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The Notes Which Do Not Fit | thoughts I do not want to keep in my head
I was curious what picture WordPress’s AI image generation feature would make based on this blog post. I tried it six times, and this is my favorite (I won’t do this often since I’m concerned about energy usage)
As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, my dad seems to have a dismissive attachment style, especially based on how he answers questions about his childhood, but also, a lot of his behavior. My best guess is that he would be either A1 or A2 in the Dynamic Maturational Model since he grew up in a safe environment.
Unlike many people with a dismissive attachment style, he remembers quite a few things that happened to him before the age of twelve. His parents are absent in his memories, and he rarely remembers things that made him feel bad. Though, in a conversation, he brought up one childhood incident where he was upset and his mom was there, albeit without much detail.
When someone is upset (specifically me, and especially when I was younger), he soothes by… telling me, or whoever, to stop feeling it. He does it gently and with a kind intention, and he’ll validate the negative emotion to a degree, but yeah, he tells people to suppress their bad feelings in order to feel better. It’s a lot more subtle than telling someone to shut up or that their emotions don’t matter, but it’s still dismissive.
According to my Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) report, I have a mixed dismissive / secure attachment style. For adults, I don’t know of anything other than the AAI, which can detect a mixed style. None of the questionnaires/quizzes/etc. are designed to account for such a possibility. Though, to be fair, I did stumble on one quiz somewhere which placed attachment style on a spectrum based on a zillion questions, and it put me smack on the line between secure and insecure (it didn’t distinguish between different insecure styles).
Conducting AAIs is expensive, and so are the methods for detecting mixed styles in children. Most attachment research is based on cheaper assessments, which means not many studies are done on mixed attachment styles.
The Routledge Handbook of Attachment: Assessment includes the chapter “Assessing Attachment in Families: Beyond the Dyads” by Rudi Dallos about attachment style in triads of two caregivers and one child. Attachment researchers had hypothesized that children of one secure + one insecure caregiver would have secure attachment. Not so. The most common style of such children was mixed secure/insecure.
Furthermore, observation of children who had caregivers with two different attachment styles revealed that many switched attachment strategy depending on which caregiver was present. If the children had been assessed based on only a single caregiver, the observers would’ve never seen that these children had a second attachment style.
This photo was taken in Jinguashi, the same town where the photo in this blog’s banner was taken. Photo by weichen_kh and under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic license.
I remember my time in Taiwan as one of my happiest periods. Yet, weirdly, it was the first time I had such a dearth of confidants.
By ‘confidant’ I mean someone who you feel safe getting very vulnerable and honest with, including some of your most private experiences. A confidant can be a family member, a friend, a romantic partner, a teacher, a therapist, or someone else. I wouldn’t say I had absolutely zero access to people I trusted enough to confide in when I really needed to, but… yeah, it was unhealthy.
I am bummed that my sleep efficiency is too low for me to increase my time in bed for the first week of the year. I’m tempted to increase my sleep time anyway, but… I’m keeping my eye on my long-term goal. I know that I’m more likely to reduce insomnia in the long run if I go through sleep restriction slowly and consolidate my sleep as much as possible before I spend more time in bed.
Now I’m thinking more than ever about why I’ve had chronic insomnia for so long.
Public domain picture by Linnaea Mallette of what my sleep-deprived mind feels like
About a week ago, I started implementing cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia based on a workbook. Only after I began did I realize that this is a program for multiple weeks of sleep deprivation.
It’s a tax. Gotta go through worse sleep to get to good sleep. Bleh.
In a letter Sugar Finny wrote to her psychiatrist, she said, “Anyway, I thought I’d try to be constructive about it and started to read the letters of Sigmund Freud… The book reveals (though I am not sure anyone’s love-letters should be published) that he wasn’t a stiff!”
That sentence gave me pause. Here I was, reading a published collection of Sugar Finny’s private notes and letters. Technically, there were no love letters, but she wrote private notes about love, and I doubt she would’ve been comfortable publishing letters she sent to her mental healthcare providers either. The legal heir and owner of Sugar Finny’s personal items consented to publication, but, still, I felt a bit of unease.
Though Sugar Finny died before I was born, after reading these notes and letters, I feel I know Sugar Finny in a way I don’t know most people in my life. I rarely get to see other people’s private thoughts like this, the ones they never intended to share.
Why the name “Sugar Finny”?
Sugar Finny had many names. She was given one name on her birth certificate, which might’ve been misspelled, and her name is inconsistent in her childhood documents, as if even her guardians weren’t sure what her real name was. As an adult, she took on a different name, and then yet another name. That was in public. In private among friends, she gave herself many nicknames. In one note, she uses the pronoun ‘we,’ as if each nickname represented a different person. Out of all these, “Sugar Finny” is my favorite, so that’s what I’m calling her.
Wait, Sugar Finny was ace?
Going into this collection, I had no idea that Sugar Finny might be ace, or anything other than heterosexual. Then I found this in a note she wrote as a teenager (note: I am preserving her spelling errors):
Beneath all the scientific, geographical, and social data, beneath all the words and rhetoric, John Wesley Powell’s message to the people of the United States was simple: we must shape society to fit the land we live in, because the land shapes us whether we like it or not. Such an obvious principle, almost tautological, yet so many Americans ignored him, attacked him, and the U.S. government ultimately went against him—which caused much suffering and loss of life among Americans. As pretty much every twentieth and twenty-first century scholar who has studied Powell’s work has said, our nation is permanently less wealthy, less stable, and less democratic than if we had implemented Powell’s policies.
A plum blossom against the background of my fingers in November
This year, San Francisco had a second spring. Probably because we had a cold spell in summer, followed by sudden heat. Many plants flowered a second time this autumn. Including my plum tree.
September was when I first noticed the blossoms. Not the spectacular show I get in spring, but any flowers was weird. I saw a few blossoms as late as early November.
Then the fruit came.
A couple of red fruits on a bare branch with many leaves missing with an partly clouded sky in the backgroundContinue reading →
The Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) is the most reliable way to measure an adult’s attachment style. As far as I can find, there are only two methods that reliably increase attachment security as measured by before-and-after AAIs: transference-focused therapy (TFT) and the ideal parent figure (IPF) protocol.
That leaves the IPF protocol. Which is also expensive, whether you do it with a licensed psychotherapist or a coach/facilitator, and is almost never covered by insurance. But there are plenty of free and cheap recorded IPF sessions out there.
This BPD Bunch episode about relationship boundaries is useful even if nobody in your life has BPD. Setting boundaries is a form of love, they say, that shows that you care enough about a relationship to keep it healthy. Since all the speakers have been diagnosed with BPD, they’ve all had relationships which lacked boundaries. They used to believe that lack proved how much they loved the other person, but while they recovered from BPD, they realized it wasn’t love, it was fear.
One speaker, Mo, talks about how she learned to respect other people’s boundaries before she learned to set boundaries for herself. Another speaker, Xannie, talks about how even when she didn’t set boundaries, they still existed, and she had strong reactions when the boundaries she wasn’t fully aware of were crossed.
When I started learning more about attachment theory, I assumed I’d put up boundaries because of my dismissive-avoidant style. Since then, I have learned that people with the milder subtypes of dismissive-avoidant attachment usually handle boundaries alright, but the further away someone’s dismissive subtype is from security, the more boundary issues. My boundaries didn’t come from DA logic, but from secure logic.
Water Ouzel once asked for my perspective on an interaction they had with one of their other friends. This was my interpretation of the screenshots Water Ouzel shared with me.
[The “friend” sets an explicit boundary.]
[Water Ouzel violates it.]
[The “friend” acts completely out of proportion and does something totally unacceptable, at least ten times worse than Water Ouzel’s violation of their boundary.]
[Water Ouzel remains “friends” with them???!!!]
Water Ouzel claimed that their “friend” made a sincere apology, and yes, I generally agree that we should give friends an opportunity to apologize and make amends but… it still creeped me out that Water Ouzel was willing to remain friends with someone who had mistreated them like that. Even if a friend apologized to me for acting like that, I would remain wary of them for a long time. And given the way that Water Ouzel’s “friend” behaved later, it seems to me that maybe the apology hadn’t been sincere.
It also concerned me that Water Ouzel had violated someone’s explicit boundary. I told them so, and they agreed that, yes, violating that boundary was a mistake. Nobody had violated my boundaries, so… I let the friendship continue.
The Notes Which Do Not Fit 