developmental window. Because the ego structure is still soft, it remains receptive to targeted corrective mirroring and systemic boundary setting. True to its core principles, the PBC-PAN framework does not prescribe specific clinical intervention methods that belongs strictly to professional clinical expertise. Instead, PAN serves to map and identify the exact developmental window in which structural repair is most plausible before the psychic architecture solidifies.

Ages 18+: Entrenchment, Collapse, and Reactivation. Beyond late adolescence, the Imaginary Army detaches from its immediate environment and becomes fully autonomous, self-referential, and permanently punitive. In adulthood, early trauma states are relentlessly re-experienced through profound neurological and physical symptoms: trauma dreams, nocturnal panic, night sweats, chronic sleep fragmentation, learning and cognitive processing deficits, vocal shouting at internalized evaluators, and severe somatic distress.

Everyday sensory cues, a sudden smell, a specific tone of voice, a moment of silence trigger deep limbic memories and episodic flashbacks. These overwhelming superego attacks reactivate instantaneously whenever an adult encounters an external situation that mirrors the original childhood Army template.

Yet, this internal warfare often remains entirely invisible to the outside world for decades. Adults successfully maintain apparent stability through a rigid suite of automated coping mechanisms:

• Emotional Numbing & Dissociation: Severing connection to physical and emotional affect.
• Intellectualization & Overwork: Channeling internal panic into frantic, compulsive achievement and corporate survival.
• Chemical Regulation: Utilizing substance use to temporarily silence the internal noise.
• Relational Replication: Systematically choosing partners who unconsciously recreate the original childhood Army dynamics (Repetition Compulsion).

These defensive strategies merely suppress the Army without ever dissolving it. Catastrophic systemic collapse occurs only when accumulated life stress finally exceeds the individual’s coping capacity. The moment the defense mechanisms fracture, the unresolved childhood architecture is exposed in its rawest form.

What appears clinically to mainstream psychiatry as sudden adult panic, treatment-resistant depression, or relational chaos is actually the late-life expression of a survival architecture built decades earlier. This profound developmental trajectory confirms why it is methodologically mandatory to examine PBC-PAN through psychodynamic and object-relational models rather than relying on surface-level, static diagnoses.

Psychodynamic Architecture: The Structural Breakdown

• Freud Recontextualized (Id, Ego, Superego): In shame-driven and unsafe environments, the psychic architecture fractures along predictable fault lines. The Id experiences primitive panic during periods of emotional caregiver absence. The Superego morphs into a harsh, externalized evaluator. The Ego structurally fails to integrate contradictory environmental signals. The Imaginary Army represents the toxic fusion of this fragmented Ego, a punitive Superego, and an abandoned, overstimulated Id.
• Object Relations & The Distributed Self: When internal self-regulation mechanisms fail to develop, identity becomes completely externally distributed, tethered entirely to others’ reactions, triangulated alliances, real or imagined observers, and ritualized conflict rhythms. While anyone may involve a third party in normal life or a standard disagreement, within unsafe family networks, triangulation transforms into a vital survival strategy. It is not necessarily an act of deliberate, malicious manipulation, even when executed by the primary source of harm. Rather, it represents survival through a borrowed interpersonal structure an external scaffolding for a fragile ego that cannot yet stand on its own.
• Beyond the Drama Triangle (The Multi-Pawn Army Triangle): Stephen Karpman’s classical Drama Triangle is fundamentally too narrow to map these complex systems. In high-pressure PBC-PAN environments, internal roles multiply and rapidly shift across both familial and online networks. Emotional self-stabilization within a fractured system requires the continuous recruitment of multiple pawns. The Imaginary Army operates as the internalized continuation of this exact external exploitation network. Addictions, avoidance, explosive rage cycles, compulsive rescuing, and chaotic relational patterns all converge on a singular, automated operational mandate: “I stabilize my internal network through the artificial manipulation of others.”
• Reflex Architecture (Peekaboo and Boomerang): The foundational interaction loops operate via two mechanical reflexes:
  • The Peekaboo Reflex: Presence – disappearance – tension – return – relief. When distorted in infancy, it automates a lifelong repertoire of hypervigilant, erratic contact-testing behaviors.
  • The Boomerang Reflex: Internal fear projected outward – a specific environmental reaction actively elicited – temporary ego-stabilization – the return of the projection loop.

Every conflict loop documented in Chapter 3 operates strictly within this mechanical feedback cycle. Together, the Peekaboo and Boomerang reflexes form the active, structural emotional engine driving many unsafe PBC-PAN families.

Clinical Pattern Recognition Across the Lifespan

The clinical imperative for this lifespans architecture emerged from deep case investigations into individuals completely broken by the psychiatric establishment. I have analyzed cases of clients plagued by relentless nightmares of maternal figures, individuals who were subjected to over ten distinct, conflicting DSM labels, forced into ECT shock therapy, and pushed through exhaustive IQ testing. The mainstream establishment repeatedly treated the downstream symptoms while remaining utterly blind to the underlying interactional terrorism. On Freud’s foundational mapping, the entire field of psychology was built, yet his structural depth was dismissed for a long time in favor of superficial checklists. By re-operationalizing his core insights alongside modern systems theory, PBC-PAN maps what the diagnostic machine misses entirely.

When we look beneath the labels, the lifespans patterns of this uncalibrated threat-monitoring become unmistakable:

• Adult Profiles (Entrenchment and Reactivation): Beyond late adolescence, early trauma states are relentlessly re-experienced through profound neurological and physical symptoms. Adults present with chronic trauma dreams and nightmares about parental figures that persist decades after physical separation. They suffer from nocturnal panic, night sweats, shaking, extreme irritability, and active vocal shouting at an internalized parental object (the evaluators). This leads to a catastrophic loss of internal continuity and rapid reactivation through everyday, minor sensory cues. Yet, these patterns remain invisible for years because adults maintain apparent stability through highly effective coping strategies: emotional numbing, dissociation, intellectualization, overwork, compulsive achievement, substance use, sarcasm, chronic joking, systematic avoidance, and the repetition compulsion of choosing relational partners who recreate familiar Army dynamics. These strategies suppress the Army without ever dissolving it, allowing massive distress to remain completely undetected in standard clinical and social settings.
• Adolescent Profiles (Internalized Distress and Masking): Adolescents present with acute somatic overloads, hyperventilation, dizziness, chest pain, trembling, cognitive learning disruptions, and severe panic in socially evaluative situations. They experience an absolute inability to voice core shame-beliefs. Crucially, these symptoms routinely coexist with high-functioning external behavior: humor, clever deflection, tactical withdrawal, or the “class clown” persona that effectively hides internal collapse from peers and teachers. The systemic collapse occurs only when another person explicitly names the unspeakable shame. True visibility is the only force that dissolves the Army.

Educational Note on Early Intervention:

Because these destructive patterns remain hidden behind sophisticated coping styles, we must move our defenses upstream. Introducing age-appropriate lessons in primary and secondary schools using simple, open-source PBC-PAN metaphors such as the Boomerang and the Child Compass can give students a shared, non-stigmatizing vocabulary for discomfort, relational tension, and early distress signals. Implementing this collective language directly increases classroom cohesion, destroys systemic secrecy, and allows peers and teachers to detect early signs of hidden environmental pressure long before clinical symptoms consolidate into lifelong individual pathology.

There is often one child within a dysfunctional network who can describe exactly what is occurring behind closed doors, if given an accessible symbolic language. The Pawn, Boomerang, and Child Compass translate complex, intimidating relational experiences into an intuitive vocabulary of words and structural images. This symbolic framework allows children and adolescents to recognize, map, and communicate systemic patterns they cannot yet articulate abstractly.

The PBC–PAN framework operates directly as a pre-diagnostic tool deployed before and alongside standard DSM-5(TR) or ICD-11 classifications to analyze developmental history, immediate environmental pressure, and underlying interaction rhythms. This purely contextual approach ensures that clinical formulations remain precise, objective, and deeply informed by the individual’s actual threat environment rather than surface-level symptoms.

Without a pre-diagnostic framework, the systemic failure is predictable and catastrophic:

• Shame seals the system, enforcing absolute silence while the outer world remains blind.
• Early defensive responses remain entirely invisible or are misclassified as intrinsic behavioral disorders.
• Triangulation and role assignment are routinely misinterpreted as typical family conflict or bitter custody disputes.
• Compensatory imagination is pathologized, mistaking a survival-driven personal fable for primary psychosis or severe personality pathology.
• Symptoms only become legible to tracking services after significant, irreversible harm has occurred.

Conversely, utilizing the non-labeling architecture of PBC-PAN radically shifts the clinical field:

• Early distress signals become instantly recognizable before lifelong individual pathology consolidates.
• Clinical interpretations remain provisional, allowing hypotheses to evolve dynamically alongside system changes.
• General Practitioners (GPs) can decode somatic and sensorimotor distress developmentally, tracking the physiological indicators of chronic threat-monitoring.
• Educators and protective professionals can intervene constructively, breaking systemic secrecy and offering needs-led support without prematurely labeling the child.

But most importantly: when boomerangs are thrown endlessly inside a home, or repeatedly within a classroom during bullying, that rhythmic return serves as the primary structural warning sign. A child understands instinctively that a boomerang hurts, that every weaponized word or action returns, and that recognition alone reveals that something behind closed doors is fundamentally uncalibrated.

When the Boomerang Theory is introduced within an educational context, conflict becomes immediately legible as a structured, trackable process: action, reaction, consequence, and choice. In combination with the Child Compass, a normative rhythm within social interaction can be identified, exposing systematic deviations from that baseline. Relational processes that typically remain implicit, such as audience formation, audience-to-army shifts, and projective identification become observable phenomena rather than subjective impressions. Externalizing behaviors, including belittling, degrading, and multi-pawn triangulation, can then be analyzed objectively as patterned interaction.

This structural recognition enables children and adolescents to infer that certain relational dynamics, whether in domestic environments or peer groups, deviate severely from normative functioning. This immediate clarity reduces internalized shame and rapidly increases psychological safety for disclosure.

Adolescents who acquire this framework are equipped to identify the precise moment a neutral or supportive audience transitions into a threatening, hostile collective (the Army), allowing them to map the escalation pathways that culminate in profound avoidance behaviors. Because these toxic dynamics are rarely articulated explicitly, they frequently persist below the threshold of institutional awareness. Once structurally named, however, measurable behavioral shifts occur.

When children are introduced to the Boomerang Theory at an early age, a single, objective interpretive framework applies to all participants within the system. If, within that shared structure, attachment-related behavior consistently deviates and fails to recalibrate over time, it signals a systemic structural dysfunction rather than a temporary situational conflict. Through rhythm, frequency, and repetition, children learn not only how conflicts mechanically unfold, but exactly how healthy containment, regulation, and relational repair are supposed to occur.

I have countless examples of bullied children who are not operating within an imaginary audience alone, but within an imaginary army. Their behavior is organized around anticipated collective violence: avoiding school, taking multi-kilometer detours, or not leaving home at all. Threat perception generalizes from specific peers to entire environments, sometimes even to the village as a whole. This reflects not adolescent self-consciousness, but a fear system structured around expected coordinated aggression. How can a young person receive different DSM labels without adequately examining where that fear, root cases originated, a pattern I have encountered in my work, where the young person becomes “the problem” while the role of peers, parents, or the wider environment in creating that fear remains unexamined? This audience–army shift is often assumed to be purely negative, the same mechanism can also be deliberately redirected and used constructively within the classroom.

A classroom-based illustration clarifies this mechanism. Consider a small subset of persistently disruptive students, sometimes characterized by insecurity and adverse home environments. Conventional interventions emphasize exclusion, such as temporary removal from the classroom. When, instead the educater suspend direct engagement, pausing instruction without disciplinary escalation, the interactional focus shifts. Various tactics can be employed instead: the teacher might use verbal or non-verbal cues to signal, “figure it out yourselves; you don’t want to learn anyway,” addressing the whole group. Because the message applies to everyone, the focus of the class shifts entirely. The peers do not need to intervene or say anything, yet the disruptive students feel observed and experience a sense of guilt. Over repeated cycles, the audience reorganizes into a regulating collective. Behavioral recalibration emerges not through punitive measures, but through sustained visibility within the group context. This phenomenon can be described as an audience-army shift. Additional empirical illustrations are derived from later applied work. Ongoing qualitative interviews, to be analysed and reported in subsequent work, explore a proposed distinction between perceived supportive–empathic and hostile–evaluative forms of the imaginary audience. The analysis will examine how these configurations relate to perceived pressure, autonomy and behavioural adaptation. Further work will require operational definitions and the development and validation of measures assessing perceived audience support, hostility and pressure, alongside measures of audience-fable-army shift/ ideation.

By analyzing these shifts within the group infrastructure, the framework moves beyond descriptive observation into active prediction. When the baseline interaction rhythms consistently fail to recalibrate under collective pressure, it signals that the unsafe audience has already solidified into an internalized threat. This predictive threshold explains why certain individuals remain entirely unreachable by conventional discipline, operating in a permanent state of hypervigilance where the slightest perceived judgment triggers a catastrophic transition from 0 to 100 in an instant.

Rooted in developmental psychology and inspired by foundational concepts from Sigmund Freud, Jean Piaget, David Elkind and related ego-defense and conflict mechanisms, the roadmap focuses on prevention rather than late-stage labeling. The goal is to help professionals recognize core relational conflicts, family roles, shame dynamics, bullying pressure and child maltreatment patterns earlier, before children are reduced to static DSM-style labels. Development is dynamic, human behavior is rarely static. It emerges from the interaction between the individual and the context in which they live. Early awareness can create safer environments long before crisis intervention becomes necessary. Unresolved shame builds psychological pressure. As chronic stress repeatedly activates the HPA axis and the autonomic nervous system, cortisol and adrenaline help shape the brain’s expectations of safety and threat. What begins as an adaptive survival response can eventually become an automatic psychological pattern. When that pressure becomes overwhelming, the mind protects itself through defense mechanisms such as projection.

I was already working with these concepts and symbols in 2024. In Trauma Unraveled, published in 2025 drawing on 108 foundational scientific sources, I presented the framework’s basic principles as simply as possible, making the patterns I had identified accessible to a broad readership. The work has since become more technical, particularly as I develop clearer definitions, counting procedures, and potential measures for its dynamic relational patterns. Operationalisation remains demanding: these interactions are highly dynamic, requiring explicit decisions about which variables can be measured reliably and which must, for now, be excluded to preserve model parsimony.

I anticipate formally submitting a manuscript for peer review early next year. The entire framework remains open-source, built to be freely used, rigorously tested, and actively criticized. Expanding this architecture is not merely an academic exercise, but a structural necessity. Developments such as Automatic Boundary Calibration (ABC) and clearly defined parameters aim to help children recognize relational traps and reduce their need for defensive responses. Whether these effects occur, how quickly, and under which conditions are questions for empirical testing.

By making previously unrecognized patterns visible, we can begin teaching these relational blueprints early. I firmly believe that PBC-PAN has the potential to expose the systemic secrecy of closed family networks, helping children recognize the pressures they are living under and develop psychological autonomy long before crisis intervention becomes a newspaper headline.

What are we failing to detect in childhood that we later attempt to manage through diagnoses, relationship warnings, and public exposure?

Start inside the family. Assess hidden maltreatment, coercion, bullying, and loyalty conflicts. Hear the child independently. Map who controls the relationship, who absorbs the pressure, and what happens when someone resists. Strengthen safety and autonomy early. The Fonagy review’s recommendation for earlier, needs-led support.

Further downstream, AWDTSG groups report more than ten million women sharing dating experiences and warnings about men. Alongside protective information sits a market in abuse terminology, coaching, and threat detection. The scientific question is urgent: when does repeated warning improve judgment, and when might it reinforce hypervigilance, suspicion, and dependence on further warnings?

The operational reality of these digital tracking networks has mutated into a brutal, highly competitive market for weaponized altruism. The self-appointed group administrators function as professional “trauma rescuers” across the Karpman drama triangle, actively fighting competing creators for digital turf, platform dominance, and audience market share. While masquerading under the guise of selfless community protection, these platforms seamlessly integrate monetization mechanics deploying GoFundMe links engineered to extract continuous crowdsourced capital for their “voluntary” moderation theater.

Concurrently, the unmonitored velocity of these digital tribunals has generated catastrophic real-world casualties:

Fatal Endpoints: The absolute psychological isolation engineered by these false accusations has driven multiple individuals into total neuro-somatic collapse, culminating in documented cases of suicide.

Relational Destruction: Unverified, anonymous exposures systematically fracture stable relational networks based on uncalibrated, distorted feedback loops.

Systemic Collapse: Targeted individuals are thrown into an immediate, irreversible state of public shame and professional ruin without any access to reality testing.

Consider the modern algorithmic pipeline: a routine first relationship ends in a normal breakup, yet the individual immediately infers, “My ex must have been a narcissist.” Upon opening the internet, they are instantly met by millions of online users and self-proclaimed digital experts confirming their personal fable: “Yes, you were dealing with a narcissist.”

This mechanical validation loop manufactures an artificial, generalized fear of dating, directly driving down global birth rates and accelerating systemic polarization where men and women are reduced to opposing, hostile categories. Fear generates engagement; engagement rewards alarming content; alarming content generates more fear. Protection risks becoming polarization. Relationship conflict becomes informal diagnosis.

Assessment must withstand that pressure. A victim can also perpetrate harm. A campaigner against abuse can behave abusively. A parent seeking sympathy can remain a source of danger to their child. These possibilities require individual investigation, without assuming equivalence or dismissing genuine victimization.

We need prospective research connecting family dynamics, clinical assessment, and digital threat exposure. The accountability question is straightforward: who is responsible for identifying the child’s circumstances before years of adaptation are interpreted primarily as individual pathology?

The problem with the mainstream diagnostic establishment is that its manual-driven checklists function strictly within an insulated academic sandbox. While these system theories might operate perfectly inside the abstract isolation of a clinic or university room, they collapse entirely on the actual work floor when trying to collaborate with complex, high-risk youth.

The problem also extends to professional training: practitioners may enter youth care with different approaches and without a shared foundation of practical tools for recognising and managing relational pressure. In a 2026 interview, an orthopedagogue and behavioural specialist nearing retirement described the institutional situation bluntly: “This cannot go on. You would be better off closing them.” His argument was that these children belonged at home, and that intervention needed to address problems within their families, including those involving their parents.

In our onging work with PBC-PAN, it has become evident that real-world intervention requires moving out of the sandbox and into the immediate relational field. We can utilize this process-driven architecture to go far deeper, actively constructing a stable holding environment by engaging with the young person directly. Utilizing collaborative tools such as co-creating a shared moodboard turns chaotic, invisible tracking environments into concrete, visible interaction rhythms.

By actively transforming abstract relational tension into a tangible, shared vocabulary of words and images, we don’t just categorize the individual; we recalibrate the system.

PBC-PAN proposes making relational patterns visible and testable, with outcomes assessed using clearly defined measures of safety, autonomy, and functioning. We need a shared, empirically tested framework for structured assessment and formulation before and alongside DSM-5(TR)/ICD-11 classification, one that examines development, relationships, environmental pressures, and system changes over time.

We are currently witnessing the rapid rise of highly weaponized, covert narrative movements where complex relationship conflicts are flattened into a singular, unscientific dogma: that one gender holds a monopoly on abuse. In this unchecked digital landscape, entire accounts of trauma including fabricated narratives of sexual assault and rape are routinely engineered or strategically deployed during initial dating phases as a high-velocity script to extract immediate sympathy, disable the new partner’s critical threat detection, and secure public validation. These calculated fabrications weaponize online altruism while genuine victims of severe domestic terrorism remain unheard.

We observe the empirical peak of this systemic corruption in a rapidly accelerating European phenomenon, visible within geopolitical infrastructure. Highly sophisticated, identity-diffused actors are constructing increasingly baroque Personal Fables of weaponized uniqueness, seamlessly synthesizing highly curated accounts of profound somatic trauma, such as miraculous awakenings from comatose states, with elite cognitive credentials like “giftedness” Armed with these manufactured survivor portfolios and utilizing high-status professional titles appended to their names, these profiles actively infiltrate clinical and digital spaces, launching aggressive parasitic alignment strategies under the public feeds of prominent psychiatrists. They deploy a coordinated repertoire of public petitions, legalistic denunciations, and mass media-driven campaigns to capture institutional attention and force the surrounding network into an automated validation loop.

The urgent, epistemological question remains for the contemporary diagnostic machine: when the psychic architecture is so profoundly warped by early parentification and survival-driven fantasy that it weaponizes the legal and public apparatus to enforce its grandiosity, can a traditional psychoanalyst genuinely intervene before the collective matrix is completely destabilized?

Without an objective, ”scientific” framework capable of analyzing these deep psychodynamic wounds and interactional systems without moral bias, the institutional failure will be catastrophic. If our clinical and legal systems continue to validate superficial checklists over structural replication, the current youth mental health crisis will inevitably explode into a weaponized, system-wide abuse crisis.

Case Analysis: Interactional Terrorism and Systemic Deception

Short case illustration. Deeper architectural parameters are fully documented elsewhere, demonstrating exactly why this specific trajectory was, and remains entirely predictable.

When you strip away the public scripts, the underlying psychodynamic architecture reveals exactly how this destructive sequence unfolds:

• The Collision of Fractured Blueprints: A man entering the system with a deep, unresolved childhood attachment wound collides with a woman whose psychic architecture was structurally warped by early parentification and survival-driven fantasy.
• The Interpersonal Laboratory: Behind closed doors, the woman deploys the inverted peekaboo rhythm as an automated, characterological contact-test. The chronic, unpredictable shifts between suffocating alignment and cold emotional stonewalling generate massive, recurring prediction errors within the man’s uncalibrated nervous system.
• The Mechanical Disregulation: Trapped inside this high-pressure laboratory, the man’s defensive boundaries collapse entirely. He retreats into years of severe chemical regulation, utilizing alcohol to silence the absolute noise of the internalized Army while the relationship loops endlessly through weaponized conflict boomerangs.
• The Late-Stage Re-enactment: By the time the system fractures, the covert actor seamlessly claims the dominant, public Personal Fable of the ultimate victim. Mainstream tracking services and local authorities step in, examine only the surface-level behavioral explosion, and mechanically assign the linear role of the “sole perpetrator” to the man completely blind to the decades of interactional terrorism that systematically drove his biology into the ground.

The practical goal is a shared framework that children, social workers, psychologists, and psychiatrists can understand and use. It would combine psychodynamic understanding with practical cognitive tools, recognise defence mechanisms, and provide a holding environment where young people feel safe enough to lower their defences and communicate the fear, distress, or unmet needs that may lie beneath aggression. While the contemporary diagnostic establishment remains heavily funded to endlessly micro-analyze Jean Piaget’s exact developmental milestones or conduct exhaustive, circular critiques of David Elkind’s legacy constructs, the actual youth care work floor requires an operational language, not a multi-decade academic debate. We cannot stabilize an uncalibrated threat environment or prevent systemic collapse behind closed doors by waiting for the next university paper to evaluate whether pathologized narcissism resides within individual eyebrow geometry.

This also requires direct communication and coordinated care between general practitioners, schools, social services, and mental health professionals. A shared case formulation should map developmental history, current pressures, relational patterns, protective factors, and the young person’s own perspective, while distinguishing observations from interpretations and working hypotheses. The baseline reality of global healthcare is an unmitigated, checklist-driven mess precisely because the system splits into isolated professional silos that validate surface-level symptoms while remaining blind to interactional origins. Clear responsibility for coordination, timely referrals, and agreed information sharing with appropriate consent and safeguarding procedures would help everyone involved work from an up-to-date, 3D understanding of the situation rather than hiding behind flat administrative checklists.

Progress should be evaluated through changes in safety, daily functioning, autonomy, and the young person’s ability to communicate distress. The framework should remain open to revision as new information emerges, with its reliability and effectiveness subject to empirical testing. Instead of generating more endless, self-serving critiques that merely demand further institutional funding to protect theoretical sandboxes, we must hand a completed, solution-oriented puzzle straight to frontline practitioners before another hidden family tragedy consolidates into a lifetime individual label.

Do we really believe that parents simply placing their bright 13- or 14-year-old with an ADHD or autism label in residential youth care tells us nothing worth examining about the family? What about individuation–separation at that age, and the adolescent’s experience of being sent away? If they subsequently receive an anxiety disorder label, shouldn’t we first examine what happened before and during that separation?

In interviews conducted in adulthood, individuals looking back on their childhoods described receiving DSM labels for experiences they now identify as child maltreatment rather than a mental disorder. This points to a diagnostic limitation where complex environmental distress are frequently cataloged through one individual. (Off-topic or maybe on-topic: you can spot splitting defenses with PBC-PAN in children)

We don’t need more flat, 1D diagnostic checklists to catalog human distress; we need an integrated 3D prospective lens to map how the human organism actually adapts, recalibrates, and survives within the high-pressure social media pipelines and interactional arenas of 2026

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(Holmes, R., framework, 2025)

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