Letter 14: The Emergence of The Fraudulent Self

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Dear Future Human,

In my last letter, I introduced you to the concept of three psychological structures at play in nearly every human being: The Flailing Child, the Liminal Space, and the Fraudulent Adult. Previously, I explored the roots and nature of the Flailing Child in detail. In this letter, I will focus on the emergence of the latter two, and the mechanism that allows these structures to coexist: emotional numbness.

This system of numbness is not a flaw; it is a brilliant and necessary survival strategy that ultimately costs us dearly. In the face of repetitive, traumatic, and overwhelming early childhood experiences, this numbness protects us from early childhood psychic and emotional collapse.^¹ However, when left unaddressed, it often becomes a hardened barrier, ultimately cutting us off from our deepest sense of Self, our emotional life, and our capacity to experience reality directly—ultimately, life fully.

I imagine many of you have seen a National Geographic documentary where a lion chases an antelope and finally catches it by the neck. The antelope, still alive in the mouth of the lion, is completely overwhelmed and hopeless. At the edge of death, it enters a freeze state, and its body seems to physically prepare for death. A variety of neurotransmitters, including opioid fibers, flood the animal’s body—a way to numb the pain and surrender to the reality of its impending death. The adrenaline to fight or flee stops; the antelope becomes eerily calm, seems to accept its fate, and surrender into its death.²

When we, as children, endure repeated psychological threats—domination, rejection, abandonment—we too have a breaking point. At this breaking point, our survival instincts kick in. Just like an antelope in the jaws of a lion, our bodies reflexively prepare for the worst. We are flooded with natural opiates that ease us into apathy and giving up, eventually numbing us from our overwhelming psychological pain.³ It is here that we enter this state of numbness that separates us from the deeper essence of who we are—our vital, feeling, connected self. We dissociate and become numb to direct experiences in life.

This chemical and neurological mechanism of numbness protects us from utter collapse each time we experience the trauma of feeling dominated, rejected, or abandoned as children. Over time, these intermittent periods of numbness accumulate in our bodies and solidify into a consistent impermeable barrier of numbness that separates us from fully experiencing the vitality of life.

This impermeable barrier of numbness becomes the foundational layer of the Liminal Space, and it is the mechanism that “permanently” distances us from our original Self. It dulls our direct sensory and emotional connection to the world.

To further illustrate how these psychic layers form and interact, let’s turn to another metaphor from nature: the structure of soil. If our authentic true Self is the ‘bedrock layer’ of our psyche—the deepest, truest stratum—then the Liminal Space is like a hardened clay layer that forms above it. This impermeable clay layer of numbness separates us from our bedrock: our original, Authentic Self.

The Flailing Child exists like an underground spring or aquifer—a source of raw, vital energy that became trapped when the clay layer hardened. Just as underground water can create pressure, erosion, and sudden breaches in the earth above, the Flailing Child's unprocessed pain and terror continues to move beneath the surface, typically breaking through when the defenses in the Liminal Space no longer work.

This clay layer of numbness becomes the foundation in which all our other adaptive defenses take root: repression, denial, avoidance, rigidity, projection, and more. These are the psychological soil layers that form on top, growing richer and more complex, but also further removed from the original bedrock and the underground spring of the Flailing Child.

The Fraudulent Adult lives in this topsoil layer—visible, functional, socially acceptable. But like plants growing in shallow soil above hardened clay, this persona lacks deep roots. It appears stable on the surface but is vulnerable to drought, storms, and the unpredictable eruptions from the underground spring below.

However, these defense mechanisms are not simply random constructions. The way we defend ourselves is often shaped by our uniquely innate gifts and talents. If humor is our gift, we apply it like a shield, by deflecting pain through wit and laughter. If intelligence is our strength, we use it to rationalize our irrational behaviors, fabricating justifications for our avoidance or detachment. If creativity is our natural talent, we weave fantastical stories that keep us from feeling any discomfort. In this way, each of us builds our armor. Every strategy is a distorted reflection of our innate brilliance, rewoven into a protective structure.

Over time, we grow increasingly disconnected from our Authentic Self, buried beneath accumulating layers of numbness and protective defenses. The Liminal Space serves as scaffolding for the construction of a Fraudulent Adult—a socially adaptive, externally polished version of us who operates atop this scaffold of defenses. Meanwhile, buried beneath it all, the Flailing Child continues to exist—hurting, unseen, and exiled.

These two personas—the Fraudulent Adult and the Flailing Child—rarely know the other exists. This leaves us oscillating between feeling capable, confident and in control (Fraudulent Adult), or feeling lost, ashamed, helpless, and all alone (Flailing Child). Even though at times we can feel “confident” when our “Fraudulent Adult” is running the show, those times don’t last too long. Because this persona is built on disconnection, its stability is an illusion. Eventually, we slip back into the despair experienced by our “Flailing Child.” The unsustainable nature of the Fraudulent Adult rests upon the reality that a part of us, deep down, actually knows we are being fraudulent. Thus, we are caught in a perpetual loop between two dissociated states: our Fraudulent Adult, which tries to survive and belong in our social environments, and our inner 'Flailing Child,' which dissociates back into our Fraudulent Adult when the pain of being in our bodies becomes intolerable.

What to do? The solution lies not in either the underground spring layer of the Flailing Child, nor in the topsoil of the Fraudulent Adult, but in the in-between clay layer of numbness that sustains the disconnect between these two entities, leaving them rigid and unchanging. We need to reconnect with our sensory, emotional, and bodily intelligence—the very capacities that were overwhelmed and shut down when we were helpless children.

To reclaim our authentic selves, we must first learn to come alive again—to awaken to our bodies, our senses, and our lived experiences.

But even here, we face a hidden obstacle: the words I use to describe this journey are themselves slippery, abstract, and often disconnected from the very experiences they are meant to represent.

What does it really mean to be “authentic”? To “awaken”? To have a “lived experience”? We believe we “know” something when, in reality, we only know the string of words—not their embodied meaning.

If we are going to heal the wound that created the Flailing Child, we must return to the direct, embodied way of knowing that we possessed before abstract language created the gap between words and experience.

In my next letter, I will explore this gap: how language, while essential, can obscure as much as it reveals; how it can give us the illusion of knowing when we have only memorized a string of syllables; and how this disconnect silently fuels the very isolation, misunderstanding, and self-deception we are trying to heal.

With you,

Ronit

1. Newport Institute, What It Means When You’re Feeling Emotionally Numb, February 2024.

2. Abraham Miranda-Páez, Sergio Zamudio, Priscila Vázquez-León, Carolina Campos-Rodríguez, and Eduardo Ramírez-San Juan, Involvement of Opioid and GABA Systems in the Ventrolateral Periaqueductal Gray on Analgesia Associated with Tonic Immobility, Pharmacology Biochemistry and Behavior, January 2016.

3. Kasia Kozlowska, MBBS, PhD, Peter Walker, PhD, Louise McLeah, MPsych, and Patrice Carrive, PhD, Fear and the Defense Cascade: Clinical Implications and Management, Harvard Review of Psychiatry, July 2015.

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