Letter 15: Words, Words, Words

The Gap Between Language and Experience

"The limits of my language mean the limits of my world."

-Ludwig Wittgenstein

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Dear Future Human,

How does a bright, curious child become an adult who is disconnected from their own experience?

In previous letters, we explored the Flailing Child (the part of us that is frozen in fear and confusion) and the Fraudulent Adult (the part focused on the performance or appearance of competence and maintains relationships through compliance rather than authentic connection). One of the major factors that contributes to this split is the gap between a child’s actual experience and the abstract conceptual world of their parents and caretakers. This letter explores how words themselves can contribute to the split from ourselves, and why healing requires bridging what we say in line with what we actually experience. While severe trauma will profoundly harm a developing nervous system, everyday mismatches between abstract language and experiences can create smaller wounds that will, over time, add up to cause meaningful harm.

How Children Actually Learn Language

Let’s explore how a child comes to learn language. Take, for example, the simple act of learning to identify a cup. You might think this would be relatively simple. A child sees a cup. Their parent says the word “cup.” After several repetitions, voila! The child understands how to identify a cup versus, say, a bowl.

But this is not what is happening in the brain—as close observation of any child, reaching out to grab, knock down, or bang on a cup will demonstrate.

In reality, multiple sensory and motor areas of the brain are engaged when a child encounters a new object—in this case, a cup. Their motor functions are engaged to try and grab it (or knock it off the table or fit their spoon inside of it). Their sensory functions are engaged as their fingers contact its material. Their visual functions are firing. Their audio processing center is grappling with the sound of the word “cup”, bringing it into contact, into connection, with the child’s visual, sensory, and motor experience.^¹

Over time, these multiple experiences of the same object wire together into a neural circuit that enables the child to differentiate cup from glass, and both from, say, a bowl. This child, now possessed of the vocabulary for "cup," will have a new and exciting way to ‘serve’ their parents, by not just pointing to the cup but actually asking for it by name.

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 sipping their drink. Repeated experiences become bound together into neural patterns linking the object "cup" with those sensations, emotions, and actions. Through Hebbian learning—neurons that fire together wire together—the brain is efficient at connecting language to lived experience.

Language as Connection Between Self and Other

Language soon becomes the medium for the “serve-and-return” that is fundamental to the child's growing understanding of self-other-world.² Language is an access point to objects in the world, but it is also an access point to other people, to organizing those cause-and-effect predictions even before we understand that other people have their own points-of-view. If I ask for a “cup,” and mom gets me a cup, then the meaning of ‘cup’ is shared. It is a way of navigating the space between us and maintaining a predictable and consistent bond.

This is true of language for everyone, not just children. The human species uses language in immensely complex ways, giving us the ability to share abstract ideas, contemplate possible futures, and eke meaning from the past—all things that, unlike a cup, have no physical reality, no objective existence we can point to or experience together. Language is the means by which humans use to "close the gap" that exists between the "I" and "You."

The Imperfection of Language

There's a problem, however. Language is a very imperfect medium for this purpose. And even more alarmingly—we are not aware of it.

It is worth pointing out the not-so-obvious truth that words, even simple words, can mean very different things to different people. Languages categorize the world in distinct ways, subtly shaping perception and thought.³ For example, the Himba in Namibia distinguish colors differently than English speakers. They have fewer categories of colors, including green and blue. Korean speakers make fine distinctions between “tight fit” and “loose fit” spatial relationships, affecting how they perceive space. Some Arctic languages have multiple words for snow, reflecting a need for a nuanced understanding of their environment.⁴

These examples illustrate that different cultures literally “see” and organize reality differently through language. Often, we are barely aware of how our own words shape how we think and experience the world. Language actually emerges as we are organizing the world into discrete objects via our experience of them.

When Language Points to Abstractions

But what happens in the developing brain when language points not toward something concrete, like a cup or a color, but toward an abstract idea, like “being good” or “running late”? How do we “experience” such words, and what neural circuits are fired and strengthened as a result? While many psychologists and trauma experts have documented how severe neglect or abuse shapes developing nervous systems, less attention has been paid to the subtler impacts of everyday mismatches between adult abstractions and children’s concrete cognitive capacities. We can observe, however, that different cultures around the world have instinctively cultivated practices to address this gap: storytelling traditions that embed abstract concepts in concrete narratives, rituals that make invisible ideas tangible, or extended family systems where children gradually learn from multiple caregivers with varying communication styles. Many societies, for instance, teach moral concepts through stories about animals or natural phenomena rather than abstract commands, providing children with vivid imagery to anchor understanding.

How Words Replace Direct Experience

Yet even with these supportive practices, children often encounter words and rules before they can truly grasp them. Take the word “No,” for example. Think of how often a two-year-old child begins to hear this word: almost always spoken as a contradiction or correction of their will-to-experience, and drive-to-explore. The child tries to grab a hot pan. No! The child, breaking free of their parents, toddles down the hill and toward a busy street. No!

Long before a child grasps the meaning of "no," they will be startled by the sharp pitch and sudden volume of a parent’s voice. They may come to associate the word with frustrated desire, with wants that are denied. 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 wires the word to experience—usually the most salient sensory and emotional cues present. If the parent's tone is sharp or loud, the word gets paired with an amygdala-mediated alarm signal: danger.

That's exactly what "No" is in the examples listed above: a linguistic intermediary, a shorthand that co-opts the child's emotional "grading system" and slaps on a fast label, ensuring that the child doesn't have to experience dangers in order to know them. The word becomes a substitute effect, a stand-in for the dangerous or unpleasant thing they would otherwise experience as the result of certain behaviors. This word is only effective when it is associated with the tonal and behavioral indications of parental anger, fear, or displeasure—all of which the child internalizes as danger signals.

A parent's reaction to potential danger, a threat the child cannot yet perceive, delivers the sudden “shock” that mimics the fear they would experience if they encountered the danger directly, such as running into a busy street. This reaction not only conveys that fear but also wires the child’s brain to register the consequences of their actions through emotional and sensory signals, acting as a substitute for direct experience.

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 learns never to drink juice on the couch, not because they understand why stains make their parents unhappy, but because they have internalized that they will upset their parents by staining the couch.

Substitute Causality

In this process, the young child forms substitute connections—intermediary associations that stand in for the real causal relationships they cannot yet perceive:

• Juice on the couch = parent's anger (not "couches are hard to clean")

• Not holding mom's hand = loss of safety (not "cars are dangerous")

• Not leaving the park = loss of connection (not "we have an appointment")

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.⁵ However, over time, repeated wiring of these associations can distort the individual’s capacity to distinguish true cause and effect even into adulthood, leaving behind primarily emotional reactivity rather than rational appraisal.

The confusion deepens when words refer to abstractions beyond the child's developmental grasp—concepts like "being good," "running late," or "you're in big trouble." The prefrontal cortex—responsible for time perception, cause-and-effect reasoning, and future planning—develops slowly, not reaching full maturity until the mid-twenties.⁶ A toddler simply doesn't have the neural architecture to hold abstract ideas in working memory or connect them to consequences beyond the here-and-now.

Anna’s Story: A Case Study

Let’s consider a specific example. Four-year-old Anna—a bright, vivacious, and adventurous child with attentive parents—has developed a sufficiently trustful bond with her mom and dad in the early years of her life. Anna's parents were responsive to her needs; she learned, via experience, that if she cried, she would be comforted; that if she asked for a cup, she would receive one.

Now Anna is at the playground—climbing, sliding, running—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. Doesn’t Anna know it’s rude to keep Mrs. Green, the piano teacher, waiting? They have to go—now.

All of her mother's words wash over Anna: a cascade of sounds, very few of which she has any way of understanding. She knows who Mrs. Green is. She knows what a piano is, and she has been to a piano lesson. But she is not at a piano lesson right that minute. She's at the playground. Without the cognitive architecture in place to understand either past or future experientially, her whole life is bound by the present moment, by the self-expressed impulse that is pointing her back toward the slide.

Anna can hear the words, but they are unmoored from her present (sensory) world. She knows "piano" and "Mrs. Green" in other contexts, but right now, her only reality is the slide. "Late" has no meaning; time is not yet a concrete experience in her cognitive repertoire. Concepts like schedules, waiting for others, or lessons cut short simply do not exist in her world—they belong to the adult one. At four, children’s semantic networks are still forming: they grasp concrete nouns long before abstract ideas, temporal markers, or causal chains that govern grown-up life.⁷

Anna pulls away and runs toward the slide again, insisting she wants to continue.

Now, Anna's mother seems to be growing angry. There's no time to go on the slide again. Anna is not listening. If Anna doesn't come right this instant, she's going to be in big trouble.

When her mother's tone sharpens—interpreting Anna's noncompliance as defiance—Anna's amygdala flares. The stress-response system floods her with cortisol and adrenaline, priming her to fight, flee, or freeze. The prefrontal cortex, which could have helped her reframe or understand, is not yet developed enough to calm the alarm.

Anna does have a sense of what big trouble is: it means experiences in which Anna doesn't get to do things she wants to do. Maybe she's already in big trouble. Maybe that's why her mom is so angry. Maybe that's why she's yelling about a piano.

At this moment, Anna's nervous system is flooded with overwhelming feelings of confusion, pain, and terror. These feelings are literally experienced as signals of danger—danger of being rejected or abandoned by her caregiver, left alone and helpless. For the child, this feeling of being all alone is tantamount to death.⁸

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 applying these protective approaches.

Protective Factors

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."⁹

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 piano lesson" while acknowledging the child's disappointment ("I see you really want to keep playing") creates safety even amid confusion.¹⁰

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."¹¹

Cultural Practices: Cultures have built-in protective practices—storytelling, ritual, and gradual introduction of responsibilities—that help children integrate abstract concepts safely.

Also, children with fundamentally secure attachments can weather occasional abstract language confusion without developing the patterns of the "Flailing Child."¹²

The Creation of the Flailing Child

While these protective practices can profoundly support a child’s understanding and emotional safety, many parents are unaware of their child’s developmental stage, or encounter situations where these strategies are insufficient. When such supports are absent or inconsistent, children are left to navigate confusion and overwhelm on their own. However, when protections are absent and nothing is done to mitigate the impact of abstract language that 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 create confusion, sending Anna's emotional compass spinning wildly, unable to find orientation.

When a child's developing nervous system becomes repeatedly overwhelmed by incomprehensible experiences, it eventually reaches a point where the child's psyche splits: it dissociates from its own pains, needs, and desires, as a protective mechanism.¹³

Neurologically, this manifests as:

• A shutdown of natural openness and curiosity

• An emotional guardedness and social defensiveness

• A frozen state of unconscious terror about caregiver relationships

The result is the "Flailing Child," a buried part of the psyche that remains:

• Feeling alone, confused, vulnerable, and terrified

• Unable to make sense of or regulate feelings

• Frozen in developmental time

• Filtering all future adult experiences through lenses of terror and disconnection

This is not pathology, it 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.

The Birth of the Fraudulent Adult

The child begins to learn that there is a causal relationship between their behavior and their parents' emotional state, not because they understand the underlying reasons, but because the parent's distress becomes the primary consequence they experience.

The child ‘learns’ that the bond with their parents is conditional. They must adapt to fit within their parents' wishes, suppressing their own impulses and wants to accommodate demands they cannot truly comprehend.

Here begins the emergence of what we might call the Fraudulent Self—a protective version of the self designed to avoid the pain of disconnection. Children become hyper-aware of their caregivers' moods, learning to conform and be "good" to survive.

It is in response to the need to adapt and fit into their parents’ expectations that the Liminal Space emerges. The child unconsciously begins to develop the defensive strategies necessary for adaptation. These strategies will become more and more sophisticated, eventually giving rise to the Fraudulent Adult—a socially adaptive, externally polished persona who operates atop this scaffold of defenses. This Fraudulent Adult now seamlessly navigates the world of abstract language that originally caused such pain and confusion. But inside, they are ruled by the inner Flailing Child.

As indicated by the Anna story above, this is a universal process. The Fraudulent Adult becomes skilled at responding to words that point toward nothing in their direct experience, creating responses based not on understanding but on reading emotional cues and avoiding conditions that might threaten their essential bonds. They learn to say the "right" things, to appear to understand concepts they have never truly grasped, to perform competence in a world mediated by abstractions.

But this competence is built on a foundation of disconnection. A part of the Fraudulent Adult knows, deep down, that they are being fraudulent.

The Path to Healing

If we want to heal this gap between the Flailing Child and the Fraudulent Adult, we must bridge the gap between words and direct experience. It means reconnecting with our sensory, emotional, and bodily intelligence, the very capacities that were overwhelmed and shut down when we first encountered the confusing world of abstract concepts as vulnerable children. Only when we can distinguish between language that points toward real, experienceable phenomena and language that creates false abstractions can we begin to discover our authentic responses and our authentic self.

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 my next two letters, I will share Jennifer's story—a vivid illustration of how these patterns play out in real life, bringing these concepts from theory into lived experience.

With deep care,

Ronit

1. A.H. Seidl, M. Indarjit, & A. Borovsky, Touch To Learn: Multisensory Input Supports Word Learning And Processing, Developmental Science, June 2023.

2. Center on the Developing Child Harvard University, Serve and Return, 2025.

3. Lera Boroditsky, How Language Shapes the Way We Think, TED Talk, May 2018.

4. Daniel W. Hieber, “Do Inuit Languages Really Have More Words for Snow? And Why Does It Matter, Anyway?”, Linguistic Discovery, July  2025.

5. Patricia K. Kuhl, Early Language Acquisition: Cracking The Speech Code, Nature, November 2004.

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

7. Lorraine D. Reggin, Emiko J. Muraki, and Penny M. Pexman, Development of Abstract Word Knowledge, Frontiers in Psychology, June 2021.

8. Ethan Kross, Marc G. Berman, and Walter Mischel, Social Rejection Shares Somatosensory Representations with Physical Pain, PNAS, March 2011.

9. Cleveland Clinic Health Essentials, What is Scaffolding?, Cleveland Clinic, May 2025.

10. Blair Paley and Nastassia J. Hajal, Conceptualizing Emotion Regulation and Coregulation As Family‑Level Phenomena, Clinical Child and Family Psychology Review, March 2022.

11. Sawyer Cohen PhD, MPhil, MS, PMH-C, IMH-E, Gentle Parenting and the Art of Repairing Relationships, Everyday Parenting, April 2025.

12. 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.

13. 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

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