Mind the Body Podcast

The Constructed Self, The Disconnected Self - On feeling lost, hidden, and finding your way back : Episode 13

• Yvette Vuaran • Season 1 • Episode 13

Share episode

Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.

0:00 | 24:05

🎧 Episode 13: The Constructed Self, The Disconnected Self - On feeling lost, hidden, and finding your way back

Something feels off, but it’s hard to name.

In this episode of Mind the Body, I explore two experiences I hear often: “I don’t know who I am anymore” and “I just feel lost.” While they sound similar, they speak to different kinds of disconnection - one psychological, one deeply embodied.

Here, I look at how the self we present to the world can slowly take over, until it’s the only place we know how to live from. Drawing on psychoanalytic thinking, clinical experience, and the impact of social media, I explore how the gap between who we are and who we show can quietly widen over time.

We also move into what happens when parts of the self go into hiding, how early relationships and shame shape what feels safe to express, and how the body holds what cannot be spoken. And finally, what it means to find your way back, through real connection.

In This Episode:

  • The difference between feeling lost and losing contact with who you are, and how these experiences take shape over time
  • How the “constructed self” develops, and why it can begin to replace something more real
  • What happens when parts of the self go into hiding, and how that disconnection is felt in the body
  • Why being seen is not the same as being known, and what actually allows the self to return

A Question to Sit With:

What moments in your life make you feel out of touch with who you are?

Take a breath, stay curious, and explore what it truly means to Mind The Body.

Join the Community

Hello and welcome back to Mind The Body. There are two phrases I hear often in my consulting room. They are, I don't know who I am anymore, and I just feel lost. They sound similar, but they're not quite the same thing. I don't know who I am is an identity question. Existential, disorientating, sometimes frightening. I feel lost is something more embodied than that. It implies there was somewhere to be that you existed somewhere as yourself, and that somewhere along the way you drifted from it. Both of these things can be true at once, and both of them are what this episode is about. We are living through the most visually saturated period in human history, and yet more visibility, more disconnection, today I wanna explore three things. First, The constructed self, the version of us we build from the outside world and what social media has done to that process. Second, the disconnected self. What actually happens psychologically and in the body when we lose contact with who we are. And third, what it means to find your way back and reconnecting with something deeper. By the end of this episode, I hope you'll understand why feeling lost in yourself makes complete sense and why the self you've lost contact with hasn't gone anywhere. It's simply waiting to return. So let's begin. I wanna start with what I mean by the constructed self. We all have one because it's how we naturally adjust who we are to fit into different situations and connect with the people around us. We present differently in different contexts. We adapt. We show certain parts of ourselves and not others. The British psychoanalyst, Donald Winnicott called this the false self, something that begins forming in childhood. In our earliest relationships, when the caregiving environment couldn't fully meet the child's true experience, the child learned to present a version of themselves that felt safer, more acceptable, easier to love. It serves a purpose, creating a buffer between our inner world and the outer world. It's a way of protection and we carry it with us into adulthood. Think about a time when you started a new job, joined a new group, or even just walked into a room full of strangers. Maybe you found yourself acting a bit differently, holding back certain opinions, emphasizing other parts of your personality, or even changing your tone of voice, showing a version of yourself that felt safer for that particular room, that particular moment. That's the constructed self in action, helping you navigate new terrain. It's a normal, even necessary part of being human. But for some of us, the constructed self doesn't stay as something we can pick up and put down. It becomes the only self on offer. The performance runs so constantly and has done for so long that we lose touch with what was underneath it to begin with. And nowhere is this more visible than our online lives. Social media has given the constructed self and audience and a feedback loop that has never existed before in human history. The image replaces the person. The caption replaces the feeling and the like. That tiny, almost meaningless gesture becomes the external measure of whether we are acceptable, whether we feel like we are enough. And what makes this particularly insidious is the speed of it. The feedback is instant. You post something and within minutes, you know whether it landed, whether you were enough, whether you're acceptable. That loop, perform, receive, perform again, runs so constantly and so fast that it starts to feel like reality. Like this is just who we are. Now, the version we post, the version that gets validated and here is what concerns me clinically when the constructed self gets thousands of likes, when the performance is rewarded, the gap between what we show and what we feel doesn't close it Widens. Because the validation is landing on something that isn't really us, and there's some part of us that knows it, which is why you can have a poster do really well, and you can still go to bed feeling completely empty. I've spoken in previous episodes about psychoanalyst, Susie Beck's concept of the false body. The body shaped from the outside in, built in response to what our earliest relationships could hold rather than what we actually felt. I think social media has given the false body and audience, the performance gets, likes. The person behind it feels nothing. When I was modeling, the industry had a term for going to meet photographers, editors, designers, to be looked over, assessed, considered, they called it a go see. You went, you were seen. You'd sit down and someone would ask you your age, your measurements flick through your portfolio, and at the end, you'd leave a small card called a comp card, your photos, your statistics, a distillation of everything considered relevant about you. Sometimes they'd take it, sometimes they'd slide it back across the table without a word. Nobody asked who you were. I think about that when I look at what we've built online, the profile as a comp card, the feed as a portfolio, billions of go sees every day in every pocket, visible but not known. And here is the paradox that sits at the heart of this. The more we share the emptier it can feel, the more we post, the more invisible we can become to others and to ourselves. Because what is being seen is not us. It is a version of us carefully constructed, and the cruel irony is that it works. People respond, they like it, they share it, they comment. The performance is convincing, but the person behind it goes to bed that night and feels nothing or worse, feels more alone than before. Because the thing that just got thousands of responses wasn't really them, and some part of them knows that. Unless of course, we start to show our imperfect selves, and sometimes we do the unfiltered photo, the honest caption, the moment of real vulnerability shared online, and that can be genuinely connect. People are hungry for it. We are collectively exhausted by the highlight reel and something in us responds when someone dares to show the mess underneath that hunger for realness tells us something important about what we are actually looking for. But I wonder if it's spontaneous or if it is being curated too. Because performing authenticity is still a performance, and the self that is carefully raging, its own vulnerability is still a constructed self. The question isn't whether we share the imperfect moment. It's whether we are actually present in it or whether we are already composing the caption while we're still inside the experience. Social media has given the constructed itself a platform and an audience it never had before. But the constructed self existed long before Instagram. It was built in our earliest relationships in the families we grew up in, in the classrooms and playgrounds where we learned which part of ourselves were welcome and which weren't. In the homes where certain emotions were too much, certain needs were inconvenient. Certain versions of ourselves were easier to love than others. Social media didn't create that gap between who we show the world and who we actually are. It just made it bigger and faster and more visible so the hunger doesn't get fed. It grows. We post more, we share more, we perform more. And the gap between who we are showing the world and who we actually are, the self that went into hiding gets wider and wider until one day someone sits across from me in my consulting room and says, I don't know who I am anymore. I just feel lost. And this brings me to my second point. What actually happens psychologically when we lose contact with who we are. When our earliest relationships feel unreliable or rejecting the most vulnerable parts of us, the parts that need that long for connection, that feel deeply learn that it isn't safe to show up. So we split. We put forward a version of ourselves that can manage, that can cope while those needier more tender parts stay hidden, waiting for a moment when it finally feels safe to come out. That's what I mean by the disconnected self. You can think of it as a self that was never held in mind, and so it went into hiding. Imagine a child who senses that certain parts of who they are, their anger, their sadness, their neediness, their exuberance aren't welcome at home. Over time, that child learns to tuck those parts away, showing only what seems acceptable, what keeps the connection safe. Even as adults, we carry those habits with us hiding parts of ourselves simply because at some part it didn't feel safe to let them be seen, but those hidden parts aren't gone. They're just waiting for the right conditions to come forward Again. And this is where early experience matters so much because our sense of self comes alive in those moments. When someone truly understands us, those small, repeated moments of being genuinely met. When those moments are missing or inconsistent in early life, the deepest parts of us don't get the chance to be fully expressed or recognized. The constructed self steps in taking the lead, while our core self keeps waiting for the moment when it feels safe to come out. I also think it's important to talk about shame here. Shame is the mechanism by which the self learns to disappear. It's different from guilt, which is about something we've done. Shame is a sense that we ourselves are fundamentally wrong. When the early relational environment communicated that who we were was too much, not enough, or simply not seen, shame became the invisibility cloak. We hid the parts of ourselves most likely to be rejected, and over time we forgot they were there. We believe shame is the truth about us, but it isn't. It's a learned response, absorbed in the earliest relationships in the environments that couldn't hold all of who we were, the problem is that shame speaks in the first person, and because it sounds like our own voice, we trust it. We build our lives around it. We hide the parts of ourselves most likely to confirm it, and it leaves a mark, not just psychologically, but in the body itself. Shame is a somatic experience. You feel it in the heat that rises in your face, in the urge to make yourself smaller, to take up less space to disappear from a room. In the way the body contracts, when someone gets too close to something real in the chronic low level vigilance of a nervous system that might have learned very early, that being truly seen was not safe. Over time, that contraction becomes the default. The body stops expecting to be met. It stops offering itself forward. And what remains is what psychoanalyst Susie Orach describes as body lessness, a particular quality of disconnection that isn't quite pain, but an absence, a sense of living at the slight, remove from your own physical experience. You might recognize it in small ways, eating a meal and realizing halfway through that you haven't tasted any of it. Getting to the end of a day with no real sense of having been present in it. That it just happened and you moved through it, but something essential wasn't quite there. It's one of the most common things I sit with in my consulting room and one of the least talked about through sensation, through unease, through body image disturbance. The sense that the body is wrong, a stranger, something to manage rather than live in the body is holding what the constructed self cannot accommodate, and we are losing our connection to it. To the place where sensation lives, where hunger is felt, where the intelligent pulse of being alive can actually be registered, we are also losing our connection to each other. The hunger for realness, for depth, for genuine witnessing doesn't go away. When our true self is hidden, it intensifies. Now we come to the third and final point, and perhaps what matters most, which is finding your way back. The self that feels lost, hasn't disappeared. That longing for connection and depth, the need to be truly seen is still very much alive inside us. Even when parts of us stay hidden, that desire doesn't go away. It simply waits for the right moment to come forward. Again, you can feel it in your body in the ache of feeling invisible in a room full of people in the exhaustion of having to perform a version of yourself that never quite fits, and in that persistent sense that something real is missing, you are somehow living a step away from your own experience, almost a bystander to your own life. Those feelings are information. They're the parts of you that went into hiding, knocking on the door, reminding you, they're still there, waiting to be welcomed back. Technology can stimulate visibility. It can give audiences metrics reach, but it cannot replicate what happens in the body when we feel genuinely safe with another person. The felt sense of being met, of being known without having to perform. Of taking up space without apology. When I talk about being seen, I don't mean being visible. I mean being seen as you actually are your true self, including the parts that went into hiding that kind of being seen is not about visibility at all, it's about recognition, and that's a very different thing. The psychoanalyst, Jessica Writes about what she calls the third, the intersubjective space that comes into being between two people when genuine recognition happens. Something that belongs to neither person alone. It's what emerges between us when we are both truly present with one another as ourselves, Not as the versions of ourselves. We have constructed for the world. I think this is precisely what is missing in so much of our online life. We have visibility, we have reach. We have a version of connection, thousands of connections sometimes, but we don't have the third. That inter subjective space cannot be produced through a screen. It cannot be curated or posted or light into existence. It requires two real selves, genuinely present, genuinely meeting. And this is where the constructed self and the disconnected self both find their answer in the experience of the third in genuine relational encounter where two real selves meet and something new becomes possible That could not have existed before when the self that went into hiding finds, perhaps for the first time that there is space for it to come forward, to be seen, to be known. And this is why relationships matter so much. Real ones the messy, imperfect, genuine experience of being in contact with another person, of letting ourselves be known and letting them be known to us. We are not meant to find our way back alone. The disconnect itself didn't lose its way in isolation, and it finds its way back the same way in relationship. And the extraordinary thing that I witness in my clinical work is that it's never too late. And when there is enough safety. Real presence and attunement. Something inside us knows how to come back. The work is about remembering how to turn toward the body, listening to what it has been trying to say, and learning to trust that the self that went into hiding isn't lost. It's just waiting for the right conditions to come back. Before we close, I wanna leave you with a question to sit with this week. What moments in your life make you feel out of touch with who you are? As you reflect, notice what happens in your body. Know that your body is always speaking. So here's what we've covered today. First, we looked at the constructed self, the version of us we build when it doesn't feel safe to show up as we actually are, and how social media has given that constructed self and audience and a feedback loop that has never existed before. Second, we explored the disconnected self, those parts of us that go into hiding, not because they are lost, but because they were never held in mind, never recognized, never welcomed into being. And third, we talked about what it actually takes to find your way back. Creating the conditions where your true self can emerge. So we began today with the question of what it means to feel lost or to wonder who we really are. Maybe then at the heart of it, that's the answer. Creating the space where our true self is not only welcomed, but also seen and known. If today's episode resonated. I'd love to know. Subscribe to Mind The Body Podcast and join my mind The Body Weekly Newsletter. The link is in the show notes. Until next time, stay curious. I.