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

Over the last 20 years, much of my work has centred on supporting the neurodivergent community. This has been extremely important to me. I know this has always been driven by a wish to offer support to neurodivergent young people in a way that was not available once upon a time. However, in recent months I have noticed that other thoughts have been permeating my thinking, and while offering support within the neurodivergent community will always be central to my work, the current state of the world has been drawing my mind in a distinctly different direction. One that is impacting all my clients regardless of neurotype.

In some ways, this has taken me back to my analytical roots. Reflecting increasingly on thinkers like Wilfred Bion and his concept of ‘containment’, and John Burnham and The Social GGGRRRAAACCCEEESSS. I find my thinking moving towards what it means to relate - to learn to relate - in an ever more fragmented and fragmenting world.

Although I know the minds of many will jump immediately to social media, this is not a piece about social media. While there is no question that social media is deeply complicit in what is unfolding before our very eyes, my concern is that if we lay this entirely at that particular door as the sole culprit, we dangerously underestimate the totality of what seems to be engulfing us all systemically at this particular moment.

What I find myself repeatedly holding when sitting with young people these days, in our current version of “the now”, is not simply a new scale of distress, but a change in the quality of it.

There has always been anxiety in adolescence. There has always been uncertainty, identity formation, and the push and pull between dependence and autonomy. There has also always been instability in the world. Entire generations have grown up in the shadow of war, deprivation, and political upheaval. This is not new.

And yet, something in the texture of the current moment is emerging differently.

Again and again, I find myself returning to a question that is now less rhetorical and more clinical:

What does it mean to develop a coherent understanding of self in a world that persistently no longer functions in a coherent way?

Those of us working in the field of child development hold to the guiding principle that a fundamental task of psychological development involves moving from a mind that exists in a state of fragmentation (how the baby makes sense of the world) towards a mind that can hold a more integrated understanding of the world we live in.

The culture, the politics, the climate, the relationships, the social mores.

Babies cannot take in the whole in a “whole” sense. The brain must first develop to a point where this view, in an ever-growing totality, becomes possible. It is this process of perception that drives our developing sense of self; understanding who we are is inextricably linked to our understanding of the world around us.

This means that early experience is not immediately organised into a stable, integrated sense of self or a reliable understanding of the world. It is felt in parts - sensations, emotions, relational impressions - without a clear cognitive thread to bind them together. Over time, through relationships that are sufficiently stable and containing, the mind begins to link these experiences. A sense of a continuity begins to emerge. The self becomes something that can be known internally and in relation to the environment around us. The world becomes something that can be thought about, rather than simply reacted to.

What is critical to understand here is that this developmental process has never depended solely on what happens within the individual. It is shaped, fundamentally, by the environments in which development takes place.

What I am increasingly aware of in my work with older adolescents and young adults is that the broader environment - the sociocultual and relational atmosphere in which they are coming into adult consciousness - can no longer be assumed to provide coherence.

Public discourse, especially a more toxic form of politics permiating our daily experience, seems increasingly marked by extremes and fragmented, distorted narratives. There is something in the current human ether that appears increasingly to crave immediate clarity, simplicity and certainty over substance and reflection. I find that as our world becomes ever more chaotic and confused, this 'clarity' is increasingly predicated on thinking that requires an acceptance of cognitive dissonance. No matter how jingoistic or hollow these ever more distorted and entrenched narratives may be, they offer the appearance of stability and certainty. This together with the speed with which information now circulates can mean that positions harden quickly, and nuance is too often lost in the speed of reaction.

Social media is one vehicle through which this is expressed, but I think it is too simplistic to say it is the origin. What it allows for is an exponential amplification of something more pervasive: a wider erosion of shared narratives and a diminishing collective capacity to hold complexity without collapsing into division.

These dynamics are not abstract. They are psychological. And, much like during COVID, the experience is shared so broadly that the collective trauma of it is easily overlooked, as this way of existing becomes normalised through the sheer number of people experiencing it all at once.

In psychodynamic terms, we understand that when experience becomes overwhelming, contradictory, or unsafe, the mind may revert to more primitive organising strategies. One of these is splitting: a defence through which incompatible or anxiety-provoking aspects of self and other are kept apart, rather than integrated. This is not a failure of character. It is an attempt to manage what feels psychically unmanageable.

What is striking now is the extent to which the external world mirrors and reinforces these internal dynamics.

The environment in which young people are developing now operates through the very processes that, clinically, we recognise as markers of psychological pressure: polarisation, projection, idealisation and denigration, rapid shifts between states without sufficient containment.

The external world of the adults in the room begins to resemble an uncontained internal world of the undeveloped child.

This creates a confusing developmental tension. Young people are expected to form a stable, integrated sense of self in conditions that persistently pull towards fragmentation.

They are asked to think in nuanced ways within systems that tend to reward binary positions.

They are asked to remain open and relational in environments that are ever more reactive, exposing, and often hostile.

This is not simply stressful. It is disorganising.

It is here that the question of trauma requires careful attention.

Trauma is often not limited to singular, catastrophic events. It is often the result of prolonged exposure of living within conditions that erode a sense of safety over time. What I am seeing now, the constant influence of ever more distorted stories of what is happening in the world from day to day, sits within that understanding, but with a different configuration.

This is not trauma located in specific relationships or environments. It is something more diffuse. A kind of ambient exposure to instability, threat, and intensity that is difficult to locate, difficult to delimit, and therefore difficult to metabolise.

And so it does not always announce itself as trauma. But it is carried in the nervous system, in the body, and in the atmosphere of experience itself.

What I see as constant exposure to a from of constant relational trauma, is present in the atmosphere young people are breathing, in the emotional tone of public life, in the urgency and aggression of discourse, in the uncertainty about the future, and in the anxieties that circulate through the adults around them. Even in the most thoughtful and containing homes, it is no longer fully possible to know what a young person is encountering, absorbing, or attempting to make sense of.

The boundary between the external world and the internal life of the child has become more permeable.

From a systemic perspective, this matters profoundly.

Individuals do not regulate in isolation. They regulate within systems; families, schools, communities. When those systems are stable, human beings can absorb and metabolise distress. But when the wider environment is itself dysregulated, the burden shifts. The system struggles to contain, and the individual is left holding more than their developmental stage can reasonably manage.

This includes adults.

Parents, educators, and clinicians are not outside of this atmosphere. They are shaped by it, carrying their own uncertainties and their own efforts to make sense of a world that feels increasingly complex and, at times, incoherent. The containing structures themselves are under strain.

Alongside this, there has been a subtle but significant shift in how power and authority are experienced. Influence has become more diffuse, more rapidly acquired, and at times unmoored from responsibility. The traditional markers of authority, however imperfect, have become less stable and less predictable.

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

Part of growing up involves orienting to authority, testing it, internalising aspects of it, and eventually differentiating from it. But when authority itself feels inconsistent or arbitrarily located, it becomes more difficult to form an internal sense of structure against which that process can unfold.

The task of integration becomes more complex. In the consulting room, this shift is tangible. I am no longer working only with internal histories shaped by personal relationships, although these remain foundational. I am also working with the psychological impact of an ongoing, shared reality; one that is unresolved, continuously evolving, and often saturated with intensity.

The work is to help young people develop an internal capacity to differentiate without dissociating. To recognise what belongs to them and what belongs to the world, while remaining in relationship to both. To hold complexity without collapsing into certainty or despair. To sustain a sense of self that can accommodate both threat and safety without becoming organised entirely around either.

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

This places a particular responsibility on those of us who work with young people.

Not a responsibility to resolve the instability of the world (that would be neither possible nor realistic) but a responsibility to recognise the nature of what they are navigating. To understand that what is being asked of them is, in many ways, developmentally extraordinary...

... and to consider how we position ourselves in response.

If the broader environment pulls towards fragmentation, then our task is not to mirror that pull. It is to offer something different. Not certainty where none exists, but a capacity to remain with complexity. Not withdrawal from reality, but a way of engaging with it that does not collapse the self.

Clinical thinking has long understood that the development of the self depends on the presence of environments that can hold, think, and metabolise experience.

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

The question is not only how young people are coping - it is what kind of psychological work we are asking them to do and are prepared to meet them in it.

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