Anxiety without an address: when buyers can't say why

Ask anyone what they remember about themselves at six months old. The answer is always the same: nothing. The usual explanation is that memory had not “switched on” yet, as if the brain were a recorder waiting for someone to press a button. That explanation misses the point. At that age there was nobody to remember. There was no single “I” to which events could attach.

Psychology has a name for this early state: diffuse identity. It is a chaotic condition with no stable centre. It sounds like a topic for a developmental psychology seminar, and it is. It is also one of the more useful ideas I know for understanding a certain kind of buyer: the one who hesitates, cannot explain why, and walks away from an offer that looked perfectly rational on paper.

This article covers the idea itself first, and then what it means for a company that sells into Russia.

The self is not assembled yet

An infant never asks “who am I”. An infant is reactive and reflexive. It responds to hunger, discomfort, sound and touch, but it does not relate those responses to a constant centre. At this stage identity is spread across the environment. The child is not yet separate from the container that surrounds it: the mother, the warmth, the sound.

Each act of behaviour exists on its own, almost like a separate sub-personality with no common thread running to the others. Crying is one state. Smiling is another. There is no bridge between them in the form of a steady “me”. The constancy of the self does not exist yet.

This is why the period cannot be recalled. Remembering requires a subject who files events as its own. When that subject is missing, events happen but they are not stored as “my memories”.

You cannot remember it, but the body can live it again

The experience does not disappear without a trace, though. The imprint of the infant period stays. What lacks access to it is the self-concept, the part of the mind that builds conscious memories.

Sometimes a fragment of that early experience surfaces as a sensation instead of a memory. It shows up at the level of sensorimotor processes and interoception, the signals the body sends from the inside. A person can physically live through something from that period, such as a causeless anxiety or a particular bodily state, and still be unable to say what it is or where it came from. The body remembers earlier and deeper than the speech that could describe it.

Chaos with nothing to hold on to

Diffuse identity is not felt as a neutral state. It is felt as chaos: no support, no constant self to lean against. This differs from ordinary adult confusion. A confused adult at least knows that it is they who are confused. In the diffuse state even that “they” is missing. There is only a stream of reactions attached to nothing.

Adults find it hard to describe the moments when they drop into something similar: acute anxiety without an object, a sense that the ground is going from under their feet for no visible reason. They cannot find the words. The reason is not poor self-reflection. The experience itself was formed before the equipment for putting it into words existed.

Take a common case. An adult under stress does not report a concrete fear, like losing a job or letting someone down. They report something less formed: a vague feeling that “everything is falling apart”, with no clear object. A rational review of the situation does not help, because the state does not live at the level of rational causes.

What helps is a return to a basic question: where is the support right now, is there something stable nearby to hold on to? That is a direct appeal to a mechanism that originally formed as an answer to the absence of support. A person in a diffuse state needs a container more than an argument. Something predictable and steady: the rhythm of breathing, a familiar place, another person’s presence.

What this has to do with buyers

Marketing is built on the assumption that buyers have reasons and can state them. We run surveys, read reviews, interview customers and sort the answers into objections. Price, quality, delivery, trust. Each objection gets a counter-argument on the landing page.

That model works when the buyer’s worry has an address. It fails when it does not. A buyer can be in exactly the state described above: an unease that is real, that affects the decision, and that has no object the buyer can name. Ask such a person “what stopped you?” and you get “I don’t know, it just didn’t feel right” or a polite invented reason. Then the team writes a counter-argument to the invented reason and wonders why nothing changes.

The practical lesson from diffuse identity is simple. Demanding that someone explain what they feel, at a moment when the feeling formed before explanations existed, only raises the anxiety and adds a sense of failure. The same happens in a sales conversation. Pushing a hesitant buyer to name the objection often ends the conversation, because you have asked for something they cannot produce.

The alternative is to restore a sense of support first and analyse later. In commercial terms that means giving the buyer fixed points: things that do not move while everything else seems to.

Why this lands harder in Russia

Here the Russian market differs from what most Western teams are used to, and the difference is one of degree more than kind.

Russian buyers, both consumers and business customers, have lived through repeated shocks over the past decade: currency swings, sudden rule changes, and in 2022 the departure of many foreign brands, sometimes overnight. I am not claiming this makes everyone anxious all the time. It means the background question “will this still be here tomorrow?” sits closer to the surface than it does in a stable Western market. When a foreign company appears with an offer, that question is often present and unspoken.

This has several consequences that playbooks written for Google and Western audiences tend to miss.

Arguments do not replace a fixed point. A Western landing page often leads with benefits and proof: features, comparisons, testimonials. In Russia a buyer with shapeless unease reads all of that and still stalls, because none of it answers “who will I talk to if something goes wrong, and will they still be around?” A named contact, a local phone number, a working messenger channel and stated terms that do not change without warning often do more than another benefit block.

Predictable rhythm is a product feature. The source idea says a person in a diffuse state needs something predictable nearby. For a buyer that can be a delivery date that holds, a reply within the hour you promised, an invoice that matches the quote. Each one is small. Together they form a container. When a foreign company treats these as operations detail rather than part of the offer, it throws away one of its strongest selling points.

Surveys return fog. Research methods imported from Western practice lean heavily on stated reasons. Ask a Russian customer panel “what concerns you about foreign suppliers?” and you may get generic answers that lead nowhere. It is more productive to watch behaviour: which pages people reread, which questions sales hears three times, where a deal stalls without explanation. That is where the missing support shows. This is the part of customer research that most often changes a company’s plans.

Your silence gets read. In a calm market, a brand that goes quiet for a quarter is simply quiet. In a market where brands have vanished, silence can be read as the first sign of an exit. Regular, dull, predictable communication (updates, stock information, a working blog) is a way of saying “we are still here” without having to say it.

What a company selling into Russia from abroad can do

None of this requires a new campaign. It requires a different question when you review your funnel. Instead of “which objection are we failing to answer?”, ask “where does the buyer meet uncertainty, and do we add a fixed point there or remove one?”

A short working list:

1. Map the moments of uncertainty. First visit, price page, contact form, waiting for a reply, first delivery, first problem. At each one, write down what the buyer can hold on to.
2. Put a person in the picture. A name and a way to reach them, in the channels your Russian buyers actually use. An anonymous form with a promise of “we’ll get back to you” is the opposite of a container.
3. Fix what can be fixed, and say so. Terms, timelines, response hours. State them plainly and keep them. A promise kept small is worth more than a large one that slips.
4. Stop demanding explanations. In sales scripts, replace “what exactly worries you?” with questions about what would make the next step easier. Let the buyer steady themselves before you analyse.
5. Answer the unspoken question. For a foreign brand, that is usually “will you stay?” Show local presence, service continuity and a track record in the market in ways the buyer can see without asking.
6. Research behaviour, not only opinions. Treat vague answers as a signal that the worry has no address, and look for where it shows in actions.

How your brand shows up in these moments is a positioning decision as much as an operational one. It belongs in your brand strategy, not in a footnote to customer support.

An imprint with no addressee

Nobody can remember being a baby. Memory is not at fault. At that time there really was no “I” that could remember anything. Yet that nameless period does not disappear. It lives on in the body, in sudden reactions without visible cause, in an anxiety that has no addressee. You cannot recognise the imprint by name. You can learn to notice its touch and stop demanding explanations it is physically unable to give.

The same holds for the buyer on the other side of your offer. Some of their hesitation has no address. You will not argue it away. You can give it something steady to lean on, and in a market that has learned to expect sudden change, a company that stays steady is offering something rare.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Russian version of this article on belokrylovo.ru: Почему никто не помнит себя младенцем: это неслучайно