NIBBLED TO DEATH BY DUCKS

When I was part of the founding faculty of the new high school in Heart Butte, we were willing to take risks and experiment. After dinner late enough in fall to be dark early but before the snows started, another teacher and I took a sack of doughnuts out to do family visits. After blundering around on the webwork of two-tracks among the various small ranches, we found the first one and spent a hilarious couple of hours telling stories and being surprised.

After that the administration forbade us to ever do it again. They said people would be insulted by our gift of pastry and they worried that we might come to harm. In fact, we were discovering a truth: adults out there in the foothills were intent on presenting themselves as normal, responsible, and achieving. The kids wanted to tell the truth and for the school to do something about their troubles. Going to homes was too revealing.

The story I told earlier was really about a child forced to drive though they were barely able to reach the pedals or see over the steering wheel. In the real version she was a girl whose mother was drunk. They were in a snowstorm beginning to be a blizzard. Years afterward the girl told the story privately but urgently. She was proud of having gotten them home safe.

Nibbled to death by ducks is a phrase meant to describe afflictions not as serious as being shot at in combat or caught in a burning house, but nevertheless a series of small afflictions that in the end result in major catastrophe, at least inside one’s own psyche. Developmental Trauma Disorder” by Bessel A. van der Kolk, MD., is meant to describe what often happens to children. They feel we do not give these worries enough attention.

Here is a list from this essay. (With translations)

Complex disruptions of affective regulation.

(Being unable to calm down or prevent recurring disappointment.)

Disturbed attachment patterns.

(Something or someone highly valued is removed.)

Rapid behavioral regressions and shifts in emotional states

(Going back to baby ways.)

Loss of autonomous strivings.

(Having what you’re trying to do taken over by others.)

Aggressive behavior against self and others.

(Hitting, yelling, taking.)

Failure to achieve developmental competencies.

(Can’t ride a bike, can’t whistle.)

Loss of bodily regulation in the areas of sleep, food and self care.

(Can’t sleep, picky eating, throwing up, not washing.)

Altered schemas of the world.

(Finding out about others, massive changes like the pandemic.)

Anticipatory behavior and traumatic expectations.

(Not wanting change, fear of unknowns, dreading.)

Multiple somatic problems, from gastrointestinal distress to headaches.

(Stomach aches to prevent going to school.)

Apparent lack of awareness of danger and resulting self- endangering behaviors.

(Climbing too high, walking in the street.)

Self-hatred and self-blame.

(Breaking mirrors, crying with regret, withdrawal)

Chronic feelings of ineffectiveness.

(Giving up, begging for help.)

Everyone should be able to realize they’ve felt the above forces now and then. Most people are not dominated by them and move on. But cumulatively or in great numbers, these are signs of small trauma that disproportionally afflict small children. especially in poor isolated communities.

Some Big Person traumas are so drastic that they must be addressed. We all speak of PTSD as though we knew people who have it, because many probably do. But we don’t make allowance for kids and their fusses. On the other hand we confine diagnoses like “defiant obstinacy disorder” to kids and respond to it with force, as has long been the major way of handling kid upsets. We say adults who are defiant and rebellious are just bad people.

One major response on the part of a child is dissociation, a word that describes something not well understood except that it clearly happens when a person is tortured, shocked, or subjected to major danger. It’s described as a feeling of unreality, of being on another planet. It seems to be related to split personalities, where the brain invents a completely different but parallel persona.

Something like this happens to a child with many small traumas, none of which individually is seen as remarkable. They are cumulative. The result can be a delinquent, a sociopath, a criminal, a misfit, a neurotic, or even a psychotic. This is not what usually happens. But particularly in a time of intense displaced reality in movies, TV and social media, a growing person can have a weak attachment to the larger community.

In the past I’d always believed I had lived a “normal” life with a few unpleasant sides to it. One was that my brothers considered themselves a partnership opposed to me and were supported in this by my parents. Another was that at some point I was labeled high achieving and expected to always do well, no matter the cost, though it was part of what made me an oddball and vulnerable. Terror at falling short meant screaming, storming melt-downs with no inquiry or reassurance. My “double” identity was mild. funny, and obedient at school and a self-isolating guarded person at home, separating myself from my family with a locked bedroom door and a pile of books.

I considered running away or suicide, which no one took seriously and which was always secret. Both my brothers had suicidal thoughts but didn’t act on them. One did risky things — hunting rattlesnakes in the desert on a motorcycle — and the other did bland safe things — working in a library. This is not unique — it’s what many families are like.

Later in life no counselor or authority figure ever got close to understanding all this, but then I didn’t give them the information they needed in order to figure it out. Cousins, their spouses and children, got into more trouble than I did — alcoholism, autism, gambling, even insanity — but they believed the fantasy that we were somehow displaced landed gentry from Scotland and therefore immune to bad behavior. We were special.

For a while I followed the idea that genetics had something to do with it. I had been told I was oversensitive. There were stories about an unreasonable and hot-tempered great-grandfather, but no one reported my grandmother’s thyroid condition (goiter) from lack of iodine on the prairie or her mental breakdown partly because of it. No one reported her sister running off with a bounder and dying in childbirth, presumably with the infant also dying. Her brother was alcoholic.

On the other side was a great grandmother who died in childbirth but that baby was saved. A step-great-grandmother took a dislike to this very young girl whose mother had just died and subjected her to the list of traumas above. There was another alcoholic brother. In another generation was the clearly psychotic uncle everyone claims never existed.

In short, no one on either side of my family had the kind of loving, idyllic, supportive family that’s portrayed in the media. Our Dick-and-Jane primary school readers ever hinted that Father lost his temper or Mother spent too much money. Spot never bit anyone and no one was allergic to Puff. We pretend. Primary school primarily taught us what we were supposed to be like.

The class that considers themselves “middle”, decent, conscientious, and caring nevertheless perpetuates enough of these duck-nibbles to produce a citizens full of fear, hate and envy — without any admitted hint that it’s happening. The nibbling ducks of worry, being out-of-sync, prey to unreasonable adults, out of focus, can destroy a culture that was never quite real anyway.