CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
“Take one dog and call me in the morning” is not a prescription you will ever hear from your doctor, but it would be a reasonable one. Healthy, happy dogs can be good for us. The research is clear: The mere presence of a dog can elevate your levels of oxytocin, the hormone that makes you feel all warm and melty toward someone you love. Oxytocin can also decrease feelings of fear and anxiety. Shock and trauma are not just theoretical concepts; they affect your entire body, and they not only compromise brain function, they actually change the size of the areas of your brain that mediate emotion. Stroking a dog, or even just looking at one, can increase your levels of oxytocin and can be as therapeutic as taking a drug.
When Willie wasn’t leaping up in terror of an unexpected noise or barking like a banshee at another dog, he was the best therapist one could imagine. The best of Willie was the best a dog could be—a dog who loved you as if you’d hung the moon or, perhaps more appropriately, as if you’d independently discovered food. Every day when I arrived home, he greeted me like a best friend he hadn’t seen in years. He snuggled against me every evening, resting his chin in the dip between my neck and shoulder, pressing his face against my skin. I’d rest my palm against the plush of his fur, the silk of his belly, and my heart would calm like a lake’s silver surface in the evening.
• • • • •
One of my motivations to switch from studying primates to working with dogs was the need to touch the animals I was working with. I had loved observing the tamarins years before at the university, but the less they were handled, the better. We were studying their social behavior in as natural an environment as possible in the physical constraints of the building, and we needed to keep their relationships as natural as possible. But sometimes the adolescents would leap onto my shoulder when I was adding new branches into their cage or bringing them a new food dispenser to play with.
Zooey, a young adolescent male, liked to play with my earrings; he had an unfortunate tendency to try to pull them off, so I quickly learned to avoid wearing even the simplest of jewelry. But his favorite interaction was to peer into my mouth. He seemed fascinated by it—he’d sit on a branch at face height and peer down intently toward my lips. Once he used his paws to open my mouth and look inside, pulling up on my upper jaw with his left paw, pulling down on my lower jaw with his right. I had to discourage those interactions, but I always left the monkeys wanting to touch them, to stroke their silly, wiry heads of hair, to scratch their tiny little bellies.
As a canine behaviorist, I saw hundreds of dogs every year who begged to be petted. And pet them I did, thousands and thousands of them over the years, from the silky ears of Yorkshire terriers to the soft flat coat of rottweilers that smoothed over their muscled shoulders like a satin glove.
Of course, I couldn’t pet them all. About 80 percent of my clients came in because their dogs were aggressive in some context; about half were aggressive to other dogs, half to people. Many of the dogs begged me with body language to stay away from them, voicelessly telling me how frightened they were, to please, please, give them some time to get to know me. A few others sauntered in and told me clearly and confidently to keep my hands to myself. Confident dogs such as those were rare, fear being by far the most common motivation behind snarling and biting, though there were a few who looked in my eyes like a hit man holding a .44 Magnum, and dared me to reach toward them. I didn’t. Who said that dogs should submit to petting by anyone and everyone who feels like it? I learned to reassure the owners that I loved their dog, even if I wasn’t petting him or her immediately. “Chomper is adorable! Look at that crazy tail! I’m not petting him now only because he is asking me not to. Do you see how he is turning his head away from me and flicking out his tongue? That’s his way of telling us that he is nervous and needs some time to adjust before I try to pet him.”
The irony did not escape me. I became a behaviorist in part because I wanted to be able to physically interact with animals rather than hiding in a blind and observing them from a distance. And here I was, working with a multitude of dogs who didn’t want to be touched, at least not at first, not until I’d helped them get over their fears and learn to trust strangers. But I could give them a voice, and that felt even more important.
The irony also did not escape me that I had a dog at home who, depending on the moment, either helped me to heal or set me back. But as we worked through it together, gradually, week by week, month by month, Willie began to settle down.
I did so many things to try to help Willie that it is impossible to say what had the biggest impact. I spent hours every week planning and implementing conditioning sessions, during which Willie’s limbic system—the primitive alarm system—rewired itself to associate approaching dogs with feeling playful and relaxed. Veterinarians with extensive training in herbal medicine and acupuncture treated him for his reactivity and nervousness every two weeks. I took Willie to my yoga master, Scott, and learned exercises designed to calm his reactive nervous system, since dogs’ nervous systems are so similar to our own.
At the same time, I continued my own therapy, concentrating on my excessive startle response, an acknowledgment that the traumas in my past had reset my own physiology. I surrounded myself with soothing scents. I had sessions with the yoga master once or twice a month. I meditated, although never as much as I felt I should. I tried hard to eat good, healthy food that stabilized rather than amped me up. Sometimes I succeeded. I continued to write in my journal every morning, and for the first time, I began talking with a few others outside of therapy, people I knew well and trusted, about the things that had happened to me. I had told Jim some of what had happened to me years before, but now I gathered my courage to tell him the full story. He listened, kissed my hands, and gently swept my tears away with his fingers. In his work at a mental health institute, he’d seen many women who had suffered terribly from traumas in their past. “It is so important for you to work through this, Trisha,” he said. “I’ll do everything I can to be there for you while you do.”
As I spoke to others in my circle of friends, I was stunned to discover how many had been sexually traumatized in some way. On the one hand, it was depressing that so many people I knew had experienced sexual violence. I knew how common it is for young people to be molested or raped, but statistics don’t prepare you to sit across the table from someone you’ve known for years and learn the horrible things that had happened to her in her past.
But there was a good side to giving voice to the traumas of the past. I felt inspired by each woman who told me her story: Look what happened to her, and look how amazing she is now! I found myself feeling less alone as I listened to their stories. The isolation of trauma can bury you, underground and alone, like an injured cat hiding silently under the porch. Your intellect tells you to call out for help, but your emotional brain tells you to stay silent, that your only safe alternative is to hide, alone and mute, even if it means you’ll never make it out. There are worse things than death.
Talking about trauma doesn’t kill you, and as long as it is done in a safe environment, it turns out to be liberating instead of dangerous. It is not always easy. In some ways, it’s like working out at a gym: Afterward your muscles might be sore, but you know it’s constructive in the long run. Along with the physical work I was doing—diet, yoga, meditating—talking about what had happened took away some of its power.
Talking, however, can only go so far, so I spent a lot of time trying to repair my internal physiology. I cuddled with Jim, hugged friends, and got massages. I petted my dogs, stroking their soft cheeks, their satiny pink bellies, and let oxytocin, my “drug” of choice, do its work.
• • • • •
One evening a few birds sounded off with a chirp as they settled in their nightly roosts. I listened to hear whether the barred owl would call: “Who cooks for YOU? Who cooks for YOU?” Not tonight, I guessed; the sky turned navy blue and the light from the barn turned a
thick buttery yellow while the trill of the snowy tree crickets joined the buzz of the cicadas as all the birds cozied in to sleep.
I pulled the shades and lay down on the living room carpet, the light of a lamp from my mother the only brightness in the room. Willie lay down beside me, his head resting on my shoulder, his long body stretched out beside mine. Lassie cuddled against my other flank, her ribs rising and falling with each breath. Tulip was curled up at my feet, which nestled underneath her fur.
On this night, Willie was calm, and every so often he exhaled a little louder, with a soft moan deep from behind his throat. I made a little humming noise in return. He pushed his head farther into the crook of my neck, and I rested my right hand in the velvet of his belly. Just me and the dogs, taking our medicine.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The summer’s heat was brutal, and I was happy to be sitting cross-legged in the cool of the downstairs bathroom. Inside the small windowless room, I could hear the babbling of baby wrens drifting from the vent that was supposed to funnel humid air out of the room. Years ago a family of house wrens had taken over the vent as a perfect nesting site. The first year, when I turned on the fan, the babies would chitter in complaint. I imagined them like tiny pilots in open cockpits with their sparse feathers flying sideways, Snoopy-like, in the breeze. Then the fan stopped working, and I bequeathed the vent to the wrens in perpetuity.
I was also listening to the hissing of Brave, a five-week-old kitten whom I had trapped a few hours before in the barn. He and his four littermates appeared two weeks earlier at the edge of the haymow. At first all I saw was a furry orange tail disappearing down a hole. The next day, a tiny face emerged and then darted back into the darkness. As the days went on, it became clear that a feral cat had delivered her litter in my barn, and that the little ginger kitten had four brothers and sisters.
I caught glimpses of Mom, a petite black-and-orange tortoiseshell, as she darted out of the barn and disappeared into the undergrowth. She was shy and wary, and the few times she saw me, she reacted as if her life depended on getting away. It well might have; some people in the country call cats “ditch rats” and enjoy shooting them. Her kittens were equally frightened, in spite of my sitting day after day beside their play area, tossing them food, being careful not to chase or frighten them more than they already were. Over a period of weeks, I conditioned them to go into a dog crate for pieces of chicken that I’d toss inside, while I sat sweating twenty feet away in ninety-five-degree weather. Finally, when they seemed old enough to be away from their mother and at risk of being taken by a fox or a hawk, I held my breath and pulled the string, slamming the crate door shut. They yowled in terror while I carried them inside, and they ran to huddle behind the toilet when I released them into the bathroom.
Few animals express fear better than a frightened kitten. With eyes seemingly too big to fit inside their heads, they paste their ears to their skull and gape their mouths open in a threatening hiss. I named the hissy boy Brave, the name of the Pixar movie about a Scottish lass with a ridiculous mane of red hair and an equal amount of moxie. I considered retracting the name, given that he seemed the most fearful of all, but I kept it, realizing that of all the kittens, he was the one most willing to face his fears.
Our own fears aren’t always so simple or logical; nor do we often acknowledge or face them directly. Sometimes fear causes us to make illogical decisions, as when we avoid traveling in a foreign country that is much safer than our own but get into a truly dangerous situation—like being in a car—without giving it a second thought. We worry about a multitude of improbable events, from dying of a rare disease to being in an airplane crash. And yet, as author Gavin de Becker describes in The Gift of Fear, while we are busy worrying about things that are unlikely to hurt us, we ignore and dismiss important signals of danger. These signals don’t come from the media or government statistics. They come from deep inside of us; from our own private security system that is hard-wired into the most primitive parts of our brain. Something tells us, some little nagging voice deep inside, that there is danger. And often we ignore it.
That’s exactly what I did when I was raped. “Don’t be silly,” I said to myself when my intuition began waving red flags. “He’s a nice man.” A nice man with a loaded gun in his bedroom and a violent and excessive reaction to a common noise.
After reading de Becker’s book, I suspect there were other indicators that my safety had been compromised. However, although those clues may be objective and factual, we may not be consciously aware of them. De Becker tells the story of a man who walked into a convenience store and immediately left without buying anything because of an overwhelming sense of dread. The next person to enter was shot and killed. While being interviewed after the crime, the survivor said that he had no idea why he had left the store. But as he talked it out, he realized that he had actually noticed a group of signals that were full of information: Except for one brief, nervous glance, the clerk didn’t greet him as usual; instead, he kept his gaze locked on another customer who was wearing a heavy jacket on a hot day. A car sat outside with the engine running.
“Now it’s all clear,” the survivor noted—the frightened clerk, a gun hidden under a coat, a getaway car in the parking lot—“but it didn’t mean a thing to me at the time.”
“Actually,” said de Becker, “it did then, too.” The survivor just added up all the facts unconsciously, in the part of his brain responsible for keeping him safe. And yet because we worship rational, conscious thought and demean what we call intuition, we often dismiss and ignore it. I am not the only woman who has said “Don’t be silly” when her inner voice told her there was danger. In case after case noted by de Becker, women didn’t listen to that little voice and were raped and/or almost murdered. Others aren’t alive to talk about it.
As I went through the initial steps of facing my past, I learned that just listening is not enough. It’s important to listen to and act on that little voice. Like many women, I may have heard what my body was telling me, but I let concerns about being embarrassed or hurting someone’s feelings override it.
A few months after beginning work with my therapist, I was traveling and my back was killing me, so I scheduled a therapeutic massage at the hotel. I could just squeeze one in after speaking at a nearby bookstore and grabbing some sleep before an early wake-up call.
No one else was in the hotel spa except the masseur. The moment I entered the lobby, a quiet wave of anxiety swept through me. How does one describe that sensation, the feeling in your gut that both whispers and yells at the same time? It is so strong and yet so hard to specify, living as it does in the most primitive, nonverbal part of our bodies. These alerts to danger aren’t only in our brains: We know now that we have a second nervous system, the enteric nervous system, which lives in our intestines and communicates with our brains on a moment-by-moment basis. No wonder we talk about “gut feelings.” There are neurons in our intestines, the same cells that we have always called “brain cells,” but our bellies contain no centers of speech and language, and thus we struggle to describe the feeling.
Before I began therapy, I would have dismissed the wave of fear that lapped through me that night, using all the arguments de Becker has heard hundreds of times: “I thought I was just being silly,” “I didn’t want to cause a fuss,” or “It would have been rude to leave.” But this time I acted on it. I don’t remember what I said, exactly, except that I handled it poorly. I stammered and apologized repeatedly, no doubt exhaustingly so. I suspect that when I finally backed my way out of the room, the man was relieved that I had gone.
When I relayed the incident to my therapist, she cheered and clapped. Rather than suggesting that I was being paranoid, she reinforced my behavior like a trainer giving a dog treats for a difficult recall. We had a little party in her office over it, and I have no doubt that is why, a few years later, I was able to prevent a situation that might have been far more serious.
&nbs
p; In that case, the same indescribable feelings of being in danger arose in a completely different context. It was during the day, in my own office with other people just yards away, and yet I was overwhelmed with a sense that the man talking to me intended to harm me. He had come in upset about a neighbor’s dog and the advice I had given the owners about how to handle the animal’s behavioral problems. He wasn’t yelling; he spoke in a low, quiet voice. At first his words were not threats; much of what he said was supposed to be complimentary. But as he talked, his smile never reached his eyes, and eventually, he moved to within inches of my face, and his eyes went flat and hard as he said, “I know how much you love your dogs. It’d be such a shame if something happened to them.”
This time there were no internal arguments or rationalizing. I had no doubt that I could be in danger, not necessarily at that particular moment but in the future. Nor did I become paralyzed with fear, as I had so often in the past. I spent the next few weeks taking steps to protect myself and my dogs that still amaze me in their clarity of purpose. I avoided being alone; I reached out to friends who agreed to watch the house. I alerted the appropriate authorities. I learned a bit about self-defense. Nothing happened, but what matters is that I acted on my fears and morphed from defense to offense. I’d finally learned my lesson and qualified for the Olympics of taking care of myself. I knew it didn’t mean I’d always get the gold, but at least now I had a chance.
• • • • •
Willie learned to face his own fears, too. One day I needed him to push the sheep through a gate. They didn’t want to go, not at all, being correct in the belief that once they did, they would be trapped, wormed, and vaccinated: the ovine equivalent of going to the dentist. By then, Willie had all the training he needed to get the job done. He knew cues for pushing the sheep forward, backing away from them if necessary, and moving clockwise and counterclockwise around them. He could run two hundred yards away from me and bring me the flock, speed up or slow down when asked, and drive sheep off the feeder pans so that I didn’t get run over by the flock. As a young dog, he was already an invaluable farmhand. However, in this case I was asking him to do a very grown-up job.
The Education of Will Page 14