Anti Vampire Center

Psychological and physical changes in children who are prey to Vampires

The most cowardly vampiric aggressions, those against children, can cause psychological harm which will have repercussions on the entire universe of future choices, actions, and initiatives of those children.

A child who is emotionally blackmailed by a parent-Vampire, who denies him all dignity and always imposes his own power on him, runs the risk of losing contact with reality and falling prey to whoever may want to dominate him and impress their own viewpoints on him.

A female child with a mother-Vampire who, wanting all of the child's attention for herself, insists on demolishing the figure of the other parent in the child's eyes, will be at risk for serious difficulties in cultivating healthy, balanced relationships with members of the opposite sex. She will tend to devalue and idolize them at the same time, because on the one hand she's been forced to look down upon her father (the first and most important man in her life), and on the other hand, she has always continued loving him, though secretly and with a sense of the forbidden and illicit which will reflect on all of her emotional choices. Naturally, the same thing will happen if the sexes are reversed (a father-Vampire who devalues the mother in the eyes of a male child).

A parent-Vampire who, unable to love one child as much as he loves another, decides to hide his lack of interest for the less loved child by treating him in an overly protective way with heavy traces of pity, risks causing in the child a tendency to present himself for the rest of his life as someone structurally incapable, full of peculiarities and frustrations, and paradoxically in need of attention.

The story The 1100 Belvedere, points out two other aspects of vampiric aggression that are harmful to children. The central point of the story is the episode of a child who, guilty of having uncovered a family secret which he was not supposed to discover, is cruelly deprived of the dignity which he enjoyed earlier, and confined to a dimension of "strangeness" and permanent discredit, for the purpose of making his "fanciful" affirmations seem unreliable. This causes in the child, in addition to a series of changes in bodily characteristics and behavior, a recurring and humiliating digestive discomfort which always arises in the presence of a key-protagonist of the secret, Doctor Maggi.

We would go and visit them in summer in a large house in the country, with so many fig and peach trees. A very thick undergrowth around the house. Dogs. A dry fountain. An enormous toad, which he called Volfango. His wife would set up a wooden table under the pergola and there they ate and drank. I ate almost nothing because I felt sick. Maggi treated me as if I was a little idiot. I had a vague and terrifying memory of him, because he made me feel nonexistent. His wife was better. She seemed to accept everybody’s existence. Also mine, with such pity as to drive her to prepare me the only thing I could tolerate in that place: bruschetta. Once, however, she made it with garlic; I hated garlic, but I ate it anyway, because I did not want to appear so silly as to make her do it again. I remember I ate it all, and the temptation to vomit began to assail me before even finishing it. I restrained myself and I got a headache. I wandered the whole afternoon about the garden with the temples tight in a steel vice. Then, when they were inside to prepare dinner and the first odor began to arrive, I started running and succeeded in arriving at the dry fountain before unloading the mush of the never digested bruschetta. I even succeeded in diluting the proof of my shame filling several times a rusted watering can I had found in the environs and emptying it on my refuses till making them almost unrecognizable. The odor, acrid, was smelt anyhow. All was discovered and the lady prepared me a light thin soup of small pasta, which I did not refuse, blocking my stomach again and risking another poor figure. When Maggi greeted me, he would say to me: "Bye, young man" with his never smiling eyes, and I knew that calling me "young man" was his way to remind me that, according to him, I would never become so, but I would always remain the ameba that I was.

The father-Vampire (or in any case the parent-Vampire, the teacher-Vampire, the baby-sitter-Vampire, in short, an emotional authority figure-Vampire) is unable to understand that children are not objects which are purchased or rented or contracted for by the individuals who raise them and take care of them; children are free, innocent beings, without a doubt more worthy and divine than we adults. They are beings who have paid us the immense honor of coming to stay with us, asking only to be brought up, loved, and helped to live a worthy life. Whatever idea one professes, be it religious or secular, one cannot help but accept that the innocent are the most sacred beings on earth and that their fragile condition should be defended and protected in any way possible from the danger of predators. Agreement with this principle is a good starting point from which to create a coalition against vampirism.

The pleasure of acquiescence

The self-damaging tendency to please a Vampire recurs in all possible schemes of aggression. The invasive presence of the Vampire, his negative charge, his hunger for blood, his heavy, avid breath, are psychological factors so oppressive and nauseating to bear that frequently one can only attempt to attenuate them by transforming them into a kind of pleasure. A masochistic pleasure, obviously, that at times even takes on the characteristics of a kind of honor at having been chosen as victims.

This terrible outcome of vampiric aggression can involve emotional relationships as well as professional, business and political dealings. Many have had at least one experience in which they found themselves facing someone of very dubious honesty yet surrounded by a halo of power, and feeling a sense of repulsive detachment and, at the same time, an aroused readiness to please him in any way. Such a person's need to prevail over others emanates from him like an odor. He alternates attitudes meant to make us feel like absolute non-entities compared to him, with others that are kinder and seemingly human. The latter complete the trap. A smile, a wink, a gesture of familiarity will be enough to make us tremble with a strange, mysterious emotion which will impel us to assume attitudes and perform acts marked by total acquiescence toward him. Pleasing him will be our greatest honor.

It will make very little difference if he is a Vampire-boss, company manager, political figure, head of a military junta that has seized power through a coup d'état, a powerful uncle who can give us a recommendation, a small leader in a neighborhood, alley or bar, an ultra-leader who organizes brawls at the stadium, or a man who wants to increase the collection of women he takes to bed. Faced with the Vampire, all our fine ideas and our human, civic and political values risk being shipwrecked in a swamp from which it will not be easy to escape without resorting to moral acrobatics to be able to still look at ourselves in the mirror.