Developing 'Self' in a Fragmenting World: What we are asking of young people now

Over the last twenty years, much of my work has centred on supporting neurodivergent children, young people and families. That will always remain central to my thinking. In recent months, however, I have found myself becoming increasingly preoccupied by something affecting almost every young person I encounter, regardless of neurotype.

In some ways, this has taken me back to my analytic and systemic roots: to Wilfred Bion’s concept of containment and to John Burnham’s Social GGGRRRAAACCCEEESSS. More broadly, it has drawn me towards the question of how a person learns to relate, to themselves, to others and to the world, in an increasingly fragmented and fragmenting culture.

What I find myself holding in the consulting room is not simply a greater quantity of distress. It is a change in its quality.

There has always been anxiety in adolescence. There has always been uncertainty, identity formation and the difficult movement between dependence and autonomy. Young people have always grown up in worlds marked by instability, conflict, deprivation and political upheaval.

And yet, something about the texture of the present moment feels different.

I find myself returning repeatedly to a question that has become less rhetorical and increasingly clinical:

What does it mean to develop a coherent sense of self in a world that no longer appears to function coherently?

From fragmentation towards integration

A fundamental task of psychological development is the movement from fragmentation towards integration.

A baby cannot initially experience either themselves or the world as a coherent whole. Experience is encountered in parts: bodily sensations, emotional states and relational impressions that have not yet been connected by a stable cognitive or narrative thread. The infant does not begin with a fully formed sense of continuity. That continuity must gradually develop.

Through relationships that are sufficiently stable, responsive and containing, experiences begin to become linked. The mind becomes increasingly able to hold apparently contradictory realities: love and anger, dependence and frustration, safety and uncertainty. The self becomes something that can be known across different states, rather than continually lost within them.

The world, too, becomes something that can be thought about rather than simply reacted to.

This process has never taken place solely within the individual. Psychological development is shaped by the relational and cultural environments in which it unfolds. Our understanding of who we are develops inextricably alongside our understanding of the world around us: its relationships, values, social structures, politics and shared narratives.

What concerns me is that the wider, macro-systemic environment in which young people are now developing can no longer be assumed to support this movement towards coherence.

When the external world mirrors internal fragmentation

Public life increasingly operates through processes that, within the consulting room, we would recognise as signs of psychological pressure: polarisation, projection, idealisation, denigration and rapid movement between emotional states without sufficient space for reflection.

Public discourse frequently privileges immediacy, simplicity and certainty over substance, complexity and thought. As the world becomes more chaotic, the promise of absolute clarity can become increasingly seductive. Distorted or reductive narratives may offer the appearance of stability precisely because they remove the burden of uncertainty.

Positions harden quickly. Nuance is lost in the speed of reaction. Contradictions are not explored but split apart.

Social media is deeply implicated in this process, but this is not simply a piece about social media. To locate the problem entirely there would be to underestimate the wider systemic change that social media both reflects and amplifies: an erosion of shared narratives and a diminishing collective capacity to tolerate complexity without collapsing into division.

In psychodynamic terms, splitting is a means of managing experiences that feel contradictory, overwhelming or unsafe. Incompatible aspects of the self or of another person are kept separate rather than held together within a more integrated understanding.

This is not a failure of character. It is an attempt to make the psychically unmanageable feel manageable.

What is striking about the current moment is the extent to which the external world reinforces this defensive process. Young people are expected to develop integration within a culture that repeatedly pulls towards fragmentation.

They are asked to think with nuance inside systems that reward binary positions.

They are expected to remain curious and relational in environments that are increasingly exposing, reactive and hostile.

They are required to form a stable sense of self while the adults, institutions and narratives around them often appear unstable, contradictory or unable to contain their own anxieties.

This is not merely stressful. It is psychologically disorganising.

An atmosphere that enters the self

Trauma is not limited to singular catastrophic events. It may also arise through prolonged exposure to conditions that gradually erode a person’s sense of safety, continuity and trust.

What young people are encountering now is often more diffuse: an ambient exposure to threat, instability, aggression and intensity that is difficult to locate and therefore difficult to metabolise.

It does not necessarily announce itself as trauma. There may be no single event to identify and no clearly bounded environment from which to retreat. Instead, it is carried in the nervous system, in the body and in the emotional atmosphere of everyday life.

It is present in the tone of public discourse, in the urgency and aggression with which ideas are communicated, in anxieties about the climate and the future, and in the increasingly distorted accounts of reality circulating from one day to the next.

It is also carried through the adults around young people.

Parents, teachers and clinicians do not stand outside this atmosphere. We are shaped by it too. We bring our own uncertainties, fears and attempts to make sense of a world that frequently feels confusing and incoherent.

The containing structures themselves are under strain.

From a systemic perspective, this matters profoundly.

Human beings do not regulate in isolation. We regulate within relationships, families, schools, communities and cultures. When those systems are sufficiently stable, they help us absorb and metabolise distress. When the systems themselves become dysregulated, the burden shifts towards the individual.

Young people may then be left carrying more than their developmental stage can reasonably manage.

Authority without containment

Alongside this fragmentation, there has been a significant shift in how power and authority are experienced. Influence has become more diffuse, more rapidly acquired and, at times, unmoored from responsibility. Traditional forms of authority have always been imperfect and frequently exclusionary, but their destabilisation has not necessarily resulted in more thoughtful or accountable alternatives.

For a developing person, this is not a neutral change.

Part of growing up involves orienting towards authority: testing it, resisting it, internalising aspects of it and eventually differentiating from it. A young person gradually develops an internal structure partly through encountering external structures that are sufficiently dependable to be questioned without disappearing.

When authority feels arbitrary, inconsistent or located primarily in visibility and influence, it becomes more difficult to establish the internal coordinates against which differentiation can occur.

The young person is not only asking, “Who am I?”

They are also asking, "What can be trusted? Who holds responsibility? Which account of reality is real? What remains stable when every position can be overturned by the next wave of reaction?”

These questions are not abstract. They integral to the formation of the self.

The clinical task

In the consulting room, I am no longer primarily working with internal histories shaped by personal and family relationships, although these remain foundational. I am increasingly  working with the psychological consequences of an ongoing and shared external reality: one that is unresolved, continuously evolving and saturated with intensity.

The task is to help young people differentiate without dissociating.

To distinguish what belongs to them from what belongs to the world, while remaining meaningfully connected to both.

To tolerate complexity without collapsing into false certainty or despair.

To recognise danger without becoming organised entirely around threat.

To retain access to safety, relationship and possibility without retreating into denial.

In other words, the work is the work of integration under conditions that do not readily support it.

This places a particular responsibility upon those of us who work with young people. Not a responsibility to resolve the instability of the world, that would be neither possible nor honest, but to recognise the developmental magnitude of what they are being asked to navigate.

We must also consider how we position ourselves in response.

If the broader environment pulls towards fragmentation, our task is not to mirror that pull. We must attempt to offer something different.

Not certainty where no certainty exists, but the capacity to remain present in uncertainty.

Not simplistic reassurance, but thoughtful containment.

Not withdrawal from reality, but a way of engaging with reality that does not require the self to collapse.

Clinical thinking has long understood that the development of a coherent self depends upon environments capable of holding, thinking about and metabolising experience.

What feels increasingly urgent is that we recognise how profoundly those environmental conditions are changing.

The question is therefore not only how young people are coping.

It is what kind of psychological work we are now asking them to undertake, and whether we, as the adults in the room, are sufficiently prepared to meet them within it.

How we manage our own responses to an increasingly complex and confusing world matters. It is at this intersection that I find myself needing to plant my feet firmly, with my eyes open, if I am to offer something meaningful to the young people who come seeking support.