Letter 16: Jennifer - The Making of a Fraudulent Self

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate.”
— Carl Jung

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Dear Future Human,

Picture a child like a starburst: wide-open and willing, explosively curious, rocketing into the world full of eagerness… to know, to touch, to climb, to experience.

To help.

This is young Jennifer.

Jennifer came to me not because she was in pain, but because she was eager to learn how to create meaningful change in the world. She exuded warmth, liveliness, and radiance. Her primary complaints were not emotional or personal, but rather her distress about the world around her. She felt disheartened by her inability to create impact through her work with universities, feeling the hollow support for recycling initiatives, and deeply frustrated by the superficial efforts impact investors were making while pretending to really care about making a difference.

What brought her to me was the disconnect she felt between her longing to help and a world that didn’t seem to care. Her adapted self, you see, was built around being Good—doing Good, helping others, advocating for justice. She became the ultimate helper, always saying yes. Her optimism became a shield. Her generosity became a way to survive.

Born socially attuned, naturally warm and generous, Jennifer tended to see the best in people. But like so many of us, these innate gifts were enlisted to help her survive a family environment that lacked authenticity and emotional safety. Her optimism became a shield and her generosity became a strategy.

Jennifer’s story illustrates what Gordon Neufeld calls the difference between adaptation and maturation.^¹ Jennifer became brilliant at adaptation—reading other’s needs, suppressing her own, performing goodness. But maturation requires different conditions: secure attachment, freedom from premature responsibility, space for natural emergence. When a child must adapt to threatening conditions, maturation is arrested. Jennifer didn’t get a chance to discover who she was, she became who she needed to be to survive.

Eventually, she could no longer ignore the cost of denying what she was feeling. Her body kept telling her something was wrong, but her mind couldn’t make sense of it.

But let’s back up.

Let’s drop into Jennifer’s life when she was a toddler. She was physically strong and eager to explore, yet inwardly inclined to accommodate. When anger or frustration surfaced, she learned to turn away from it, redirecting herself toward pleasing, toward doing what was expected.

Jennifer remembers those early years as deeply embodied. The emotional tensions in her household moved through her intensely, registering before she had words to make sense of them. There was also happiness: a sprawling suburban home, trees to climb, material comfort, and a father who tended to her gently—reading to her, soothing her, and holding her when she cried.

But there were storms, too. Sudden emotional withdrawals. Moments that left her feeling alone and confused, flooded by feelings she didn’t yet have language for. Her mother, let’s call her Anne, was a force of nature. She had always wanted a girl, and she had strong ideas about how Jennifer should dress, act, and behave. Jennifer remembers the terrible discomfort she felt wearing the clothes that her mother picked out for her, well after Jennifer began to express her own preferences. It didn’t matter; Jennifer learned to obey.

Domineering, loud, insistent on getting her way, Anne was easily ruffled and easily injured by perceived slights. Jennifer’s brother’s passive-aggressive nature—his stoic defiance of their mother’s wishes—was his ultimate act of resistance against her. Jennifer’s father’s codependence, his mollifying behaviors, and his inability to assert himself on his own behalf or that of his children, were all attempts to appease her. When Jennifer’s younger sister came—a naturally aggressive personality who from the beginning of her life refused to concede to other people’s demands—the conflict of wills played out primarily in her relationship with Anne.

There was Jennifer, orbiting everyone else’s needs, trying to stabilize the system from the inside. That’s how she describes her childhood, and how she experienced it, as a continuous act of yes-saying. Yes, she would make sure that her brother, her older brother, got to the bathroom safely. Yes, she would do ballet, and gymnastics, and piano, and her schoolwork. Yes, she would wear that dress, the one she hated, with the bows on it. Yes, she knew the answer to the question. Yes, she would do whatever everyone wanted. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

Jennifer didn’t have what Dr. Becky Kennedy calls sturdiness—a caregiver who could hold big feelings without collapsing into them or asking the child to manage them.² Anne wasn’t sturdy. Her moods took over the house.

This is how children become what Kennedy calls “emotional caretakers.” Instead of being held in their own feelings, they learn to hold others. The child becomes the sturdy one.³ And the part of them that needs to be held—the Flailing Child—goes underground.

Somewhere along the way, she stopped asking what she wanted and began organizing herself around what everyone else needed.

Kennedy distinguishes between empathy and caretaking: “Empathy is noticing someone’s feelings and caring about them. It’s not taking care of them...big difference.”⁴ Jennifer learned to conflate the two. Noticing her mother’s upset, became responsible for fixing it. This is what Kennedy calls “capability stealing” in reverse—the child is forced to take on capabilities far beyond their developmental stage, robbing them of the experience of simply being a child.

Deep inside Jennifer, something was gradually coming apart.

It surfaced in waves of overwhelming sadness that she could not understand or stop. Her siblings knew Jennifer as “the crier.” At times, these invisible pressures simply collapsed her into a state of overwhelm and helplessness, and she didn’t know why.

This is where Jennifer’s Flailing Child became visible, a part of her frozen in fear and confusion, overwhelmed by terror of not being good enough. She was swept into her mother’s emotions, without an adult to buffer or guide her.

These crying episodes were what Kennedy describes as the nervous system reaching overload.⁵ When feelings become intolerable, children either melt down (externalize) or shut down (internalize). Jennifer did both, collapsing into tears when the pressure became too much, then shutting down again to keep functioning. But neither response allowed her to actually process and integrate what she was feeling. The emotions remained locked in her body, waiting.

When Jennifer showed me her childhood photos, I could see that her disappearance was actually visible. As a baby, she is beaming—her eyes bright and alive, curious, full of joy. A few years later, Jennifer is pictured obediently posing in a ruffled dress, her lips pulled into a smile as if they don’t quite believe it. Something has been turned off.

In that gap, between what Jennifer felt and what she was allowed to express, the Liminal Space emerged. Like so many of us, Jennifer learned to bury parts of herself—her anger, her preferences, her curiosity, her creativity—in exchange for acceptance. Where Jennifer’s authentic experience was stifled, her mind began to fabricate a story that made life more tolerable.⁶ This was not a conscious choice. It was a trade made before she had words for it.

Gordon Neufeld describes this kind of adaptation as “defended attachment.”⁷ Jennifer found ways to stay attached to Anne, but that attachment came with conditions: be helpful, be good. This is very different from “vulnerable attachment” where a child can be fully themselves and still belong. Jennifer’s authentic gifts—her sensitivity, her attunement, her generosity were hijacked by the need to maintain connection. They were not available to simply support her own growth.

As this was happening internally, her nervous system was doing exactly what nervous systems do. Each time she suppressed herself to preserve connection, a neural pattern was reinforced. Smile instead of cry. Yield instead of resist. Comply to stay safe.

The neurons that fired together, wired together. Neural pathways were laid down connecting her emotional-limbic system with compliance and appeasement behaviors. The patterns that kept her connected grew stronger, while those that supported self-expression quietly faded.⁸ Jennifer became, reliably, the peacemaker. The helper. The good one. The circuits for self-expression, boundary-setting and the ability to engage in conflict in the service of her values were underused—and ultimately, pruned.

Over the years, Jennifer continued to over-perform: a teacher’s pet in school; a perfect child at home. The story she told herself and showed the world was that she was good because she was helpful, and she was valuable because she performed.

This is how her Fraudulent Self developed. She was not consciously deceiving herself and others; she was biologically adapting to fit into her environment. As Dr. Becky Kennedy describes this, behavior slowly hardens into identity.⁹ When families base worth on behavior (“you’re good because you help”), children begin equating certain behaviors with being lovable. Helping means belonging. Having needs or preferences can be dangerous. This creates shame—not guilt (which is about actions being out of alignment with values), but shame (which means something is wrong with me). For Jennifer, shame became a belief: “If I have needs, if I show anger, if I stop helping—I’ll be rejected.”

However, something real in her never disappeared—an inner NO. It surfaced in adolescence, after a trip to Costa Rica. Jennifer became keenly aware of the social inequities in the world, and of her parent’s hypocrisies. Good liberals who touted social justice, Jennifer’s parents nonetheless lived in a multi-bedroom home with four cars in the garage, completely disconnected from the realities of the very people they professed to care about.

In social justice activism and in dance, part of Jennifer’s inner life began to awaken and grow. Yet, her light was still dimmed, distorted by the layers of protective mechanisms that prevented her from speaking up, and overtly confronting her parents and her society. Speaking up still felt dangerous. Conflict still felt like abandonment.

This is the cost of the adaptive Fraudulent Self and the defenses we construct to prevent us from feeling, seeing and reconnecting to our abandoned Flailing Child. The defenses protect us from pain and terror but also block us from intimacy, truth and change.

Ironically, we can’t heal our deepest pain points until we are courageously able to fully experience them and expose the illusion of their power over us.¹⁰

Psychic pain, like physical pain, is information. But unlike a broken bone, it can remain hidden for decades, filtered into anxiety, disconnection, illness, and dissatisfaction.

The rules that apply to our bodies also apply to our psyches.¹¹ It is all part of the natural world. All of it is part of adaptation and creation. Becoming aware of the nature of the human condition is necessary for understanding the underlying causes, so that we can identify the path to healing.

Jennifer didn’t fall apart. Instead, she drifted away from herself—shaping her life around being good rather than being true.

And yet, for Jennifer, as for the rest of us, there is a way back.

With awareness, care, and safety, we can return. We can meet the Flailing Child still waiting, not to relive the pain, but to release it. To reclaim the life that has been waiting for us.

The story of that return—to her body, her clarity, and her authentic self—is told in the next letter.

With raw and endless care,

Ronit

1. Gordon Neufeld, The Keys To Well-Being in Children and Youth: The Significant Role Of Families, Alliance for Childhood European Network Foundation, pp. 36–57, January 2014.

2. Dr. Becky Kennedy, You Need to Be a Sturdy Leader for Your Kids, Thriving Parent Network, January 2025.

3. Nicole Harris, What Are the Warning Signs of Parentification?, Parents.com, July 2023.

4. Dr. Becky Kennedy, Overcoming Guilt & Building Tenacity in Kids & Adults, Huberman Lab, January 2025.

5. Dr. Becky Kennedy, Good Inside: A Guide to Becoming the Parent You Want to Be, Harper Wave, Ch. 13, 2022.

6. Mark R. Leary and Shira Gabriel, The Relentless Pursuit of Acceptance and Belonging, Science Direct, 2022.

7. Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Maté, Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers, Random House Canada, Ch 8, 2009.

8. Daniel J. Siegel, Pruning, Myelination, and the Remodeling Adolescent Brain, Psychology Today, February 2014.

9. Dr. Becky Kennedy, Good Inside: A Guide to Becoming the Parent You Want to Be, Harper Wave, Ch. 1, 2022.

10. SWEET Institute, Understanding Childhood Wounds and Their Lifelong Impact, Sweet Institute, November, 2024.

11. Mitchell B. Liester MD, When the Body Remembers, Psychology Today, April 2025.

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