On Bats, Trauma, and Resilience
Last week, I found a bat in my washing machine. Really.
I had thrown in some old towels after my dog’s bath a few days before and must have gotten distracted. The next time I went down to do laundry, the lid was open and the tub still filled with water, along with the towels. I shut the lid and the washing machine did its thing. After the spin cycle, I went to put the towels in the dryer, and there was this little brown bat, shivering into the towels!
Images of my last indoor bat encounter of the close kind flashed through my mind. Several decades ago, a bat flew into my bedroom one night. I screamed, yelled, waved my arms, grabbed a broom, threw dirty clothes at it, and then lay trembling in bed, cursing my bad luck and new role as sole protector of my sleeping children. Finally, after what seemed like hours, it found its way out through the window I had left open.
This time, I talked gently to my bat, and tried to figure out how to help the poor thing. I held first a box, and then a wire bird feeder inside the tub, hoping she would be able to climb it like a ladder (no, this did not work!). I opened the basement door so she could smell the fresh air. I watched as the little bat struggled to climb up the metal walls of the machine, her claws trying to grasp the holes, and then as she slid back to the wet towels. Again and again, she tried, until at last she flew out, right past the open door, and clung to a cupboard near the furnace. I reminded her where the open door was (helpful, huh?!), put in another load of laundry, and left. When I came back a while later, the little bat was gone. I closed the outside door.
I mused about the trauma that the little bat must have experienced: suddenly being swept into a swirling tub of water and (biodegradable!)suds, clinging to the rotating tub as it vibrated and spun through the wash cycle. And yet somehow, she survived, and persistently worked her way back to home and safety. THAT is resilience!
I thought, too, about the children who come into our classrooms, still spinning from whatever ACES (Adverse Childhood Experiences) they’re living. Some tremble in a frightened heap, but others come in loud and thrashing and ready to claw their way their way out.
How can we help these kids build the same kind of protective resilience that my little bat displayed? Research tells us that there are three main protective factors for resilience: attachment, initiative and self-regulation. Could my little resilient bat have come to teach me more about these?
With Little Bat #1, who was, truth be told, probably also a bit traumatized, I pretty much blew it. Forget attachment: no way my yelling and fierceness could have been perceived as anything THAT bat could trust or want to be around! Initiative? Absolutely not: swiping a broom at him to shove him out the window took away any ideas he might have had about how to get out (like…maybe the same way he came in???). As for self-regulation: I don’t know much about bats’ emotions, but that bat’s swooping and squeaking and diving from ceiling to floor as I tried to regulate it right out of my life didn’t seem much under his control to me!
Of course, my calmness helped with the attachment in last week’s Little Bat #2. A soft voice, and kind demeanor makes any of us feel less threatened, which is a pre-requisite for healthy attachments.
I also respected the little bat’s initiative: OK…so I thought my idea about offering her the wire suet cage was kind of brilliant since bats use their claws to climb BUT when she didn’t grab onto the idea, I let it go, too. And because I did, she figured it out herself.
Although I’m sure she was scared, of both her ride through the spin cycle and the giantess hovering around her, Little Bat #2 demonstrated remarkable self-regulation. Without a lot of flapping or fluttering, she flew to a place where she could get warmer and drier and groom and collect her wits. And when SHE was ready, she went about her business. I gave her the space to put the SELF back into self-regulation (here’s a great blog on the topic if you want to read more).
Thank you, Little Bat, for reminding me that resilience, whether for bats or young children, can emerge from what researcher Ann Masten calls “Ordinary Magic.” This is the magic that our children need and want most of all as they move from adversity to happily ever aftering.
(Little Bat print courtesy of New York Public Library Digital Collection, a great collection that is in the public domain!)
