Patrick may have loved dogs as much as I did, but he was appalled at the amount of money it would cost to bring Drift home. As we stood behind the barn, white sheep polka-dotting the green hills beyond, I said ridiculous things to try to convince him to spend the money. I promised that I would have a garage sale or eat beans for months. He took another look at Drift’s grinning face and agreed we could take him home.
I spent Drift’s first months with us in a haze of infatuation, enamored of every move he made. I’d catch myself staring at him while he slept, watching his chest rise and fall. I was riveted by everything about him, from the way he groomed himself like a cat to the way his ears pricked up at the base and flopped over at the tip. All he had to do was cock his head when I spoke and I’d melt for the twentieth time that day.
It wasn’t all smooth sailing: He didn’t eat for days, until I realized he was afraid to eat in my presence. He barked demandingly and had a stubborn streak more common in a coonhound than a border collie. But he was mine, he was brilliant, and he was beautiful.
Eventually, we found a farm to buy, and Drift and I got to work our own small flock of sheep. One late-summer day, Drift and I were working sheep in the big pasture high on the hill. The air was warm and heavy. Dark clouds were gathering to the south as I sent Drift to gather the sheep. A good border collie will stand motionless at your side until you give the cue to begin, at which point he’ll explode into a ground-devouring run. Drift darted away as soon as I whispered, “Come Bye,” the cue to run clockwise around the sheep. As he did, a Z of lightning split the sky; immediately afterward a crack of thunder shot through the valley. Drift seemed to ignore it and continued running around the sheep. By the time he’d gathered the flock, the sky looked even more threatening, and it had begun to rain. I said, “That’ll do,” and we retreated to the farmhouse, soaked to the skin.
A few days later, Drift and I went back up the hill to work sheep. As usual, he stood by my side, waiting for a quiet word to run in a semicircle around to the back of the sheep. I whispered, “Come Bye,” but this time Drift stood immobile. I looked down at him in surprise. He turned his head away from me, looking toward the woods and the farmhouse. I moved a few feet to “reset” him and sent him again. He took the signal this time and did a nice outrun. Was it slower than usual? Perhaps. But once he got behind the sheep, he worked beautifully, enthusiastically, and we had a good session before it was time to let the flock rest. By the time we walked away from the flock, I had forgotten about his brief hesitation.
The next day, Drift and I were back up the hill. Again I settled him on my left side and said, “Come Bye.” Drift moved forward, but instead of streaking toward the sheep in a wide semicircle, he began to trot toward the house. Astounded, I stood stock-still for a few seconds as I watched him move determinedly down the steep hill away from me and the flock. He loved working sheep, seemed to live for it, and always ran to them with an abundance of enthusiasm. But this time he might as well have said, “I quit,” and walked away without looking back.
It made no sense to me at all. I called his name once, then again with more force. He put his head down and sped up, disappearing behind a wall of tree trunks and leaves. I followed silently, sure this time that something was terribly wrong. Once in the house he seemed fine, and when I took him to my veterinarian, he could find no sign of pain or illness. I called several trainers to find out how common it was for a dog to just walk off the job, and what they thought I should do about it. Several said that Drift should be punished for disobeying and I was spoiling him by letting him leave the sheep. But by then I knew enough about dog behavior to understand that what he had done had nothing to do with “dominance” or control. Drift was afraid of something, and he was telling me in the only way he knew how.
Because of the way I’ve told the story, no doubt the connection between Drift’s behavior and the storm is apparent. However, for me, the time between the thunder and Drift’s response was separated by a thousand other events. It didn’t occur to me to associate the storm with his refusal to run to the sheep because, except for a brief pause, he’d behaved beautifully the first time after the thunder’s boom. But months later, when a client came into my office with a dog named Barney, the wheels began to turn, and I made the connection.
Barney was your basic black Labrador, a big goofy horse of a dog who slap-danced into the room with his tail smashing into the walls and his torso careening into my legs. Aggression to strangers was clearly not the problem, but there was a problem—a big one. Though Barney had been going to dog parks for years, lately, he’d become an unwelcome guest. Barney had begun to pick fights with other dogs. They’d started out as minor skirmishes and had escalated into full-fledged battles.
Even worse, Barney was barking aggressively at dogs he saw while walking on a leash. The owners’ once relaxing strolls through tree-lined streets had become tense, anxious ordeals. That was what had motivated Kathleen and Joshua to come to the office; they’d begun to avoid evening walks and had eliminated excursions to the dog park altogether. They knew that Barney needed more exercise than he was getting, and they wanted their happy, trustworthy dog back.
As we discussed the progression of Barney’s behavior, his owners remembered that a few months ago he’d had a bad experience at the park. A large dog, new to the park, had threatened Barney when he dared to venture close to the dog’s ball. The newcomer’s stiff posture and quiet growl quickly escalated into an attack. As the dog bit at Barney’s neck, the owners intervened and separated the dogs.
Barney had no visible injuries and seemed to shake it off. He appeared to be his usual joyful self at home. His owners noted nothing special about his next visit to the dog park. But on the subsequent trip, Barney reacted with a growl when another dog came up to greet him, and on the next trip, Barney began to charge at other dogs himself. Because Barney had seemed fine right after being attacked, and had behaved appropriately the first time he returned to the park, Kathleen and Joshua hadn’t linked the attack and his behavior.
“That’s right! Remember?” said Joshua. “He was attacked just a week before he began to growl at the dog park!”
Bingo. I immediately thought of Drift and the time he quit working sheep. It’s amazing how the mind can hold facts adjacent, oblivious to their connection, until some miracle of neurons and electricity links them together. I’d seen that same pattern over and over in dogs just like Drift and Barney, who had been through some kind of frightening event and appeared fine at first but gradually evolved into being overly reactive to things that they had ignored in the past.
• • • • •
At the time, in the early nineties, I’d heard about PTSD, and even wondered if Jason suffered from it, but I didn’t know much about it. Drift and Barney got me curious, so I began to do some reading. Although our understanding of the condition has increased exponentially over the years, and the details of the diagnostic criteria are in flux, the basics of PTSD haven’t changed and are now well known to most of the public. After a traumatic event, some individuals develop a suite of persistent symptoms that include “increased physiological arousal” (difficulty sleeping, being easily startled or frightened, being easily irritated or angered), “avoidance or emotional numbing” (fearful reactions to previously positive or neutral events, trouble concentrating, avoidance), and “intrusive memories” (flashbacks or nightmares). Sometimes the symptoms show up right away, but often they are delayed for months or years.
At first I read about PTSD as a behaviorist, curious if this phenomenon might occur in dogs. The delay of visible reactions in people was especially interesting, since I had seen the same phenomenon in some of my clients’ dogs. Like Barney, most of these dogs had been attacked by others at a dog park or on neighborhood walks. They behaved normally at first but were described as “completely different dogs” within a few weeks or months. Other dogs had been in car accidents or survived house fires. In every case, some kind of trauma
had prefaced their change in behavior.
However, although we know that dogs can suffer emotionally, it isn’t clear if they can experience the exact equivalent of PTSD in humans. So much of our understanding of PTSD is based on internal experiences described through speech, and even that is often inadequate. Even with humans’ linguistic skills, people can go for years not knowing that what they are experiencing is related to an earlier trauma.
I should know. The man with the baseball bat appeared soon after the electrician fell to his death in Phoenix. However, I never made the connection between the fear and the trauma until I began therapy decades later. For decades, I had attributed my fear of being alone at night to a character flaw—a sign that I was inherently weak. By then, talking to therapists had allowed me to understand that being raped had filled me with shame and fear, and had added to the shock of seeing a man die at my feet.
Dogs, however, can’t talk to therapists or write in journals about having nightmares, flashbacks, and trouble concentrating. But there is no doubt that dogs are capable of being psychologically traumatized and suffering from some PTSD-related symptoms. One symptom is “hyperarousal,” or a state of always being in fight-or-flight mode, just like Willie and me. The body becomes continually primed for danger, always on alert. We humans may be aware of a traumatic event in the past and talk about our flashbacks or nightmares, but the primary driving force of PTSD resides in the unconscious.
People who suffer from PTSD have systems that are out of balance—too much “on” and not enough “off.” The brain is stuck in panic mode and perceives the world to be a relentlessly dangerous place. Minor events can elicit a response disproportionate to any potential danger. None of this is conscious, and none of this requires any kind of cognitive control that is beyond the ability of a dog.
Just as humans react differently to similar experiences, some dogs seem affected by trauma while others don’t. I’ve evaluated dogs from horrific situations that might have psychologically crippled them for life, but they love their new homes and everyone they meet and sleep like puppies and go through the rest of their lives with silly grins and bodies loose and relaxed.
Other dogs appear to suffer terribly after a potentially traumatic event. I’ll never forget hearing about a hollow-eyed dog who had been rescued just before death, having been abandoned among other dogs with no food, no water, and no means of escape. The dog watched his packmates die slowly and horribly of thirst and hunger, some cannibalizing the others in a desperate attempt to stay alive. He had come out of it as stunned as a soldier who had seen the worst of warfare, and it took months for him to learn that life could be safe and full of love and care, for him to do more than stare blank-faced out the window.
• • • • •
Drift and Barney were resilient and able to recover from their fears once we realized what had frightened them. Figuring that out was the key to changing their behavior. It was equally important for me to acknowledge that being raped had changed me forever.
My first therapist, Anne, helped me see that, yes, of course what happened in Minneapolis had been a rape. For years, when I allowed myself to think about it at all, I denied that it had been all that bad. I may have been afraid for my life, but Jason never threatened to kill me. I’d been injured, but I recovered physically within a week. It was far harder to recover from blaming myself for what had happened. I was on a date. I willingly went back to Jason’s apartment. I willingly got in bed with him. How could that be rape? Anne helped me understand that it was: I had been silently threatened by the gun beside the bed, physically overpowered, and violently assaulted.
I also worked through the aftermath of rape by reading more about it. I began a book titled After Silence by Nancy Venable Raine, but after reading for ten minutes I literally threw the book away from me. It landed on the floor, pages creased, cover bent. I didn’t feel better after beginning the book; instead, I felt worse.
Nancy had been unpacking boxes in the kitchen of her new apartment when a stranger broke in and, for hours on end, raped her repeatedly at knifepoint, telling her he was going to kill her. What had happened to her was so horrific that I was overwhelmed not just with sympathy for her but with disgust for myself. How could I equate her experience with mine? Ridiculous. Here I had come to the realization over the years that what happened with the Vietnam veteran had indeed been rape, but obviously, I was just coddling myself. What had happened to her was rape. What had happened to me was a bad date.
It took weeks before I could pick the book up again. Doing so was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. Somehow, partway through, I began to forgive myself for being traumatized by what had happened to me. Instead of defining it as “not bad enough,” I began to see the universals in one’s responses to being raped, and to understand why I had said so little about it. There’s a perfect storm of reasons why rape victims are silenced, both by themselves and by others.
For one thing, talking about sexual assault is a form of exposing yourself. We’re talking about the areas of your body that you protect from others—your “private parts.” The definition of “private” is: “secluded from the sight, presence, or intrusion of others.” No surprise then, that when you are assaulted in areas so personal they act to define your perception of self, you don’t want to compound the violation by talking about it.
Another reason that victims don’t talk about sexual assault or other horrific traumas is that we simply can’t explain the consequences. Nancy Venable Raine sums this up in a sentence that took my breath away: “The loss of a sense of safety is impossible to imagine when you still possess it, and nearly impossible to regain once you have lost it.” How do you describe to someone what it’s like to live with the knowledge that at any instant you will be attacked from the inside out?
Being internally attacked is such a unique and horrific experience that I don’t think it’s possible to imagine it if it hasn’t happened to you. Perhaps that’s part of why some traumas are so isolating; why soldiers don’t want to talk about what they went through when they come home, why rape victims turn in to themselves and go silent. It is part of why I never wanted to talk about what had happened. I felt as though language could not explain a phenomenon so primal that it is beyond words. After the rape, it seemed as though I had been hollowed out, with my sense of self gone, and nothing left with which to replace it.
When I finally was able to begin talking about it, I told a friend that it was like trying to function as a person without skin, with muscles and nerve fibers naked and exposed.
The worst result of the rape was the loss of my ability to speak even to myself about it. As Judith Herman says in Trauma and Recovery, “Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable.” No wonder I was so busy . . . busy avoiding thinking about something too awful to contemplate. This is the most profound crime of rape—it not only isolates you from others, it isolates you from yourself. As Nancy Venable Raine says, while others focus on the sexual aspect of a rape, in real life its primary victim is one’s “memory and identity.”
• • • • •
Facing all three events—being molested, watching a man fall through the air and die at my feet, and being raped a decade later—was the first step in my recovery. Gradually, I began to realize that much of my behavior—which I had ignored or explained to myself as “character flaws”—was based on events in my past that I had willed myself to forget. Sensing a man about to kill me is a classic type of flashback for people who have experienced a traumatic fright. I might have not been particularly brave as a young child, but my terror of being alone at night after being molested and seeing a man die was far beyond that of a five-year-old frightened by a horror movie.
As hard as it was—and make no mistake about it, it was awful at first—to face the traumas that had shaped my life, I never could have moved on if I hadn’t done so.
• • • •
•
Willie, on the other hand, had no event that would explain his behavior—at least not that anyone knew about. What was clear was that he had a lot to worry about. To him, the world was a dangerous place. Unfamiliar dogs were especially scary. Unexpected noises were harbingers of great danger. Much of the time, life was glorious, full of new people (“Look! There’s another one!”) and the languorous joy of grinding his shoulder into a pile of fox poop. But he had to be ever alert for danger. Fear and its partner, anger, were always present, like the sight of a flock of ephemeral sheep, fading in and out behind the trees.
That was my Willie, even as an eight-week old puppy. Could a dog that young have experienced a trauma so horrific that it changed the very nature of his brain? What had happened when he was alone in the litter; what frightening event might have traumatized him so severely that his very nature was changed? Or was he just wired differently than normal? Did he arrive at birth as a squalling wet sock of a puppy already programmed genetically to be on high alert? We don’t know what particular genetic blueprint could have sent him into the world with a brain functioning like that of a combat survivor.
No matter what the cause, he behaved as though he had been psychologically traumatized. My heart broke for him every time he exploded off the carpet, startling to the quietest of sounds. The only problem was, I did, too. No wonder we were soul mates.
The Education of Will Page 13