“Power does not corrupt. It reveals.”
— James Baldwin
We often think of psychological warfare as something belonging to espionage thrillers or military strategy rooms. Rarely do we associate it with a social media post, a forwarded message, a tag, a veiled comment. And yet, in the digital age, the front lines of control are subtle, shifting, and terrifyingly banal.
Sometimes it comes dressed as humour.
Sometimes as concern.
Sometimes as a story that seems unrelated to anything real.
But for the person it's aimed at, the message is unmistakably surgical.
This is not a story about a particular incident. It’s about the patterns we refuse to see — and the characters who rely on our blindness.
What gives digital harassment its strength is not how loud it is, but how subtly it slips beneath perception.
It wears disguises:
The abuser need not say your name. He merely needs to describe a “type” — a character you, and only you, will recognise. The message isn't for the public. It’s for you. But sent through the public, so that your reaction can be dismissed as "paranoia", "bitterness", "vanity", or the tired trope: "female jealousy".
This is not clever. This is textbook covert narcissistic warfare — manipulation embedded in storytelling.
And it's time we learned to read it.
These are the 3 pillars of what I will call the Proxy Predator Model:
This isn’t about logic. It’s about narrative architecture.
It’s not that the audience believes the false story. It’s that the subject begins to question their own.
What makes this strategy dangerous is not just the predator. It's the proxies.
All self-appointed “neutral observers” who — knowingly or not — serve as extensions of a central manipulative mind.
They:
They don’t always know they are pawns. That’s the genius — and horror — of this system: it’s built on willing complicity and plausible deniability.
To reduce such tactics to “drama” or “personal issues” is to miss the point entirely.
This is about:
This is about jurisdiction — over identity, story, space.
This is about a pattern of digital misogyny cloaked in spiritual lingo and social acrobatics.
This is about boundaries.
If you’ve ever been recast in someone else's public fairytale — a fabricated caricature built to humiliate you while maintaining social favour — hear this:
You are not alone.
There is a language for this.
There are tools.
There are ways to fight back without ever having to stoop.
There is a world beyond the puppet theatre of proxies and veiled threats.
And you are not paranoid for recognising when you are being watched.
The person warning others about a supposed danger is not always your protector.
Sometimes, they are merely describing themselves — in reverse.
And if you listen closely, if you hold the mirror steady enough,
they tell you everything.
This is not about revenge. It's about reclaiming narrative space.
This is not about exposing a person. It's about decoding a system.
This is not about pointing fingers. It's about lifting veils.
To hold up a mirror is not to claim innocence. It is to risk seeing yourself, too — distorted, partial, exposed. But unlike the predator, the one who holds the mirror does so not to wound, but to warn. And that, perhaps, is the crucial difference.