Note on consent:
* Parents have consent to make decisions on behalf of their minor children. This work was done within that responsibility and relationship. Containment of a minor is part of guardianship. This kind of spell is not appropriate outside of clear consent or caretaking authority.
Seven years ago, I used a spell I rarely talk about.
Not because it didn’t work. It worked exactly as intended, and it sits in that category of parenting decisions you don’t make lightly, don’t repeat casually, and don’t explain to people who don’t understand boundaries on energetic levels.
At the time, E was fourteen — peak angry tween — smart, perceptive, and actively searching for her own source of power. She wasn’t neglected, abused, or ignored. Quite the opposite. She lived inside a rare situation: two households that communicated well, consistent structure, between divorced parents who actually like each other. That kind of containment doesn’t always feel like safety to a teenager… Sometimes it feels like oppression, according to the Geneva Convention of Teen Feelings.
This post isn’t about demonizing a kid, glorifying control, or dramatizing teenage rebellion. It’s about what happens when a young person with perceptive awareness, unstable physiology, and unresolved anger begins experimenting with non-physical leverage — and where the line is between allowing growth and protecting the household.
I tolerate a lot. Until lines are crossed. The line was crossed when the energy stopped being self-contained.
I allow anger. I allow moodiness, withdrawal, posturing, and energetic experimentation. That’s part of adolescence, especially for perceptive kids who can feel non-physical layers before they have the discernment to manage them well. Power-seeking is normal. Boundary-testing is normal. Even flirting with forces you don’t yet understand is, unfortunately, normal.
What isn’t acceptable is displacement.
When she began picking on the dog — small, pointed acts meant to vent pressure — it warned me: something important had shifted. The energy was no longer just hers, and this new energy was looking for outlets. Hosts. Leverage.
There’s a physiological component to this that most people ignore because it doesn’t fit modern narratives. Low iron levels matter. Iron isn’t just a mineral — it’s a grounding agent. It’s one of the reasons my Gaelic tradition uses iron objects at thresholds, horseshoes over doorways, nails in beams. Certain entities are repelled by it. Many others lose coherence around it.
Teenage girls are uniquely vulnerable here. Menstruation lowers iron. Dietary restriction lowers iron. Lifestyle choices dressed up as identity — “being vegetarian like my cool friends” — can unintentionally strip the body of its natural defenses. Combine that with heightened emotion, identity instability, and perceptive sensitivity, and you get increased astral traffic. There’s a reason the stereotype of the angry emo teenage witch exists. It didn’t come from nowhere.
We weren’t unsettled by her or by whatever was passing through her field. Bear and I are grounded adults. Wetiko doesn’t get to run the house. And I believe everyone has to learn, in their own time, what they are and aren’t willing to host.
But when a child begins externalizing that energy — what I taught her to call “blowing off,” as in stop blowing off your anger on the dog, or on everyone in the room around you — it’s no longer a private learning curve. It’s a containment issue.
I didn’t punish her. I didn’t attack her. I didn’t shame her. But when she wouldn’t contain it herself, I put her in her own bubble. She was allowed to stew in her own emotional and energetic output, but she was no longer allowed to dump it into the shared field. No bleeding off. No collateral damage. No testing power by destabilizing weaker beings.
She didn’t like that.
Wanting to reassert leverage, she went looking elsewhere, and found it in the astral.
She came downstairs calm.
Her shoulders were relaxed, her gait unhurried. There was a lightness to her that hadn’t been there all day — not relief, not joy. Satisfaction. The kind that comes from believing you’ve just tipped a board you weren’t supposed to touch.
She was smiling.
Not a big smile. A tight one. Controlled. Like she was holding something back.
I stayed seated. I met her as my daughter, not the energy riding her.
“What’s up, Peanut?” I asked.
She stopped a few feet away and looked at me, eyes slightly unfocused, like she was listening to something else at the same time.
Then she said it — not loudly, not theatrically, but with malice.
“I sent a shadow into your bedroom. I watched it go in myself.”
Not teenage bravado. Not metaphor. Not imagination play. The phrasing was precise. Intentional. And the tone wasn’t hers — flatter, older, testing for reaction.
She was watching my face — both to see my reaction and to register that she was being seen. I’m the parent who would believe her, and she needed that belief. She needed to be recognized as powerful.
This wasn’t necessarily about hurting us. She didn’t grasp the scale of what she was handling. It was about seeing whether she could provoke a reaction — and she was genuinely excited that she’d managed to create or invite a shadow. Some astral wildlife seemed willing to do her bidding. For an angry girl, that kind of response can feel thrilling.
The message underneath was clear: You try to control me, I’ll reach for power that answers to darker incentives.
I nodded. No anger. No fear. No flinch.
“Okay,” I said calmly. “Are you sure you want to start a game you don’t understand yet?”
The smile faltered.
Not because she felt bad— but because the response she wanted didn’t arrive. She wanted power reflected back at her. What she got instead was recognition of risk. I wasn’t impressed. I wasn’t afraid. I saw that she was in over her head.
I didn’t threaten her. I didn’t lecture. I didn’t escalate. I simply acknowledged the moment for what it was.
She lingered for a moment, searching my field for cracks where there were none.
Then she turned and went back upstairs.
The next day, after she left for school, I acted.
This wasn’t a spell cast in anger. It wasn’t reactive. It wasn’t meant to teach her a lesson or scare her straight. It was a time-out spell — the energetic equivalent of removing matches from a child’s reach when curiosity has outpaced discernment.
I wasn’t trying to suppress her nature. I was protecting it.
What she’d been reaching into was bigger than her embodiment could hold. The spell wasn’t designed to punish her for exploring power — it was designed to slow the exploration down until her body, heart, and judgment could catch up.
I absorbed the excess charge first. Everything she’d been amplifying — her room, her altar, her tools, her field — was drawn into an egg stone. It grew warm. Heavy. That told me enough. Containment always has weight.
The rest of the work was insulation, not exile.
I enveloped her in an even stronger noise-canceling shell — not silence, but dampening. Incoming interference muted. Outgoing discharge contained. Her own heartbeat made louder in her awareness than anything external. Not as punishment — as orientation.
She needed to hear herself again.
The spell allowed loneliness. That part was intentional. Loneliness isn’t cruelty when it’s temporary and purposeful. Sometimes it’s the only way to sever unhealthy attachments that rely on constant stimulation and external response.
Her heart was empowered to be the key.
If her heart field strengthened, it could break the shell on its own. Until then, the other channels were closed — not forever, just until coherence returned. Growth before access. Integrity before expansion. The bind wasn’t a punishment; it required her to build the very capacity needed to dissolve it.
Everything she’d invited into the house was banished separately. That part was clean and unsentimental. You don’t negotiate with stray energies. You escort them out and lock the door.
The final step wasn’t mine to hold.
I sealed what remained — stones, water, intention — and walked it out into the cold to the maple who already knew what she was agreeing to. Trees understand timing better than people do. I didn’t ask for immediate resolution. I asked for right resolution.
Freezing does something important. It pauses without destroying. It suspends motion without denying potential.
Her magic wasn’t taken from her.
It was put somewhere safe until she could carry it.
Here is the spell, verbatim from my notes:
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Post script
She’s twenty now.
Grounded. Capable. Competent in ways that don’t need proving. She’s building a life of her own and she handles the practical, three-dimensional world with real competence. Work, responsibility, follow-through. She knows how to stand on her own feet.
Her magic matured too. Power is no longer something she uses to provoke. It’s something she embodies.
That spell didn’t take anything from her.
It bought her time.
Time to grow a heart strong enough to lead, and a nervous system steady enough to hold what she’s capable of. When the thaw came — and it did — she was ready for herself.
That’s the point of parental containment.
Not suppression.
Not fear.
Not control.
Stewardship — until wisdom meets power.