Photo of a crowd of people in 1920s attire outside a train with palm trees on the left and other trees in the background in Winter Haven, Florida. My grandfather’s family was in Florida in the 1920s, and my dad even lived in Winter Haven for a while. Public domain photo from this website.
(This post is pre-scheduled. I plan to be offline at the time of publication, and won’t see or respond to comments before November).
I suspect my dad had contact with someone with “disorganized” behaviors very early in life.
As I discussed in this post, he had a close friend, Natalie, who had a bunch of behaviors associated with disorganized attachment. Furthermore, my dad had some cousins who, based on my own recollections of hearing them speak and reading their emails… yeah, their speech sounded as if they might have disorganized attachment strategies. I can now hear in my head my mom saying “[Person] is crazy.” (I agree that particular cousin almost certainly had a mental illness.)
The IPF (Ideal Parent Figure) visualizations aimed at insecure-preoccupied I’ve tried feel utterly bizarre. My imagination just won’t go there. Acting helpless in order to get caregivers to pay attention to me, what the heck?
The exercises I’ve tried which are aimed at disorganized people were deeply resonant. Easy, but resonant.
That’s a clue.
Disorganized people find IPF exercises to be very challenging, like me trying to imagine that I’m a child with an insecure-preoccupied mindset. But someone whose attachment strategy had been very secure since birth probably wouldn’t relate to IPF exercises aimed at disorganized people at all, again, like me trying an insecure-preoccupied exercise.
This makes the most sense if I somehow have both secure and disorganized attachment programming.
***
Someone in the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) coding training asked about mixed attachment styles, since they are so common in babies and toddlers. The trainer said that no, mixed styles do not exist in adults. During childhood, mixed styles fuse into a single attachment strategy.
(Eventually, I will add footnotes to my old posts about “mixed” attachment styles to correct them).
Right now, my best guess is that if I had gone through the Strange Situation Protocol as a toddler, I would’ve been secure-with-avoidant traits around my dad and disorganized around my mom. Then, in childhood, that fused into the more functional strategy, which was my dad’s. I might belong to the 15-25% of people who have a different attachment strategy than my primary infancy caregiver (my mother).
Even if my guess is correct, I’m certain having a disorganized attachment to my mom in infancy left a lasting mark.
Such as feeling drawn towards people with (some) disorganized styles.
***
I still haven’t gone through the sources George Haas of the I Love You Keep Going podcast cites when he claims people seek relationship partners (including close friends) who offer the same “care” as their infancy-caregivers. Thus, I don’t understand all the evidence. But it makes sense.
My baby brain got the notion that my mom with severe post-partum depression who felt no bond with me was the ideal of what to look for in relationships, ha ha.
Well, not entirely. I think my baby brain loved my dad’s secure-with-dismissing-traits style just as much, if not more.
I could write a whole blog post series about how this AAI training has affected how I interpret my troubled friendship with Water Ouzel, but for now I’ll just say that I am 80% certain that if they were to take the AAI, the transcript would be classified as CC (Cannot Classify), and 70% certain that it would be U (unresolved) too. Both of those categories are “disorganized.” I got really close to the mark in this post where I ask, “Did I find my mother in Water Ouzel?”
And it’s not just them. Looking back, I have been drawn to multiple people over my life who have some behaviors associated with disorganized attachment.
***
I’ve noticed a pattern in these AAI transcripts: I feel drawn to some interviewees, and repulsed by others.
Surprisingly, one group I dislike is… insecure-dismissing. I’d treat those interviewees with respect, sure, but I wouldn’t want them in my personal life. The same is true of interviewees in insecure-preoccupied transcripts.
F3 (prototypical secure) speakers don’t appeal to me either, though I like those interviewees a bit more.
You know who I really like? The interviewees in F1/F2/F4/F5 transcripts. Not the most secure, but within the F (secure) range. As someone with F1 speech myself, it’s no surprise that I feel camaraderie with other F1 speakers. It’s the appeal of F4 and F5 speakers that’s more intriguing. The interviewee whom I could most easily see myself befriending had an F5 transcript. Secure with strong preoccupied traits.
The other group I find alluring? A few (though not) most interviewees in disorganized transcripts.
I’ve made a chart:
At the top in yellow is “F3: Unrelatable.” The second row in green is, “F1 F2 F4 F5: Cool People.” The third row in orange is “Ds (insecure dismissing) E (insecure preoccupied) Unlikable and the bottom row in red is “Cannot Classify (disorganized): Yikes” and then in the bottom right corner is red banded with green and the text “or exciting.”
So far, I haven’t read that many AAI transcripts, so maybe this pattern won’t hold. Maybe I’ll find some Ds (insecure-dismissing) or E (insecure-preoccupied) speakers likable, or find an F3 speaker I could see myself befriending, or some uncool F1/F2/F4/F5 speakers. If the pattern doesn’t persist, I might write an update.
***
If it is true, as I believe, that my dad was an F1 speaker and my mom, at the time of my birth, would’ve produced a transcript with a disorganized classification… why did they choose each other? Why did they plan to have a child (me) together? Why did they stay together for forty years?
People with secure strategies generally aren’t supposed to want to couple with those with disorganized strategies—and for that matter, most people with disorganized strategies find secure speakers unappealing too.
When I found out that my dad had a terminal diagnosis, a little girl inside me was scared, because she was going to lose the gentle giant who protected her and be left alone with her mom.
That says it all. Little girls aren’t scared of being left alone with moms who parent in a secure manner. Yet my childhood memories aren’t fearful overall, not even being home wasn’t, because when my mom did something that got me upset, I could, often enough, run to my dad for help. A secure base.
When I asked my dad about his parenting style, he said that he was hands-off, just like his own parents… except he had to be more hands-on to shield me from my mother. I haven’t gone back to the recording to double-check that he used the word “shield” but I distinctly remember that word. So yes, he also thought of himself as a protector—against my mom.
While I was learning how to score the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI), I discovered that the psychologist who coded my AAI had misclassified my transcript.
I signed an agreement to not leak any training materials for scoring the AAI. I can make general comments, such as “in order for a transcript to be classified as F (secure) it must meet certain required criteria, and an F transcript will most likely meet a bunch of non-required criteria as well.” I’m not allowed to spell out what those exact criteria are. Basically, I have to keep the transcripts themselves confidential because they came from real people, and I’m not supposed to reveal enough info to inspire someone to try coding the AAI without training.
Yeah, so the F category (secure), Ds category (insecure-dismissing), E category (insecure-preoccupied), and U category (unresolved) each have their own required criteria. If a transcript meets the required criteria for both Ds and E, it must be classified as CC (Cannot Classify). In the extremely rare situation that a transcript doesn’t meet the required criteria for the F, Ds, or E category, then it belongs in the CC category by default. (The U category must always be combined with another main category, such as U/F or U/CC).
Last year, I definitely met some of the non-required criteria for the Ds category. Including what I call “the lemonade instinct” which has a different name in the AAI scoring system but, uh, yeah that’s a non-required dismissing criterion (though I won’t explain how to identify it in speech, and I especially won’t explain how to distinguish it from a similar preoccupied speech pattern). But… I don’t meet the required Ds criteria. I never have.
Photo of a titi monkey by Matthew James Kelly – Own work, CC0, Link / Titi monkey fathers are the primary caretakers for infants, as mothers don’t do much beyond breastfeeding
For a while, I’ve figured both of my parents most likely had insecure-dismissing strategies and… I now think I was wrong.
A few days after my dad died, I read some diary entries he wrote when I was a baby. Something that immediately struck me was… he behaved in a way that leads to a child developing secure attachment. Since I doubt he received any particular training in parenting… that implies that he himself had a secure strategy.
Some things he wrote about in his diary, things that weren’t directly related to me, also didn’t seem like things someone with an insecure-dismissing strategy would say.
Then there were all the photos I went through to prepare slideshows. He looked at me with love and held me with love. This wasn’t an insecure-dismissing father.
During my dad’s illness and after his death, a bunch of people have told me they could tell that he adored me and that the two of us had a special bond. I felt that bond. I’ve felt that bond my entire life.
I arranged for my dad’s body to go through water cremation.
Today, at the funeral home, I spoke directly with the founder, who only works part-time nowadays. His son runs the place. Apparently, his son is a huge enthusiast for water cremation, which makes sense since this is one of the only two funeral homes in the entire state of California that offer this service. (Apparently the son wanted to be the first, but the other funeral “beat him to the punch” and got water cremation up and running sooner). It took a lot of work to get all the permits lined up so they could do this legally, and the son is currently talking to representatives in the California legislature to change the laws around water cremation so it will be easier for other mortuaries to take up this practice. Apparently, politicians don’t understand the issues well.
I asked the funeral home founder what he wants when it’s his turn to die, and he pointed at my dad’s urn. “That.”
Photo of a tabby cat peeks through rustic rocks in Aaqrabâte, Syria, creating a mysterious vibe, by Samer Daboul
After I said goodbye to my father’s corpse and went to the front desk of the ICU, a guy working there went into some monologue about how the atoms or something always remain and nobody is truly gone. I don’t remember the details, since it sounded trite. What I remember is that he didn’t seem to pay attention to me, an individual. He had some concept in his mind of what family members who come to visit corpses are like, and was riffing off that. It seemed to be about comforting himself or shielding himself from someone whose loved one had just died, and not to have much to do with me.
Since he works in an ICU, I’m sure he’s witnessed many deaths and interacted with many bereaved people. I’d expect someone who did this a lot professionally to be used to this and either be courteous and quiet or, if they had the mental space, to listen empathetically, but, well, maybe this is how he copes. Maybe this is how he can stay in this job.
Photo of man on a cliff’s edge enjoying a bright sunny day outdoors by João Gabriel
It’s sometimes hard to remember that the supposed social benefit of stock markets is to direct investment money towards companies with greater potential for long-term profit. For short-term profit, stock markets are actually a bad way to allocate resources, but day traders may, theoretically, contribute by increasing liquidity.
Astral Codex Ten published this essay which discusses how AI-powered algorithms are already doing better in the stock market than the vast majority of human traders, and it’s conceivable that AI will be better than all human stock-pickers in the near future. “If the trendline does keep going, things start changing quickly. Finance gets transformed first, as human stock analysts go the way of horse-drawn carriages and kerosene lamps.”
If this led to a better allocation of investments so more resources went to more socially beneficial (or at least more long-term-profitable) ventures, this would be good. But consider: why are AI-powered algorithms making more money on the stock market?
Public domain picture of fireworks at night over a bad, a hill decked in lights, and boats with spectators aboard, from PxHere
The first few days after my dad’s death were rough. I wept a lot. I wrote this blog post on the day of his death, when my grief was at its peak.
On the day of his death, my mom couldn’t even think about what to do with his remains, so it was up to me to arrange for a funeral home (we had already planned that I would do that, and my dad knew and said it was fine). She said those last days of his life were like watching a movie; she doesn’t do such things. Yet about a week ago, she said, “The worst is over. He’s dead.” Ever since, she’s seemed to be her usual self, emotionally. You’d never guess that the man she’d lived with for almost 40 years had died mere days earlier. She was like a bird who’d molted and had a full coat of new feathers.
An outsider might even think she was callous. I know she wasn’t. I witnessed the effort she put into caring for him during his illness. I remember how she behaved the day the doctors declared that his cancer was terminal.
My dissociation those first few days was milder. I never felt like it was a movie or it wasn’t me doing those things. Instead, I experienced a type of fading. There was a haze over my vision which wasn’t there before—and isn’t present now.
Last week, my father said, “If I knew I was going to die next week, this all would be easier.”
NO, DAD, DON’T SAY THAT.
His last words, addressed to me, were, “I love you. I don’t know what more there is to say.”
When I saw him the following morning, I thought I saw him breathe, though I knew that couldn’t be true. Those fingers which had held me many times felt soft. The final time I held his wrist, I felt a pulse. It was my own.
On June 30, 2026, in the Anza Vista neighborhood of the city of San Francisco, my father died.
The Notes Which Do Not Fit 