Letter 13: The Flailing Child Within

“The child in man is an eternal child, something that becomes and that never finishes growing, that calls for unceasing care, attention, and education. That is the part of the human personality which wants to develop and become whole.”

-Carl Jung

---

Dear Future Human,

I woke up this morning with a sinking feeling in my stomach and a strange sensation in my body. Lying in bed, I listened deeply, remaining still as I scanned my body and mind.

I know that when I truly listen, my feelings and sensations reveal discomfort, fears, concerns—signals, in other words, demanding my attention. That’s why I call them "the informants." As I discussed in a previous letter, The Informants Within, our feelings carry vital information, essential for survival, alerting us to tune into our body’s cues so that we can stay healthy, safe, and aligned with our true nature.

As I continued to tune into the energy in my body, my thoughts turned to Jennifer.

Feelings of concern arose for her.

Like a seed planted in a rocky soil, Jennifer was born into an environment where she had to struggle to receive the nourishment she needed to survive. Children, like other organisms, adapt to fit into their ecosystem. Jennifer was no exception. Born to a mother who dictated her every thought, action and emotions, Jennifer quickly learned that her safety depended on obedience. She became hyper-aware of her mother’s moods, learning to suppress her own needs and wants to accommodate her mother’s demands. At a very young age, she had internalized that the only way she could survive was by conforming and being a ‘good’ girl.

Jennifer, for her survival, had no choice but to adapt to her childhood environment. But, due to the brain’s conservation of energy, these behavioral patterns became ingrained in her. As an adult, the same fears of rejection, abandonment, or confrontation continue to show up in relationships, work, and her personal aspirations.

She did not adapt to thrive—she adapted to disappear.

I have been working with Jennifer for a few years now. Ironically, my concern for her this morning was due in part to her recent breakthroughs. She is making great progress and has recently come to the realization that she doesn’t know who she is or what she wants. She is now beginning to recognize her constant need to please others and how she has allowed their perception of her to define who she is. I need to help her move slowly and give her extra support to help reinforce her new level of awareness. It’s a pivotal moment.

I need to emphasize that many of the issues that Jennifer presented me with when we first met—insecurity, fear of rejection, seeking external validation and disconnection from her values and true self, are not unique. In my decades of practice, I have seen this pattern repeatedly emerge in most people across all walks of life. No matter how educated, accomplished, or financially successful my clients were, it didn’t take long for them to reveal their underlying fears—fears of rejection, abandonment, and being exposed as a fraud. Beneath their achievements, many lacked a true connection to themselves: to what they genuinely valued, what motivated their actions, and a deeper sense of purpose or meaning in their lives.

Why would the average adult feel so reluctant to express their honest opinion, or get so triggered by a simple statement like, "We need to talk?"

In other words, why do so many adults in our society tend to follow rather than lead? Why do they often appear fragile and easily manipulated?

Deep within most adults of my time lives a tender, bewildered child—constantly seeking validation and acceptance from the world around them.

Over the next few letters, I will systematically explore why these frightened little children still live within us, how they control our emotional and social lives and why our adult selves have been unable to overcome their power. I will endeavor to make this intricate and complex process as tangible and relatable as possible.

I will begin by introducing three psychological structures that form a kind of psychic scaffolding as we grow from early childhood into adulthood: the Flailing Child, the Liminal Space, and the Fraudulent Adult.

My intention in describing how these structures emerged is to help you appreciate what each of us endured throughout our development toward adulthood—revealing the numerous challenges we had to contend with to survive and adapt. I will endeavor to make this intricate and complex process as tangible and relatable as possible.

To understand how these structures developed, we must start at the beginning. We are born helpless: totally dependent on our parents for survival, experiencing the world entirely through our bodies and our sensory capacities.

Evolutionarily speaking, childhood is an extremely vulnerable time. Children are biologically primed to perceive potential danger to themselves in any experience that carries with it a twinge of pain or shock.^¹ To a young child a scraped knee or a moment of emotional rejection can feel equally threatening, each carrying the possibility of disconnection, harm, or abandonment.²

By instinctively moving away from pain and toward safety and comfort, we are driven to rapidly discover how to adapt and belong to our physical and social environments through curiosity, play and wonder.

As I discussed in the letter, Neurons that fire together wire together, children are born with a remarkable neurological system designed to rapidly form connections, enabling them to process what they hear and see, learn language, and develop social and emotional skills. However, these developmental processes take a great deal of time, especially the formation and functioning of the emotional and cognitive systems.³

Cognitively, infants and toddlers have very limited capacities to interpret the world. They mostly learn through observation and direct bodily experiences. At this stage, they are capable of understanding relatively few abstract words adults commonly use.⁴ For example, phrases like “it is time to leave,” or “Mom is going on a trip for work and will be back later,” hold little meaning for them. They have no real sense of time and little ability to understand cause and effect, giving them little to no comprehension of the connections between events.

Psychologically, a child’s capacity to understand others’ minds develops gradually. Children begin understanding that others have different visual perspectives around age 2-3, develop basic Theory of Mind by ages 3-5, but continue refining their ability to understand complex mental states well into adolescence.⁵ That capacity depends on the gradual development of the prefrontal cortex, which matures progressively in both function and complexity throughout childhood and adolescence, reaching full maturity in our mid-twenties.⁶ A toddler's joyfulness when playing peek-a-boo is a perfect example of an early stage of development. They are beginning to appreciate the play in seeing and not-seeing, but have not yet fully grasped the complexity of others' visual experience.

Considering their many physical, cognitive, and emotional limitations, young children exist in a continual state of not knowing—constantly learning, stumbling and making mistakes. Their life is filled with moments of triumph, as well as with agony and despair. Their innate impulse for curiosity, their need to discover and test their environment, further compounds their frustrations, as it often places them in conflict with parents exasperated by their willfulness.

These conflicts, however small, can be agonizing for a young child. Their primary caregiver is their entire world—the source of all security and belonging. The steps required for socialization (correction, discipline, etc.) often feel like sudden withdrawals of love and approval. In those moments, the child’s entire sense of safety can feel threatened. They experience this rupture as a threat—not just emotionally, but physically, in their bodies. In a sense, it is. Without staying close to their parents, the child has a limited chance of survival. They do not yet have the cognitive capacity to distinguish what counts as a real or imagined threat. In fact, I have discovered that even adults have trouble with this!

To make matters more challenging for children, many parents lack awareness of their own emotional needs, and understandably, this makes it difficult for them to recognize or meet their child’s emotional needs. We often have unrealistic expectations that don’t align with the child’s developmental stage. Our society does not teach the cognitive, emotional, and psychological stages of childhood development, leaving parents ill-equipped to relate, communicate with, or nurture their children effectively.⁷

For example, parents often don’t make a distinction between instructing children in behaviors that are a necessary part of their socialization (being kind, respecting boundaries, sticking to routines, etc.) and behaviors that try to correct or control aspects of the child’s natural personality (the toys they’re drawn to, the sports they enjoy, the kinds of music they love). As children grow and begin to express their individuality, they often encounter criticism or suppression—especially when their personality, needs, or values contradict those of their parents or community. They hear constant messages of “No”: No, you can’t do that. No, you can’t say that. No, you can’t play with that now. No, you can’t wear that. No, we can’t buy that…

Lacking the neural architecture to interpret social cues, emotional states like exhaustion or irritation, or unspoken norms—young children don’t yet perceive others as individuals with rich inner lives. While infants demonstrate an inherent capacity for relatedness from birth and show some awareness of self–other differentiation within the first weeks of life, their understanding of others remains limited and fragmented throughout the first year. In the first six months, infants experience people primarily through sensory patterns and emotional regulation rather than as complete, separate individuals. "Mother" is perceived as a distinct presence but is experienced more through repetitive sensory and comfort associations: feeling safe, the sound of a lullaby, the smell and taste of breast, and the soothing satisfaction of hunger. But she is also the repetitive experience of the shocking cold of a changing table, or the pain of a cry that sometimes goes unanswered. All these repetitive experiences, both comforting and distressing, will be associated with the visual, verbal, or tactile identification of “mother.” The brain performs these associations autonomously, without conscious awareness or intention.

The result is that even with the most loving, attuned caregivers, the fundamental mismatch between a child's needs and any human caregiver's capacity creates an inevitable developmental challenge. For the child, the experienced presence of their primary caregivers will be an a mixture of satiety and disappointment, safety and threat, all of it seemingly random—like weather that changes unpredictably. The child may thus develop an underlying fear of arbitrary danger—the sense that at any moment, something bad could happen.

These unavoidable feelings of threat manifest in their bodies as repeated, overwhelming experiences of confusion, pain and terror. These feelings are literally experienced as signals of danger—danger of being rejected or abandoned by their caregivers—left alone and helpless.

This feeling—the feeling of being all alone—for the child will be tantamount to death.

Trapped in an environment that continually floods the child with overwhelming feelings, within a world whose causes and effects they don’t yet understand, their nervous system eventually reaches a breaking point. It is intolerable; it is all too much to endure.

And yet they must endure it. They must survive it. That is the evolutionary mandate.

To adapt, to survive, the child begins to dissociate: from their own pain, their own needs and their own frustrated wants. Neurologically, this manifests as a shutting down of the child's natural openness and curiosity. They become emotionally guarded and socially defensive, even with family members.⁸ Simultaneously, part of their psyche remains frozen in a state of unconscious terror that their security, their relationship with their caregivers, is constantly at risk.

I call this part of us the ‘Flailing Child’—the part that is buried deep within us, that feels completely alone, confused, vulnerable and terrified. Unable to make sense of or regulate their own feelings, the ‘Flailing Child’ remains frozen in time. It will remain there, filtering our adult experiences through its lenses of terror and disconnection until we uncover, understand, and integrate both it and the other layers of psychic scaffolding that serve to buffer us from its raw intensity and our original light.

In my next letter, I will explore the next two layers.

All my love,

Ronit

1. Lisa Fritscher, How Evolutionary Psychology Explains Human Behavior, VeryWell Mind, November 2023.

2. Ethan Kross, Marc G. Berman, Walter Mischel, Edward E. Smith and Tor D. Wager, Social Rejection Shares Somatosensory Representations with Physical Pain, PNAS, February 2011.

3. Raed Mualem et al., Econeurobiology and Brain Development in Children: Key Factors Affecting Development, Behavioral Outcomes, and School Interventions, Frontiers Public Health, September 2024.

4. Francesca Bellagamba, Anna M. Borghi, Claudia Mazzuca, Giulia Pecora, Fabiana Ferrara and Alan Fogel, Abstractness Emerges Progressively Over the Second Year of Life, Scientific Reports, December 2022.

5. Janet Wilde Astington, PhD and Margaret J. Edward, MA, The Development of Theory of Mind in Early Childhood, Encyclopedia on Early Childhood Development, August 2010.

6. Olivia Guy-Evans, When Does The Prefrontal Cortex Fully Develop?, Simply Psychology, July 2025.

7. Lael Stone, How To Raise Emotionally Intelligent Children, TedXDocklands, February 2020.

8. Camille Guérin-Marion, Sage Sezlik, and Jean-François Bureau, Developmental and Attachment-based Perspectives on Dissociation: Beyond the Effects of Maltreatment, European Journal of Psychotraumatol, October 2020.

---