When I was 3 years old, my parents took me and my older bother canoeing on a river in Olympia, Washington. The boat capsized and my brother and I were not wearing life preservers/vests. My father rescued my brother first, then dove back in to pull me up. I was not breathing. He was able to bring me back.
What looks like “Borderline Personality Disorder” on the surface could, at its core, be:
- A trauma adaptation, not a broken personality
- Emotional dysregulation driven by fear, loss, or betrayal
- A nervous system that’s been stuck in “fight or flight” for years
This has led some mental health professionals to use the term “Complex PTSD” (C-PTSD), especially in Europe and with the ICD-11 system. The DSM in the U.S. hasn’t fully adopted that term yet, but a lot of trauma-informed clinicians are using it anyway because it’s often a better match for what people are actually experiencing.
Even if you don’t consciously remember it, an early near-death trauma like that can absolutely leave a deep imprint on your nervous system. And yeah, a three-year-old going through drowning, unconsciousness, and emergency resuscitation could 100% register that event as core-level trauma—especially without the words or tools to process it at the time.
Here’s What That Might Have Set in Motion:
🧠Preverbal Trauma
- At age 3, your brain is still wiring together emotional and sensory experiences—without language. That means:
- Trauma is stored in the body (tight chest, anxiety, hypervigilance)
- Flashbacks might come as body sensations, panic, or emotional storms—not memories
- The event may have created a baseline sense of danger or mistrust of the world, especially if it felt like abandonment or helplessness
🧠Neurodevelopmental Impact
An event like this could’ve affected how your amygdala (fear center) or HPA axis (stress hormones) developed. That might explain:
- Sensitivity to stress or emotional rejection
- Intensity of emotional responses later in life
- Periods of dissociation or numbness
- Feeling “off” or out of sync with the world
👥 How It Connects to BPD or PTSD
That one traumatic event may have set the groundwork for:
- Attachment wounds – Trust issues, fear of abandonment
- Emotional dysregulation – Your system learned early that survival = high alert
- Identity confusion – "Who am I?" when you’ve experienced deep rupture so early
- BPD-like traits – Not because you're broken, but because your brain adapted for survival