Childhood in the digital world .The Disconnected Self

A child can be bright, polite, and high-functioning while feeling unreal inside. That quiet distance is easy to miss, especially when there are no obvious behavior problems, but it can shape everything from mood swings to shutdown to the familiar “I don’t care.” We explore what I call the disconnected self: not the absence of self, but a self that has learned to divide, adapt, or go offline in order to cope. 

Drawing on core ideas from psychoanalysis and attachment theory, we walk through how splitting and lack of integration can leave feelings unlinked, why Winnicott’s false self can look like “being good,” and how consistent emotional holding helps a child build a steadier sense of who they are. We also look at Bion’s view that children learn to think about feelings through being understood, and Fonagy’s idea that numbness often signals a developmental gap rather than true emptiness. When stress or trauma is significant, we discuss how self-states can fragment, creating a child who seems like a different person in different settings. 

From a parenting perspective, the biggest change is the question we ask. We stop focusing on what is wrong with the child and start asking what the child had to do to manage their inner world. I share a practical stance you can use immediately: consistency over perfection, naming emotions without panic, staying calm, and resisting the urge to fix what may not be fixable in the moment. We also connect this back to childhood in a digital world by asking how screens can become escape or self-soothing, and what that might reveal about disconnection from self and others. If this resonates, listen, share it with someone raising a child, and subscribe and leave a review so more parents can find the support they need.

Transcript

Why The Disconnected Self Matters

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello, this is Kim Lee, child and adolescent psychotherapist. Now, in the series that I've been working on, which has to do with the childhood in a digital world, something occurred to me that I thought maybe useful to add. So this is an additional, originally unplanned episode. And it's partly prompted by something else I'm working on for the forthcoming book Facing Psychological Reality. And it has to do with the notion of the disconnected self. Now, in some ways, I think there there are certainly children in my practice who I would describe as not suffering with, but have developed a disconnection with the self. And this isn't a clinical disorder, but it is a state of being which I think is observable in different ways, but I don't think it's understood. So I thought that I would just try and describe this. Now I'm going to be doing so from an evidenced perspective perspective, or evidenced in as much as this comes from the work of some very eminent psychoanalysts. And I'm going to just paraphrase some of the things that they've stated because I think it sort of helps us to provide a framework in which to understand what I'm describing. There are children who appear entirely present. And yet there's something essential that's missing. And this is something which is rarely named directly, but it's very often felt, and it's what I've just mentioned is the notion of the disconnected self. And it's not always visible, not always very often just not dramatic at all, but it's profoundly important. Because sometimes the difficulty is not about what the child is or isn't doing, it's what the child cannot feel. And when we can see this, we can make a very different kind of sense of the behaviors that follow on. In the consulting room, disconnection doesn't arrive as a diagnosis. It's more about observing the child who shrugs or is unable to answer or answers in an adaptive way to questions like what they're experiencing and how they're feeling, or in the adult who says, I don't care really. And actually probably just doesn't know whether they do or not. So in the child, for example, who moves from laughter to rage with no apparent bridge between the two, and what becomes clear is that this is not defiance or indifference, it's something else. It is a self that has not been able to stay together, parts of the self. Now, psychoanalytic psychoanalytic thinking has long understood that the mind does something very particular when it's faced with more than it can bear. And Melanie Klein, who is a pioneer child psychoanalyst, described how in infants early experience is split into what feels good and what feels bad. And that is largely about what the infant or how the infant experiences its primary caregiver, which Klein described as the object, only because at that stage of development it wasn't a mother or father, it was the provider of gratification for needs, or not, which means that it would then be a good object or a bad one. Now, when those experiences are too overwhelming and they're not brought together in what we call integration, then they become kept apart. So the child doesn't feel one thing, they feel many things, but not at the same time. There is a lack of integration, and this is where we begin to see a kind of internal disconnection. Now, there are also children who do something even more remarkable, and they adapt. Now, Donald Winnicott spoke about what he called the false self as opposed to the true self. And the false self is a way of being that develops when the child learns that their real feelings, their real experiences are not what the environment needs. So that the true self containing these feelings, sensations, and thoughts is deemed as unacceptable. Therefore, the child must adapt to its environment and to its perception of and the real demands of others by developing what he called the false self. Now, this isn't wrong any more than the true self is right. So what happens is they become what is required or what they perceive is required. Polite, capable, well behaved. And often these are the children we worry about the least because they don't present any difficulties, or at least that's how it looks. But internally, something very important has happened because they are living without quite feeling real. I sometimes see this kind of adaptive behavior in children who present very differently in different situations. And there are lots of explanations or additional explanations for this, but for the sake of this particular topic, this false self, true self presentation, or a failure to be able to make contact with the true self is something which shows that a child is is not occupying them, them themselves, they are disconnected. Now the self isn't something a child builds alone, it's shaped in relationship. And Balby, John Bowlby, helped us to understand that children develop a sense of who they are through how they are held emotionally by those who care for them. Winnicott, interestingly, also described holding, handling, and being held in mind. Similar kinds of principles, slightly different reframing. But Bowlby believed that when the holding is consistent, then the self becomes steady. And when it's confusing or frightening or absent, the self must organize itself around that instability. And so we see children who want closeness but can't tolerate it, who seek reassurance but can't believe it. Not because they're being difficult, but because their experiences have been. Wilfred Beon, another psychoanalyst, offered something very important and he suggested that children don't automatically know how to think about their feelings. They learn this through us, through being understood, through having their feelings received and given back to them in a way that is tolerable and makes sense. But when that doesn't happen and feelings remain unprocessed, they are they are felt but not understood, present but not connected. And so the child cannot say, I feel angry, because they can only be the anger. You may have heard this before. I don't know, I don't care, I feel nothing. These are these are reactive comments that are very common in children and young people. Peter Fonegie believed that this is not an expression of emptiness. And Peter Fonegie, psychiatrist, and I think a neuropsychiatrist, so he would say, no, this isn't emptiness, it's a gap, a gap in the development of the self that where feelings have not yet been brought into awareness in a way that the child can think about them. So the child isn't avoiding feeling, they are disconnected from it. Now, when the self divides, in some cases, particularly where there has been significant emotional strain or trauma, the mind does something even more powerful. It divides. This is work which has been studied by many theoreticians, and I think perhaps the earliest was Sandor Ferenzi and later Philip Bromberg. They described how we may move between different self-states almost as if we are different people at different times, not consciously but structurally. So the child who is calm at school may be overwhelmed at home. The adolescent who seems in control may suddenly feel completely under, and they themselves don't understand why. Now, this kind of fragmentation of the self, where the parts have not joined, means that we get a sense of somebody who has different selves, or indeed the individual develops a sense of different selves. We see this a lot in post-traumatic stress disorder. Now, what this means for parents, this is where everything changes because once we understand this, we stop asking what's wrong with the child, and we begin to ask what has the child had to do in order to manage their experience? Now, this is something which I see as a clinician all the time. It's a question I ask simply, how do they get this way? But I'm thinking a little bit more forensically as well, because I'm thinking what's happened internally, psychologically, is this a child who has had to what we call split off a part of themselves in order to cope? Is this a child who has learned to adapt because environmental, family environmental factors and other life events have caused the child to develop mechanisms psychologically because there was nobody or there was not enough available to help them to bring together the different parts of the experience. I worked with well in fact I've worked with a a number of people who've experienced the loss of a family member, a loved one, a friend, and very often, well not very often, but but sometimes this sort of happens in a kind of dramatic way, and the patient may already be in therapy and they're suddenly faced with this this life event. And it is what what is interesting is to see the different expressions that they may have. They may have uh disbelief and shock, anger, fear, sadness, a whole host of things. Sometimes they say, I don't know what to feel, I don't know, I I don't know what to say, I don't know what to do. And I think what that represents is a sort of fragmentation caused by shock. And it's entirely understandable, and it's very common, and I'm sure that many people listening will be able to identify with that experience. Now, my response is pretty much consistent in every situation, and it is there are no rules. What what you think, what you feel, there are no rules. Everything is okay, and when I say everything is okay, I mean everything is allowed, everything is legitimate, everything is real in that moment. And rather than questioning it, we we name it, we accept it. We're angry, it's okay to voice the anger, even if it feels unfair, we're we're overwhelmed with pain. It's okay. And it can change within the course of a day. Now, why I'm saying this, I mean, this isn't a podcast about grief and grieving, but it it is about the fact that fragmentation can occur. So if we go back to the idea that children may have life experiences, not necessarily death, although it could be, where the experiences I've described, the sensations, the ideas, the reactions, are not held in this kind of it's okay kind of way. Then what we're left with is a small person trying to manage whatever whatever uh has been aroused in them. And sometimes this will be a kind of partitioning. I remember uh somebody saying to me once when there had been a death in the family, and they were talking about the child, and so she seem you know she seems fine and she hasn't cried, and I was thinking, oh no. And and in fairness to the person concerned, how are they supposed to know? But actually, what you know what does that does that mean now that the child hasn't cried, can't cry? Well, you know, what what are we what how do we understand it? So the validation of the child's true self is what matters most. Now, if you recognize any of this, and I'm quite sure you will, there are a few things that matter enormously. And it's not about perfection, it's about consistency, helping your child to name feelings. And you can name your own without you know falling apart, preferably, but remaining calm in the presence of their emotional states means that you're showing them that their internal world is real, that their true self is real, can find expression, and can be understood. And perhaps most importantly, not rushing to fix because there isn't anything to fix, but staying alongside. And this is, you know, once again, because of the importance of connection. It's not created through correction, it's created through being understood and being alongside. There's nothing to fix, it's something to facilitate the management of, but it's not a problem to fix. Now, the disconnected self isn't the absence of self, it's the presence of a self that has had to divide in order to cope. And when we begin to meet that self with curiosity and acceptance rather than judgment, something will change and it will be meaningful. Not every child who is struggling is visible, and not every child who is quiet is at peace. So it's really important that we understand those things, and if this episode has resonated with you, you may very well find it helpful to seek further support through uh either my work with parents or other clinicians. Now, I want to somehow try and pull this back into the series because I did make reference to that. If we think about screens and we think about screens as a mechanism for escape or for recovery, or for self-soothing, what does that say about the self? And does that mean that there is a disconnection from the self that results in a disconnection from the self of others? Is it that the child or young person, more so the young person, maybe not, is in some ways inhabiting a part of themselves that cannot be connected or they experience as not being able to be connected to other. Therefore, the internal disconnection finds expression through external disconnection. And once again, we come back to the importance of being alongside because connection works against disconnection. We have to be patient and we have to be consistent, and we have to try not to fix it. It is about the being with that matters most. I realize this is a slight deviation from the original script, but I don't think it's entirely off track. So I hope it's been interesting and I will be back shortly with another episode. Thank you for listening.