This phenomenon seems to match up with existing search terms like structural dissociation, double-binds, and double-bookkseping. It’s an interesting and sympathetic exploration.
Another possible solution to the hostile telepath problem, at least the angry mom. Instead of self-protection and appeasement aa a core strategy, you could be curious about the other person’s internal experience. Perhaps under their anger is distress. Perhaps they want you to connect with their distress.
Perhaps you could telepath back.
Perhaps they want you to care about their experience, not just engage in self protection so you can continue to access the resources of the relationship.
This isn’t always true. It isn’t always possible, epecially for a child totally dependent on a parents’ resources.
But as an adult, this is emotional connection is often what is being requested.
Perhaps instead of thinking of myths as eternal Truths, its more useful to think of them as heuristics, or easy ways to capture and communicate complex ideas. Tech for thinking complex thoughts. Humans rarely have the capacity to think abstractly, so we mostly reason by metaphor to something concrete.
From this perspective, stories and metaphors give shape to the kinds of thoughts people can think.
I think of Chinese Cheng Yu, the 4 character idioms that refer to stories that have morals or lessons, as being the most compressed form of this. Most cultures, from ancient Greece to rural America, have some form of this.
When s someone references a Less Wrong phrase that conveys a complex idea via a metaphor, like Cupstacking, the Map is not the Territory, they are doing the same thing. To some extent, one of the projects of Less Wrong is to replace and expand a vernacular.
On the other hand, recently Americans have been fed a glut of superhero, Western, and epic fantasy stories that have a single clear Good guy and Bad guy, and a straight forward arc of the person winning (usually though violence) being the Good guy, or at least Our guy. There is a struggle for power, honor, respect, justice, safety, the girl (or her memory), and all that is right. Whoever opposes the Protagonist/POV character is the bad guy by default.
This story has very little to do with universal truths, but it does shape thinking, especially when so often repeated.