THE BRAIN NEST

When I was a child in NE Portland, Ainsworth was just a street, blocks away and for some reason wider than the others, with a center strip of lawn, a boulevard, kind of sinister in the way that “special” things might be unique, valuable, and therefore guarded.  Today in my old age and far away, Ainsworth is still is a word meant to be neutral but has sinister overtones for me, because it is the name of a woman who devised a test of human attachment that carries her name the Ainsworth Strange Situation Procedure.  It sounds callous and sinister to me, since the essence of it is scaring a child and seeing how they react, then deducing from that how properly attached they are.

In the past I’ve been labeled “borderline” when borderline was a favorite junk definition from people who couldn’t quite put their finger on the problem or even quite why it was a problem.  Borderline diagnosed people are judged by the edge of their identity and how it seems to others.  Attachment theory is internal, central, and unseen in the structure of the brain connectome.  I’m much better described in terms of attachment style.  I’ll explain.

I was only and first child of people who grew up on farms but aspired to urban culture.  They married late.  We lived in a neighborhood that was once a small town (Albina) and kept some of its characteristics.  The street went from Prescott where my cousin lives now, down to Alberta along NE 15th as it descended the hill, passed Killingsworth (even more dangerous street, than Ainsworth) and on down to Columbia Blvd along the Columbia River.  I think but cannot verify that a classmate lived on Ainsworth and had a mother who went “crazy” though no one would explain.

“Ainsworth is a surname with its origins in the Northwest of England. The origin of the word Ainsworth is from the Anglo-Saxon word 'worth' meaning an ‘Enclosure'.”  I hear this as “one’s own worth” — how to figure what that is?  Something like reputation or more about value in a job?  Or is it human relationship? 

My child-enclosure was the limit of how far I was supposed to go on foot, though every time it snowed a bit (not often in those days) a friend and I would take off roaming down the hill and end up near the river, having to phone home for a rescue by car because we were cold and wet.  Our caretakers always came for us so we grew confident.  When older I sometimes walked down that way to the Oregon Humane Society and then walked back home. 

After I had left, this modest territory became black and then criminalized and then returned to respectabiiity through art, gays, Latinos, and eating places.  Waves of population moved through, using mostly the same structures.  Under it all was the trolley rail system that once ran down Alberta and over the Willamette River.  Under that was a path made by indigenous people and wildlife visiting the river.  The people of each phase saw the same place differently.  Thus territory carries culture, including animal culture, both with internal maps.

The territory of attachment is virtual — it is not concrete.  You can’t see it — it’s only a “thing” because it has been conceived and named and because experience validates it.  This virtual territory is a field or space that first develops between the infant and care-giver face to face.  In a place where time and change happen slowly and the culture fits, the child or cub or kitten grows up secure and confident.  So is the caregiver.

We are witnessing enormous disruptions that prevent people feeling secure or, nastily, can make that a path to destruction when they try to prevent change.  It helps to know one’s attachment type.  Ainsworth identified three main attachment styles, secure (type A), insecure avoidant (type B) and insecure ambivalent/resistant (type C)  The latter is basically Obstinate Defiant or ODD -- opposing without leaving. The fourth recent addition has been necessary because of our present worldwide conditions:  disorganized/ disoriented (type D) is produced by “deterritorializing”  ¥ou don’t know where you are, what is under your feet or which direction to go.  This could be actual or metaphorical.

"Formally, deterrritorialisation is the severance of social, political, or cultural practices from their native places and populations."  Migration, invasion, war, famine, climate change.

https://culturenet.wordpress.com/2008/03/06/deterritorialization-and-reterritorialization/

“The terms deterritorialization and reterritorialization are used to characterize a constant process of transformation, according to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Deterritorialization is the process in which to undo what has already been done. To take control away from places that have already been established. Where “articulations are disarticulated”, an example presented by Slack and Wise. Then reterritorialization usually follows. And this is the process to re-do what has been undone to what has already been done. Except this time, the act of re-doing is to incorporate new power.” 

My attachment style is disorganized/disoriented.  The story of “Indian” reservations is obviously and exactly this situation so it feels familiar.  Marrying in a progressive time, my father’s sibs had agreed that a person should have only two children, replacements in a crowded world.  But my family accidentally had three, due to impulse, bad calculations or the failure of the secret shipment of condoms (illegal in those days) to arrive.  Abortion was not an option. That changed the territory.

When I suggested the surprise of this baby as a realistic fact, my cousins — each in a family of two children — reacted as though I were talking about abortion which is a subtraction and as though an extra baby was always welcome.  But it meant that the family finances and the size of the house was never quite enough.  Not a real hardship, but extra stress and maybe confused strategies.

My mother had been a successful working girl in a small town, but now she was stretched to her limits and not quite familiar to her environment.  My father was a traveling man, mostly on the road.  She set me apart from her two sons as a way of survival — but then pulled me back in as an extension of herself, another way of survival.  A bit confused.

If the boys were happy and things were going well, I was welcome.  If not, I was pushed away.  Luckily, she let me read because she wished she had been able to and because then I holed up out of the way.  Unluckily, she never could shake the social demand that all women must have proper weddings, meaning absolutely obedient, and passed that on to me.  Luckily she was never abused -- just neglected.

At forty during a siege of therapy for the sake of being a minister, the counselor forgot my appointment and had left, locking me out.  I sat on her porch and wept in an internal storm that was very helpful to dissect.

In 1944 kindergarten was half-days, but first grade was day-long.  On the first day of school that year I carried a packed lunch but misunderstood the teacher’s instructions and went home for lunch as I used to.  At home the door was locked.  Everyone was gone.  I sat on the stoop and wept.  Finally I remembered my lunch and ate it, in the process smashing a ripe tomato all over my face and chin.  

Then my mother and pre-school brothers showed up and saw what looked like the result of a bloody accident or an attempted murder.  Uproar.  I was blamed for not doing as I was told.  That was the earliest exclusion from the family that I can remember.  It was a thread through my life, determining my disoriented/disorganized attachment style, but it was not at all conscious.