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

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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 have learned that when I truly listen, my feelings and sensations reveal discomfort, fears, concerns—signals, each one 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. They are essential to our survival, alerting us to tune into our bodies’ 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.

A feeling of concern arose for her.

Like a seed planted in rocky soil, Jennifer was born into an environment where she had to struggle to receive the emotional and relational 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 emotion, Jennifer learned early that her safety depended on obedience. She became hyper-aware of her mother’s moods, suppressing her own needs and maintaining connection. At a very young age, she had internalized that the only way she could survive was by conforming and being a good girl.

Jennifer had no choice but to adapt. And because the brain conserves energy, these behavioral patterns became ingrained in her. What once protected her now follows her into adulthood. The same fears of rejection, abandonment, or confrontation continue to show up in her relationships, work, and personal aspirations.

When a child must adapt to threat, maturation stalls.^¹ There is no room to explore or unfold. Instead, the child becomes whoever they need to be to maintain connection. Jennifer could not afford the luxury of discovering who she truly was. She had to become who she needed to be to survive.

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 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 see her deep need to please others and how she has allowed their perception of her to define who she is. This is a critical moment. I need to help her move slowly and give her extra support to help reinforce this new level of awareness.

I need to emphasize that many of the issues Jennifer presented with when we first met—insecurity, fear of rejection, seeking external validation, and disconnection from her values and true self—are not unique. In decades of practice, I have seen this pattern repeatedly across all walks of life. No matter how 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 valued or what gave their life meaning.

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?” Why do so many adults in our society tend to follow rather than lead? Why does authenticity feel so risky, even when there is no real threat?

Deep within most adults of my time lives a tender, confused child—constantly seeking validation and reassurance from the world around them. This arises because any loss of attachment is experienced as an existential threat. This isn’t just a metaphor; it’s biological.² Disconnection doesn’t just hurt; it registers in the nervous system as danger.

The tender, confused child within is not merely seeking validation to feel comfort. They are seeking safety so that their nervous systems don’t experience the feelings of danger that arise from disconnection, abandonment, and being utterly alone.

The early wiring doesn’t disappear with age. It’s why ordinary adult moments—a critical comment, a delayed text, someone’s disappointment—can trigger extreme threat. On a bodily level, any signs of potential disapproval or dismissiveness are perceived as a threat to connection, and when connection feels at risk, survival feels at risk.

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 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.

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.³ To a young child, a scraped knee or a moment of emotional rejection can feel equally threatening, each carrying the possibility of loss of connection.⁴

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

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.⁵

Cognitively, infants and toddlers have very limited capacities to interpret the world. They mostly learn through direct bodily experiences. At this stage, they are capable of understanding relatively few abstract words adults commonly use.⁶ 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 or cause and effect; these words cannot assuage their fears.

Psychologically, a child’s capacity to understand others’ minds develops gradually. Children begin understanding that others have different visual perspectives around ages 2-3, develop basic Theory of Mind by ages 3-5, but continue refining their ability to understand complex mental states well into adolescence.⁷ 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. Their lives are filled with wonder and discovery but also with insecurities and confusion. 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 disconnect as a threat—not just emotionally, but physically, in their bodies. In a sense, it is.

Here’s where the disconnect begins. The child faces an impossible dilemma: I need to be myself. And I need to be attached. When being authentic threatens attachment—the child makes an agonizing adaptive decision.

The Flailing Child forms in this gap—the part of us that learned to hide its needs in order to stay connected. It remains frozen because expressing those parts still feels unsafe.

What makes it even more challenging for children is that many parents were never taught to understand their own emotions, so they struggle to recognize or meet their child’s. It’s not a lack of care, but a lack of guidance. Without a shared understanding of child development, expectations often exceed what a child is capable of, leaving parents and children alike without the tools to connect well.⁸

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…

Young children aren’t yet able to see others as separate people with their own inner worlds. In the first year of life, infants experience caregivers mostly through sensation and emotional regulation, not as fully distinct individuals.

“Mother” is known through repeated sensory associations: feeling safe, the sound of a lullaby, the taste and smell of milk, the relief of hunger. She is also the cold shock of a changing table and the pain of a cry that sometimes goes unanswered. Both comfort and distress become linked to “mother,” as the brain forms these associations automatically.

Attachment researchers call this “right-brain to right-brain” regulation: an infant’s nervous system learns to regulate by syncing with the caregiver’s. When the parent is calm, the baby settles. When the parent is anxious, the baby becomes anxious too.

In this way, the infant isn’t just forming memories of their caregiver—they’re learning how to regulate their own emotions. If a caregiver can’t hold their own distress, the child learns: I’m alone with this.

Over time, this creates a core experience of overwhelming emotion without support.

This early experience doesn’t disappear as we grow. The nervous system remembers what it learned long before we had words. This part doesn’t mature alongside the rest of us, because it never felt safe enough to do so.

The result is that even with the most loving, attuned caregivers, there is an unavoidable mismatch between a child’s needs and any human caregiver’s capacity. For the child, this mismatch is felt in the body as confusion, fear, pain, and terror—signals of danger, of possible rejection or abandonment, of being left alone and helpless.

For a young child, the feeling of being all alone is experienced as a threat to survival.

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 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.⁹ Simultaneously, part of their psyche remains frozen in unconscious terror that their security and connection with their caregivers is constantly at risk.

I call this part the “Flailing Child” because it feels like it’s constantly in free fall; it doesn’t have a solid and secure ground to stand on. It lives beneath our adult competencies, unconsciously affecting our perceptions and actions.

Unable to make sense of or regulate its own feelings, the Flailing Child remains frozen in time. It’s filtering our adult experiences through its lenses of terror and disconnection until we begin to see and understand why it’s there.

In my next letter, I will explore the two layers that emerged to protect the Flailing Child and help us adapt to fit into our environment.

All my love,

Ronit

1. Gordon Neufeld, “The Keys to Well-Being in Children and Youth: The Significant Role of Families,” Improving the Quality of Childhood in Europe Vol.5 , pp. 36-57, January 2014.

2. Dr. Becky Kennedy, “Good Inside: A Guide to Becoming the Parent You Want to Be,” Harper Wave, September 13, 2022

3. Lisa Fritscher, “How Evolutionary Psychology Explains Human Behavior,” VeryWell Mind, November 2023.

4. Ethan Kross et al, “Social Rejection Shares Somatosensory Representations with Physical Pain,” PNAS, February 2011.

5. Raed Mualem et al., “Econeurobiology and Brain Development in Children,” Frontiers in Public Health, September 2024.

6. Francesca Bellagamba et al, “Abstractness Emerges Progressively Over the Second Year of Life,” Scientific Reports, December 2022.

7. J.W. Astington PhD and M.J. Edward MA, “The Development of Theory of Mind in Early Childhood,” Encyclopedia on Early Childhood Development, August 2010.

8. Lael Stone, “How To Raise Emotionally Intelligent Children,” TedXDocklands, February 2020.

9. C. Guérin-Marion et al, “Developmental and Attachment-based Perspectives on Dissociation: Beyond the Effects of Maltreatment,” European Journal of Psychotraumatolgy, October 2020.

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