The Education of Will

by Patricia B. McConnell

  I began to see Willie as not so much my therapy dog but the reason I needed therapy myself.

  • • • • •

  On the darkest night of that dark time, I lay on the rug, stroking Willie’s belly and wishing I hadn’t kept him. I hadn’t signed up for a dog like Willie. His happy face could open my heart, but his look of cold rage could chill my blood. His cuddly nature bathed me in sweet peace, but he could destroy it all in a second by scrambling up in a panic, sending me to the ceiling and keeping me on edge for the rest of the night.

  It was time to face the facts: Willie was not just exhausting me; he was bringing up issues that I thought I’d buried and forgotten years ago.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  It was late summer 1966. My best friend in high school, Clarisse, and I had enrolled in modeling school. She had gorgeous long legs and a mane of strikingly red hair. I had short, stumpy legs and a thicket of bleached-blond hair, but I got offered a few jobs through the school, including one for an upcoming convention.

  A dozen of us teenage-model wannabes had been hired to introduce an auto company’s newest cars by prancing like fillies as they rolled onto center stage. I was fifteen and dolled up like a cheerleader in a butt-high red skirt and tight blouse. We were all carrying pom-poms and rehearsing in a coliseum-like building, clustered in a small circle in the middle of an oval arena, miniaturized by the thousands of empty seats rising around us to the top of the building. I worried that my hair would frizz and that the pimple on my chin was not adequately covered with pancake makeup. The girl next to me had perfect skin and lush black hair that she would shake out of her face every few seconds. I narrowed my eyes as she repeated for the fourth time, “What did he say?”

  The stage manager had been giving us instructions, looking at his clipboard more often than at us. “Run over here,” he said. “Walk over there. Shake your pom-poms. Can you toss your hair a little bit?” The girl with creamy skin flicked her head, tossing her hair. “Yeah, like that,” he said.

  He kept talking while we circled around him, trying to catch what he was saying before his words drifted away into the vast open space around us. The only other sounds came from the technicians, who were setting up lights on the catwalk five stories above, occasionally calling to each other.

  The two girls across the circle from me had begun giggling at a private joke when someone yelled, “Watch out!” The stage manager grabbed the girl in front of me and pulled her backward. Simultaneously, a life-size dummy fell through the air right above where she had been standing. I clearly remember thinking, That’s not funny. It had to be a practical joke. My mind was unable to identify the lumpy thing falling through the air as a person. It took a second or two, after he landed just a few feet in front of me, to understand that it wasn’t a dummy—it was a living human being.

  He hit parallel to the ground, flat on his belly, legs and arms extended. His clothes and his body split upon impact like a watermelon dropped on the pavement. My eyes went first to the split at the back of his jeans, exposing his bright white underwear. My first reaction was embarrassment. I thought, the sentence clear as a scalpel’s edge years later, It’s okay, mister, don’t be embarrassed; we won’t look at your underwear. It did not occur to me that split pants were not the primary problem. Then I saw that his arms were bare, and they were split open, too. As my brain began to comprehend what was happening, he raised his head and made a gurgling sound. And then he put his head down and died.

  Red. Fresh-flowing blood is shockingly red. An expanding fan of it grew from underneath his hips and thighs. The blood spread out in perfect symmetry, flowing fast, a brilliant red triangle between his legs. One of the girls ran over and held his hand, cradled his forehead. Most of us stood transfixed and mute. Helpless.

  Within minutes we were herded away, toward the outskirts of the arena. I found a pay phone by a shuttered hot dog stand and groped through my purse for a dime. As it dropped into the coin slot, I heard the wail of an approaching siren.

  “Mom? Mom, can you come get me now?”

  “What’s wrong?” she asked. I wasn’t expected to call for a ride home for hours.

  “A man fell. I think he’s dead. There’s blood everywhere. Please can you come and get me now?” I went outside and sat on a cement step to wait for her, sweating in the sun, staring at the empty parking lot.

  The next day, my parents and I read an article about it in the newspaper over the bacon and eggs my mother made every morning. A thirty-seven-year-old electrician, married with two children, had fallen fifty-eight feet to his death. We spoke his name and thought with sympathy of his wife and two children. We never talked about it after that; it never occurred to us to do so. I willed myself to forget about it, so that it wouldn’t ever bother me again.

  • • • • •

  But of course it did. Willie’s hyperactive startle response made me recognize my own response to things happening “out of the blue.” His behavior made me worse, but it also forced me to admit that seeing a man fall out of the sky and die at my feet had created a continuous warning light in my brain. And that signal couldn’t be turned off with willpower alone.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Once a man has fallen out of the sky and died at your feet, your brain stays ready for it to happen again. Willie’s reactivity, and my need to react instantly to keep him still and allow him to recover, made me more anxious and fearful than I’d ever been. Many of the fears from which I thought I’d recovered had come back. My startle response had been reset to PANIC. I was having a recurring nightmare that I was standing powerless on a cliff as Willie’s uncle Luke fell to his death into a roaring river. Every day as I drove home from the office, I would imagine that the house and the dogs inside had burned to ashes. I would blink and shake my head to try to dispel the image, but it would not leave me until I arrived home at night, gulping air in relief to find the house still standing.

  I froze if someone directed a snarky comment at me. I snapped at Jim or the staff in my office when I got frustrated or frazzled. My “best self” became harder to find—it seemed I was either going mute and freezing in the face of disagreements, or I was saying something I later regretted. I willed myself to be the person I wanted to be, the person everyone else expected me to be. Much of the time I succeeded, and I adapted to being jumpy, sleep-deprived, and exhausted. But not always. Not often enough.

  I was spent. My emotional pockets empty, I had nothing in reserve. Willie had done remarkably well with his restrictions, but a young, exercise-impoverished border collie is like a car with its engine gunning and the brake on. If you don’t engage the tires at some point, smoke starts coming out of the pipes. Yet the vets continually reminded me that just one quick movement could destroy all the effort we’d put in so far. “One quick movement” was Willie’s middle name.

  I startled every time he began to move too fast; I felt as if disaster could strike any moment. I had become so tightly wired that I was the one who jumped first at the slightest noise.

  I was tired of teaching him tricks, of trying to keep his mind engaged, of always being ready to anticipate the next leap. Even after all our training, Willie’s fear of unfamiliar dogs was extreme. Sometimes it escalated to a chilling level of out-of-control rage. We were making good progress—he was now comfortable seeing other dogs unless they surprised him and came too close too fast—but each step forward took time, patience, and energy. He still overreacted to even the smallest stimulus and was fearful of loud noises or strange shapes.

  His challenges to my other dogs over resources had decreased but required constant vigilance. Though he responded well when male visitors threw him treats, I managed his interactions with them obsessively, lest something go wrong and Willie’s fear should increase instead of decrease. His digestive system had improved with age, but I had to feed him with obsessive care. He needed Chinese medicine, probiotics, certain kinds of protein, like beef or pork, but not others (heaven forbid I fed
him chicken), chiropractic care, three Western-medicine veterinarians, and constant training and conditioning.

  • • • • •

  Now it was my turn to seek help. As Willie lay at my feet, I called my staff into my office and explained that life with him had become so difficult that I needed advice about what to do next. Spending my days helping clients with dogs who generated lawsuits or cats who put grandmothers in the hospital is not an easy job. Seeking advice about behavior problems in pets is often couched as the trivial pursuit of neurotics done only by the overly entitled. But canine behavior problems can be serious. Life-and-death serious. Wondering if your dog, the one who was your best friend before you got married, is going to bite your three-year-old son is not a trivial question. Living in fear of a hundred-pound dog who has begun stalking you is not something you can ignore. I hadn’t known how much my clients’ emotional pain and suffering would come home with me every night, like cigarette smoke on my clothing. And when I arrived, there would be my Willie, whose behavioral problems needed a week’s worth of physical and emotional energy every evening.

  My colleagues listened intently, and one of them said: “Trisha, I know you love Willie, but he has been a nightmare ever since you got him. You work hard every day solving serious behavioral problems; you don’t need to go home and begin all over again. Look at you! You’re exhausted. That’s not fair to you, to him, or to your other dogs.”

  As a result of our discussion, I made the following plan: I would keep him until his shoulder was fully healed, doing all I could to treat his behavioral problems in the meantime. At that point, I’d reassess how it was going and either keep him or find him a better home. Of course, the question arose: What home would that be? Who would want a dog like Willie? I’d deal with that later if I had to.

  The discussion was thoughtful, objective, and familiar, like the talks I had with clients every week. Sometimes owners had to face the fact that a dog was so dangerous it was a public health menace. Other owners had to acknowledge that, as much as they loved their dog, she could never be happy living in fear of a toddler pulling her tail, or in terror of another dog who stalked her through the house like an armed serial killer.

  It helped to hear my staff’s professional objectivity. But this time it was me and my dog we were talking about. I felt sick to my stomach. How could I even think about not keeping Willie? The dog who moaned when he pressed his head against my neck; whose happy face could only be described as radiant. When Willie was good, he was very, very good, and by now I loved him as much as I’d ever loved any dog. But at his worst, he seemed miserable, living his life on the edge of terror, quick to fall into a rage so extreme he seemed crazy.

  I didn’t have any of the barriers to effective treatments that my clients had. I knew how to condition dogs to assuage their fear of loud noises; I taught people to do it on a regular basis. Willie’s health-related problems were exhausting and expensive but not insurmountable. I had access to the best veterinary care in the country. I’d literally written the book on how to handle a dog who was aggressive to other dogs. I had a raft of dog-loving friends who were happy to introduce their dogs to Willie, or to teach him that unfamiliar men were harbingers of toys and treats instead of fear and danger. I’d seen hundreds of dogs who had caused serious injuries to people or other animals. One client had stitched up a long gash in her own forearm herself, afraid that if she got medical care, her dog would be taken away from her. Willie had never hurt anyone.

  But there was something else—something that I hadn’t allowed myself to talk about. I was just as jumpy as Willie. While his reactivity set me off, I knew that my own startle response did the same to him. We were living in a vicious circle, each making the other worse. In my heart, I knew that in spite of my professional expertise, my own problems meant I wasn’t the ideal owner for Willie.

  Heartsick, I leashed Willie, and we went out the door to the car. I put him in a sit/stay behind the car while I hauled the heavy ramp from the backseat and placed it so that he could climb in without jumping and reinjuring his shoulder. It was hard for Willie to sit and stay while I lugged the ramp around. When I turned to Willie to release him, he sat big-eyed and trembling, almost overwhelmed by the energy it took to make himself obey and control his almost-out-of-control impulses. His face was desperate with the need to leap forward—to move move move, oh-please-I-have-to-move—countered by his desire to be a very good dog, the very best dog anyone could ever have.

  That was when it hit me: I knew Willie like I knew myself. I knew what it was like to fight the demons inside and still want so badly to be good. To be so fearful that the slightest noise blows you off the ground as if a bomb has gone off under your feet. I knew what it was like to be happy and friendly on the outside and yet spend much of your life in fear.

  I looked at his imploring face, and my heart opened up so wide and fast that my knees went weak. As I released Willie from his stay and he climbed into the car, I knew that I could never send him away. I sat beside him while he licked the tears off my cheeks, and I whispered, “I will, I will, I will, Willie, I will move heaven and earth to try to help us both.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  After making my pledge to Willie, I recognized that I was no longer capable of dealing with my problems by myself; I had to get help. I made an appointment with a therapist, Mare Chapman, recommended by friends. Years earlier, before I got Willie, I had benefited immensely from working with Anne Simon Wolf, a brilliant therapist who had helped me relieve much of the guilt and shame I’d felt over the incident with my sister’s boyfriend, lodged for decades in my chest like a jagged black dagger. How could I have been so weak when Bruce came into my bedroom? Was it my fault that he did? Had I been flirting with him, and betraying my own sister, without even knowing it?

  I had attended the Hoffman Process, a weeklong personal growth retreat that combined journaling, group discussions, and guided meditations to help people get rid of the baggage from their past. It also involved a lot of physical activity, including beating up a pillow, as a symbol of one of your inner demons, for forty-five minutes of nonstop fury. I’d picked up the plastic bat the teacher handed to me and whaled away at the pillow, the physical representation of my shame. I began with gusto, but after ten minutes it seemed that I couldn’t possibly continue for a moment longer. Somehow I did, for ten more minutes, then twenty. Eventually I went into a kind of a trance state that connected my mind and body in ways they had never been before. When I was done, I felt lighter, less dense, as if I’d lost weight by adding air between the molecules of my body.

  I also examined myself and my own behavior, looking honestly at my negative traits, considering which I had adopted from my parents and which I had developed to rebel against them. My list of negative traits began with “too busy.” Busy, busy, busy, that was me. I was running a business that provided fifteen to twenty dog training classes a week, along with numerous consultations for serious behavioral problems of dogs and cats. I had a staff and a set of volunteers to manage. I taught a class at the University of Wisconsin–Madison about the biology and philosophy of human-animal relationships. I cohosted a weekly call-in radio show. I wrote books, gave speeches and two-day seminars around the world, and managed a small farm with twenty sheep, three dogs, a cat, and twelve acres of woods and pasture to take care of. The only part I didn’t take care of was me.

  Before I participated in the Hoffman Process, I bristled when friends said they were concerned about how little time I had to relax. “I’m not too busy!” I snapped at a concerned friend over lunch one day. “I’m sick of people saying I’m too busy. I am NOT too busy!” Later we laughed about it and began calling “busy” the “b-word.”

  Through the Process, I began to realize that being so busy all the time was both a reflection of my mother’s habits, as well as an avoidance of thinking about the events in my past.

  The scientist in me loved the fact that solid research had shown the prog
ram to have a long-term positive effect on participants’ psychological states. The entire week was exhausting, terrifying, and exhilarating, but it provided a safe place to be brutally honest about who I was in relation to who I wanted to be. I began to forgive myself—for being too busy, too weak, too critical of others, and for what happened with my sister’s boyfriend. I brought back fifteen-year-old Trisha and showered her with compassion for being a mixed-up young girl who did her best to handle a difficult situation.

  But resolving the guilt about what happened in my bedroom was one thing. Recovering from the visceral trauma of having a man fall through the air and die at my feet was another. Years later, Willie’s overly reactive startle response showed me that I hadn’t yet recovered from it.

  One definition of the word “shock” is “something that jars the mind or emotions as if with a violent unexpected blow.” No wonder that for decades, I had sensed a man with a baseball bat behind me, always poised to smash me in the head. I had taken a hit to the head, but not in the way I imagined. Shock is different from the experience of other aversive events because it’s a reaction to something unexpected. Unpredictable events are harder to deal with than predictable ones; this knowledge is standard fare to any behaviorist. Until Willie’s behavior sent me into a second round of therapy, I hadn’t known about the power of what some call “fright.” Far more than in the usual use of the word—perhaps as a giggled reaction to a scary story told at a slumber party—fright is a kind of a fugue state in which, according to psychiatrist Guillaume Vaiva, one experiences “a complete absence of affect (neither fear nor anxiety), accompanied by a lack of thought, true loss of words and faced with a reality that seems unbelievable.”