“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate.”
— Carl Jung
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 in pain, not in explicit pain at least, 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 distress from 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.
It was the disconnect between her drive to create meaningful change and the apathetic world around her that brought her to me. Her adapted self was built around being Good—doing Good, helping others, advocating for justice. She was the ultimate helper, the one who always said yes. Jennifer had an uncanny ability to see the world through rose-colored glasses.
Born socially attuned, extroverted and generous, she was determined to see only the good in people. But like so many of us, these innate gifts were enlisted to help her survive and cope with the chaos and lack of authenticity around her. Eventually, the cost of denying what she was feeling became too evident and she could no longer rationalize what her body, her truth-sensor, had been trying to show her.
But let’s back up. Let’s drop now into the mind, body, and spirit of Jennifer when she was a toddler: physically strong and adventurous, yes, but also an innately emotionally passive personality, inclined to sublimate her anger or frustration quickly into a desire to appease, to do what was expected of her.
Jennifer remembers the deeply connected bodily state where tensions in her household vibrated through her like plucked strings. There was happiness in her childhood, of course: a sprawling suburban home, plenty of trees to climb, anything material she wanted, and a father who coddled her, read to her, soothed her when she cried.
But there were storms, too. Hidden, unspoken disconnections that left her feeling suddenly alone, alienated from her family, engulfed in strange terrors and nameless anxieties. Her mother was a storm: huge, ferocious, 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, a natural people-pleaser, caved quickly to her mother’s desires again and again. She saw that her older brother—avoidant, passive-aggressive, and prone to withdrawal—only created more tension and more storms in the house. She saw that her father continuously failed to stand up to his wife, Anne, instead withdrawing, placating, doing his best to pacify her.
Domineering, loud, and 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 only means 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.
Then there was Jennifer, spinning dizzily around all these primary personalities—each of them orbiting, in turn, around the heavy gravitational pull of Anne’s needs, opinions, and desires. This is how Jennifer describes her childhood, and how she experienced it—as a breathless rush to stabilize and caretake for her family members; a breakneck and 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 rake the leaves. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
She became someone who stopped asking, “What do I want?” and instead constantly scanned the room for, “What do they need?”
All along, deep inside, there was something in Jennifer slowly fraying, collapsing. This would emerge, sometimes, in long fits of overwhelming sadness that she could not escape. Her siblings knew Jennifer as the crier. Occasionally, the weight of all these invisible pressures—invisible to her consciousness, inaccessible to the language she had as a child, but felt, deeply, in her body—would simply collapse Jennifer, dissolve her suddenly into the helpless, overwhelmed child she was.
In these moments, Jennifer’s Flailing Child was revealed: a child drowning in unprocessed overwhelming pain and terror of never being good enough, rejected by her primary, dominant caretaker. A child getting swept away in the raging stream of her mother’s desires, while her father only stood passively by and watched. A child disappearing to herself, without the language to ask for help. No matter how good and accommodating she was, the family dynamic remained a constant threat.
When Jennifer showed me some of her childhood photos, I could see that her disappearance was actually visible. In her infancy, she was beaming—her eyes bright and alive, deeply curious, full of joy. A few years later, Jennifer was pictured obediently posing for the camera in a ruffled dress, her lips gripped around the smile as if they don’t quite believe it. Something had dulled visibly in her eyes. Something had been turned off.
In the gap, between what Jennifer felt and what she was allowed to express—the Liminal Space emerged. Like most of us, Jennifer learned to bury parts of herself, her anger, her preferences, her curiosity, her creativity, in exchange for acceptance. This was the cost of her adaptation to survive. She needed to suppress pieces of herself, mute her voice, manage others’ needs, be nice—in order to stay safe and “fit” within a family environment she didn’t understand, and couldn’t control or escape. For Jennifer, as for most of us, an inner void developed. In this space, Jennifer’s authentic experience was stifled, and her mind began to fabricate a narrative that made reality more tolerable.1
While all these shifts were occurring in her, her neurophysiology was doing its work. Jennifer’s brain was busy encoding what was happening around her and the responses needed to maintain a sense of safety and belonging. Every time Jennifer suppressed her voice and appeased her mother to avoid conflict (when she smiled instead of cried, when she gave up instead of fighting) her brain reinforced a neuronal pattern. Neurons that fired together, wired together. Pathways were laid down connecting her emotional limbic system with compliance and appeasement behaviors to ensure safety and social connection. As she grew older, her brain’s neural pruning tendencies began to reinforce this neural connection over other, less-used ones—ensuring Jennifer’s identity would remain as a peacemaker and people-pleaser.2 The circuits for self-expression, boundary-setting and the ability to engage in conflict in the service of her values were underused, and ultimately atrophied.
Over the years, Jennifer continued to overperform: 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 Adaptive Fraudulent Self developed. She was not consciously deceiving herself or others; she had biologically adapted to fit into her environment.
However, a part of her was still connected to something real, an inner NO that reemerged in middle school. After a trip to Costa Rica, Jennifer became keenly aware of the social inequities in the world, and of her parents’ hypocrisies. Good liberals who touted social justice, Jennifer’s parents nonetheless lived in a multi-bedroom home with four cars in the garage, completely marooned from the realities of the very people they professed to care about.
In social justice activism and dance, Jennifer’s inner life—her passion and certainty, her self-expression—began to flourish. 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. The embedded neural circuitry of her early childhood wound—not good enough, not strong enough—prevented her from speaking up. Remember, Jennifer had experienced acceptance and belonging only through performance, not authenticity; her inner world, her pained core, remained untouched, unseen, alone.3
This is the cost of the Adaptive Fraudulent Adult and the defenses we construct to prevent us from feeling, seeing, and reconnecting to our abandoned Flailing Child. The very defenses that keep our pain and terror out also block the healing and love from getting in and touching us where we most need the help—in the depth of our being, where a child is still thrashing around in pain and confusion, feeling alone and unworthy. Ironically, we can’t heal our deepest pain points until we are courageously able to fully experience it and expose the illusion of their power over us.
Just as our bodies call our attention to an illness through pain, our psyche cries out through discomfort and distress. However, while an illness or a physical wound eventually cannot be ignored for too long since it will continue to worsen, our psychic pain often stays elusive. The defenses we built to protect us from terror and helplessness continue to prevent us from feeling it directly. Instead, our pain shows up in anxieties, disconnection from self, conflict, illness, and overall discontent with life. Over time, this buried pain wreaks havoc in our lives, leading us to project blame onto external causes, people and situations, rather than where the real source lives, deep within us.4
The rules that apply to our bodies also apply to our psyches. They are 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.
Before we can truly embrace the pain of change, we must first become profoundly aware of the cost of staying the same. For some, like those grappling with addiction, the consequences are often stark and undeniable. Sometimes it takes hitting rock bottom, losing a job, a home, a relationship, or even one’s health or sense of purpose, for the full weight of inaction to become unbearable.
However, for Jennifer and most people, the costs are more subtle but no less critical. That is why it is so important for you to hear her story.
When I met the adult Jennifer, still an activist, still a do-gooder, even a frenetic one, she would not have been able to identify the cost of all her striving, all her years of subtly repressing, dissociating from, and ignoring her early pain points. And yet she was teetering on the edge of a marriage to a man who didn’t share her passions, had no fire of his own, and in all ways behaved just like her father: kindly, well-meaning, and utterly incapable of meeting Jennifer in the ways she most deeply needed. Her family relationships were largely intact, albeit just as superficial and unsatisfying, just as full of unspoken resentments and power dynamics, as they had ever been.
For Jennifer, the most salient cost to her adult self was the one written into the very structure of her adaptations: Jennifer was a fraud. She was motivated by fraudulent desires, desires that fundamentally emerged from her core belief that she was not worthy—not enough.
It was an unconscious self-betrayal.
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 inner child still waiting. Not to relive the pain. But to release it. To reclaim the life that’s been waiting for us.
The story of that return—to her body, her clarity, and her authentic self—is told in the next chapter: Jennifer's Rewiring: Interventions and the Path Back to her Organic Self.
Love,
Ronit
Mark R. Leary and Shira Gabriel, “The Relentless Pursuit of Acceptance and Belonging,” Science Direct, 2022.
Daniel J. Siegel, “Pruning, Myelination, and the Remodeling Adolescent Brain,” Psychology Today, February 2014.
SWEET Institute, “Understanding Childhood Wounds and Their Lifelong Impact,” Sweet Institute, November, 2024.
What a breathtaking journey through Jennifer’s becoming! You describe every step of the way, and my being resonates with so much. I feel like I’m literally there. I can’t help by inquire “what is my version of this? What happened to me, how did so adapt to survive? What am I still carrying with me today?” A real exciting invitation! And a real cliffhanger - can’t wait to read what happens next in Jennifer’s journey!
i love this and you Ronit, it is so well written and really invites me to become more awake, understand my deeper motivations and choices, I can relate to Jennifer!!! I especially love reconnecting with and being the starburst child, thank you so much for preserving your wisdom for we who are making and becoming the future <3