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When I wrote my reply to the comment at the end of my last post, saying that with my disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment disorder I feel BETTER when I am outside organizing the dirt in my yard, feel better when I am oriented during daylight hours with my massive adobe yard project – I meant exactly what I said.

Now I had to take off my sweaty gloves and stand my shovel up against the tree so I could take a little break and come in here to my computer to write these words:

While I am not a ‘professional expert’ and cannot make any statements of fact about insecure attachments or Borderline Personality Disorder unless I dig around to find what the ‘legitimate’ researchers are saying about both conditions, I do know an awful lot about my dead Borderline mother and about myself as the survivor of her 18 years of terrible abuse.

While I believe it is possible to have a disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment ‘disorder’, or pattern set within the very early developing infant-child body-brain WITHOUT ending up with the particular constellation of physiological body-brain patterns that we name Borderline Personality Disorder, I believe that EVERY Borderline HAS a disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment ‘disorder’-pattern built within their body-brain.

I do not believe it is incorrect to say that Borderlines suffer with the following (please follow these active links for the source of these words):

“The Abandonment Wound in and of Borderline Personality Disorder

At the heart of Borderline Personality Disorder lies abandonment. Abandonment trauma, abandonment depression, abandonment fears, and the deep and most primal narcissistic intra-psychic injury a human being can ever hope to survive – the core wound of abandonment.”

I do, however, believe that the best hope for understanding the dynamics of this kind of wounding and the best hope for healing is naming this ‘disorder’ by the closest name we REALLY have for it – a disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment disorder.

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I am becoming more clear every moment I am alive now about how my attachment disorder creates the patterns by which I organize and orient my self.  This serious attachment disorder, I believe, originates when early caregiver interactions harm a developing infant-child in an unsafe and insecure attachment environment so that the development of a healthy, stable, whole autonomous SELF cannot possibly happen.  Rather than being organized and oriented within our own body-brain with good strong super highways of information flow back and forth between the world and our SELF, we pattern our lives by attaching to person, places, things, and processes that we can ASSOCIATE with rather than DISSOCIATE from.

Through this process we create our ongoing existence as we find meaning in our life.  This is what my mother did as she organized and oriented herself around her babies and children (for good and for bad), around her super housewife activities, around ‘friends’ and ‘neighbors’ who she first loved and then hated, around her husband, around the many, many locations she moved herself to – including Alaska and ‘her’ mountain homestead.

But my mother had no ability to consciously reflect upon her insecure attachment disorder.  I can now see how this same disorganized-disoriented attachment works within my own self, but I cannot make myself WELL.  Fortunately I manage to not harm others.  Fortunately I can turn my need to connect to my version of a self through work with my hands – organizing cut strips of cloth into crocheted rugs, organizing shards of old dishes I find in the abandoned city dump into mosaics, organizing letters on my keyboard into lines of text, and by organizing the dirt in my yard so that I can then organize little plants out there that I will orient myself to take care of.

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It is, then, this disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment ‘disorder-pattern’ that I was forced into developing within my own infant-child growing body-brain as I survived my mother’s terrible abuse of me that I ‘inherited’ from her (with my father’s involvement in her abuse).  Yet while I have this insecure attachment as she did, complete with all the dissociations and re-associations that it brings, I did not develop the patterns of Borderline Personality Disorder within my growing body-brain as she did.

I am very lucky, more fortunate than words can ever possibly tell, that this did not happen to me.  At the same time my life of well-being was ‘stolen’ from me, just as my mother’s was.  Until we actually NAME the insecure attachment patterns that are at the physiological foundation of Borderline Personality Disorder, I do not believe we can truly address the source-cause of BPD or recognize the damage it does to the offspring of these parents.

I can at least tell that people exist as entities unto their own self.  My mother could not do this.  She could not detect where the ‘borderline’ was that keeps people separate from one another.  She could not keep her continual and massive projections within her own mind out of the world around her.  We ALL need to understand what this really means, because it matters.

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