Letter 15: Words, Words, Words
The Gap Between Language and Experience
"The limits of my language mean the limits of my world."
-Ludwig Wittgenstein
Dear Future Human,
How does a bright, curious child become an adult who is disconnected from their own experience?
One of the major factors that contributes to this split is the gap between words and a child’s lived experience. In this letter, we will look at how language itself can quietly pull us away from ourselves, and why healing means reconnecting what we say with what we actually feel and experience. Even without severe trauma, repeated mismatches between abstract language and lived experience can cause real harm through repetition.
We have spoken previously about how a child’s sensory, visual, tactile, motor, and emotional experiences become associated with language, using the example of a cup.1 Through repetition, these experiences wire together into a neural circuit that enables the child to differentiate cup from glass, and both from, say, a bowl. Once the child has the word “cup,” they gain a new way to reach their parent, not just by pointing, but by asking and being met.
From the beginning, a child learns through their senses. They feel the warmth of a cup in their hands, hear water pouring, see a parent using it. These kinds of experiences bind together into neural patterns linking the object “cup” with sensations, emotions, and actions. Through Hebbian learning2—neurons that fire together wire together—the brain is efficient at connecting language to lived experience.
Language soon becomes the medium for the “serve-and-return” that is fundamental to the child’s growing understanding of self, other, world.3 In addition to accessing, words help us connect to one another. When a child asks for a “cup” and a caregiver brings one, the word becomes shared. It helps the child predict what will happen and trust the connection. In this way, language isn’t just about naming things—it’s a way of navigating the space between us and creating a sense of safety and consistency.
This is true of language for everyone, not just children. Humans use language in immensely complex ways, giving us the ability to share abstract ideas, contemplate possible futures, and make meaning from the past—things that, unlike a cup, have no physical reference point. Language is the means by which humans “close the gap” that exists between the “I” and “You.”
There’s a problem, however. Language is a very imperfect medium for this purpose. And even more alarmingly, we are often not aware of it.
Even simple words can mean very different things to different people. Languages organize the world in different ways, subtly shaping perception and thought.4 For example, the Himba in Namibia distinguish colors differently from English speakers.5 They have fewer categories of colors, including green and blue. Korean speakers make fine distinctions between “tight fit” and “loose fit” spatial relationships6, affecting how they perceive space. Some Arctic languages have multiple words for snow, reflecting a need for nuanced understanding of their environment.7
These differences show that different cultures literally perceive and organize reality differently.
But what happens in the developing brain when language points not toward something concrete, like a cup or a color, but to an abstraction like “being good” or “running late”? What does a child’s nervous system wire to when the word has no lived reference?
We can better understand this gap by referring to a core conclusion of trauma research: a child’s nervous system wires itself around experience. When a signal is repeated but there’s no clear sensory or emotional reference for it, the system doesn’t simply fail to understand. The nervous system adapts. It improvises.
What is not studied as much is how everyday abstract language creates this same situation, not through extreme events, but through ordinary moments. When young children hear abstract words like, “behave,” or “we’re late,” and don’t have the ability to ground those words in lived experience, their nervous systems still respond. So they don’t wire to the meaning of the words. They wire to tone, urgency, approval, withdrawal, or threat. Over time, behavior becomes less about understanding the world and more about managing relationships.
Many cultures help children grasp abstract ideas by grounding them in stories, rituals, and everyday life, offering concrete images instead of abstract rules. While helpful, children still encounter many words and rules before they can truly grasp them. Take the word “No,” for example. Consider how often a two-year-old child hears this word, usually used to protect them from their innocent drive to explore. The child reaches for a hot pan. No! The child, breaking free of their parents, toddles down the hill and toward a busy street. No!
Before a child knows what “no” means, the tone and volume of a parent’s voice already land in their body. It is often experienced in their bodies with frustration associated with unmet desire. More profoundly, they can experience it as an abrupt interruption of their connection to the world and a sudden halt to their natural drive to learn through direct experience.
In such cases, the brain still pairs the word with experience, most often with the strongest sensory and emotional signals available. When a parent’s tone is sharp or loud, the word wires to an amygdala-based sense of danger. That’s exactly the intention, for the child to experience fear of danger so the child doesn’t have to learn through injury. The word works because it carries emotional force.
In our early social environments, the reactions of the parent to the child become a critical intermediary of the child’s interactions with the physical environment. The child stops drinking juice on the couch, not because they understand stains, but because they know it will upset their parents.
As this happens again and again, the child fills the gap by forming relational shortcuts. Meaning comes less from understanding cause and effect and more from tracking connection. Spilling juice on the couch doesn’t register as “couches are hard to clean,” but as Mom is angry. Letting go of her hand isn’t about cars being dangerous; it’s about a sudden loss of safety. Refusing to leave the park isn’t tied to an appointment—it feels like a threat to connection.
These emotional associations stand in for causal relationships the child can’t yet understand. Instead of learning how the world works, the child learns how to stay close, how to stay safe, and how to preserve relationship. Emotion steps in where explanation is still out of reach.
This is the beginning of what we can call “false” or “substitute” causality, which develops precisely because the child lacks the cognitive architecture to understand that roads with traffic are dangerous, or that couches cost money and may have to be replaced if they’re stained. The child learns that there is a causal relationship between their own behavior and their parents’ distress but does not understand why.8 These early associations follow us into adulthood, influencing how we respond emotionally even when the original reasons are no longer present.
Let’s pause here and bring in Iain McGilchrist’s work: words don’t first arrive as ideas, they arrive as experiences.9 Before words make sense to a child, they land in the body, carrying the tone, tension, and feeling of the moment. They feel the urgency before they grasp the reason.
So when a child hears words they don’t yet understand, those words get paired with whatever is most available in the moment, tension in a parent’s voice or a spike of fear in the body. The child isn’t learning what the words mean. They’re learning what the moment feels like, and what it takes to stay connected.
Before we continue, let’s consider a specific example. Four-year-old Anna—a bright, vivacious, and adventurous child with attentive parents. She is at the playground—climbing, sliding, fully embodied and generally having the time of her life. Suddenly, her mother grabs her by the arm and firmly tells her she’s late for her piano lesson. Mrs. Green is waiting. They must go—now.
All of her mother’s words wash over her. She knows who Mrs. Green is. She knows what a piano is, but she is not at a piano lesson right now, she’s on the slide. Concepts like schedules, waiting for others, or lessons do not exist in her cognitive world—they belong to the adult one.10
Anna pulls away and runs back toward the slide.
Anna’s mother grows angry and her tone becomes sharper. Anna is not listening. If Anna doesn’t come right this instant, she’s going to be in big trouble.
Now, Anna’s amygdala fires. The stress-response system floods her with fear. She doesn’t understand what she has done wrong, she only knows she is in danger of losing connection.
In this moment, Anna’s nervous system is flooded with overwhelming feelings of confusion, pain, and terror. For a child, losing connection is tantamount to annihilation.11
It is important to pause here and acknowledge that not all encounters with abstract language create lasting trauma. Several protective factors can buffer children from developing these wounds, and many parents today are increasingly educated about child development and are applying these protective approaches:
Scaffolding and Translation: Some parents naturally translate abstractions into concrete terms: “When the big hand points to the 12, that’s when we leave” or “Mrs. Green is waiting for us at her house with the piano.”12
Emotional Attunement: When caregivers remain emotionally regulated themselves, children are less likely to interpret abstract language as threat. A calm parent explaining “we need to leave for the piano lesson” while acknowledging the child’s disappointment (”I see you really want to keep playing”) creates safety even amid confusion.13
Repair and Reconnection: When misunderstandings occur, caregivers who recognize the rupture and repair it through reconnection prevent the formation of lasting wounds. A parent might say, “I’m sorry I frightened you. Let me explain differently.”14
Also, children with fundamentally secure attachments can weather occasional abstract language confusion without developing the patterns of the “Flailing Child.”15
However, when protections are absent and nothing is done to mitigate the impact, abstract language repeatedly overwhelms a child’s developmental capacity, the bond of safety and connection becomes ruptured. Anna experiences her mother not as a source of security and understanding, but as an external force arriving to interrupt and stymie her desires. Words intended to explain the situation instead created confusion, sending Anna’s emotional compass spinning wildly, unable to find orientation.
When a child is flooded by experiences, they can’t make sense of it, so their nervous system adapts. The child learns that staying connected matters more than staying in touch with their own pain or needs. Turning away from discomfort becomes a way of holding on. Numbing feels safer than risking disconnection.16
In the body and nervous system, this looks like a gradual closing down. Natural curiosity fades. They become more guarded. Relationships begin to feel unsafe, as if something could go wrong at any moment.
Little by little, this gives rise to what I have called the Flailing Child, a part of the psyche that emerges in terror but never disappears. It remains caught in fear, confusion, and vulnerability, unable to make sense of intense feelings or settle itself. As the person grows older, this part continues to perceive situations and people through a lens of possible threat and abandonment.
This is a brilliant survival adaptation that only becomes problematic as it persists into adulthood, creating a hidden emotional core that continues to perceive threat and abandonment even in safe adult relationships.
From this adaptation emerge the familiar structures we’ve been tracing: the Flailing Child, the Liminal Space, and the Fraudulent Adult. Abstract language does not cause these patterns on its own, but it plays a powerful role in shaping them—especially when words replace experience rather than grow from it.
This letter has focused on how that gap forms: how language, when unmoored from lived experience, can quietly pull us away from ourselves and from one another.
Healing the split between the Flailing Child and the Fraudulent Adult starts by coming back to direct experience—listening again to the body, the emotions, and the senses that had to go quiet.
The person who was once overwhelmed by meaningless abstractions can learn to trust their direct experiences again, creating language that serves connection rather than disconnection, understanding rather than confusion, authentic relationships rather than performative compliance.
In the next letter, I will turn to Jennifer’s story—a lived account of how these dynamics take shape in adulthood, and how the journey back begins not with better explanations, but with restoring contact with direct experience.
With deep care,
Ronit
A.H. Seidl, M. Indarjit, & A. Borovsky, Touch To Learn: Multisensory Input Supports Word Learning And Processing, Developmental Science, June 2023.
Donald O. Hebb, The Organization of Behavior: A Neuropsychological Theory, Wiley & Sons, 1949.
Center on the Developing Child Harvard University, Serve and Return, 2025.
Lera Boroditsky, How Language Shapes the Way We Think, TED Talk, May 2018.
D. Roberson, J. Davidoff, I.R.L. Davies, & L.R. Shapiro, Color Categories: Evidence for the Cultural Relativity Hypothesis, Cognitive Psychology, 2005.
H.M. Norbury, S.R. Waxman, and H.J. Song, Tight and loose are not created equal: An asymmetry underlying the representation of fit in English- and Korean-speakers, Cognition, December 2008.
Daniel W. Hieber, “Do Inuit Languages Really Have More Words for Snow? And Why Does It Matter, Anyway?”, Linguistic Discovery, July 2025.
P.K. Kuhl, Early language acquisition: Cracking the speech code, Nature Reviews Neuroscience, November 2004.
I. McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, Yale University Press, 2019.
Lorraine D. Reggin, Emiko J. Muraki, and Penny M. Pexman, Development of Abstract Word Knowledge, Frontiers in Psychology, June 2021.
Ethan Kross, Marc G. Berman, and Walter Mischel, Social Rejection Shares Somatosensory Representations with Physical Pain, PNAS, March 2011.
Cleveland Clinic Health Essentials, What is Scaffolding?, Cleveland Clinic, May 2025.
Blair Paley and Nastassia J. Hajal, Conceptualizing Emotion Regulation and Coregulation As Family‑Level Phenomena, Clinical Child and Family Psychology Review, March 2022.
Sawyer Cohen PhD, MPhil, MS, PMH-C, IMH-E, Gentle Parenting and the Art of Repairing Relationships, Everyday Parenting, April 2025.
J. Quintana, P. F. Alemán Ramos, and P.M. Almeida, The Influence of Perceived Security in Childhood on Adult Self‑Concept: The Mediating Role of Resilience and Self‑Esteem, Healthcare (Basel), August 2023.
Camille Guérin-Marion, Sage Sezlik, and Jean-François Bureau Developmental and Attachment-Based Perspectives on Dissociation: Beyond the Effects of Maltreatment, European Journal of Psychotraumatology, October 2020.