The Education of Will

by Patricia B. McConnell

  One ewe in particular was the problem. Barbie was a pretty yearling when I adopted her as a favor to a friend. In spite of her small stature, she had matured into the flock’s leader and senior enforcement officer. Barbie would tell you right away if your dog had what it took to work sheep. She did job interviews in an instant, correctly reading a dog’s confidence, or lack of it, in one glance. At the slightest sign of hesitation, Barbie’s head went down, her anvil-thick forehead facing the dog. Many a time she had smashed toward a dog, charging forward like some petite woolly bull.

  As Willie learned to work the flock, I supported him by walking up behind him when Barbie challenged him. Barbie learned that she wasn’t going to win, and Willie learned that he could back her down. Gradually, my presence was rarely necessary. But this time Willie was at the edge of his abilities, and I needed to stay by the gate to hold it open. I decided that Willie was old enough to step up to the challenge, so I asked him to face off Barbie on his own and force her inside the pen.

  First Barbie tried an end run around Willie to the right, but like a World Cup soccer goalie, he cut her off. Another ewe tried to scramble past Willie on the left, practically leaping over him in the attempt. Willie cut her off, too. Time after time, the sheep attempted to dart away, zigging left or zagging right, and Willie blocked every attempt. But they wouldn’t move forward through the gate, and although Willie was working hard, the sheep were only moving sideways.

  It had been a long time since Willie had busted in on the sheep. He had never bitten, and in spite of his early attempts at lunging, he had been remarkably trustworthy around the flock. I love sheep, and I hate to see them scared or injured. But sometimes a working sheepdog has to use more than his presence to convince them. Although no good shepherd wants her sheep hurt, sometimes the woollies just have to learn that dogs have weapons inside their mouths and are willing to use them if necessary. Busting in on the sheep to bully them is one thing, but using your power to get the sheep moving is another. A quick nip on the nose can be appropriate if the dog has good bite inhibition, nips lightly, and lets go instantly. Not all dogs have the emotional control to do that. My little Misty, a powder puff with people, was so frightened of confrontations with sheep that she’d dart in, sink her teeth into a sheep’s ear—always the left one—hanging on for dear life with her eyes squeezed shut in terror. Not good. But Willie had never used his mouth on the flock, in part because he was, pure and simple, a good dog. It was also because he was afraid of confronting the sheep. And Barbie knew it.

  Back at the gate, Willie continued to block the flock’s attempt to escape, but he began to spend more moments in a stiff-bodied face-off with Barbie. Finally, she turned and flat-out charged Willie, her head level with his, her hard, bony forehead poised to smash him into the ground. In a rare moment of wisdom, I kept my mouth shut. And instead of darting backward to avoid her, for the first time in his life, Willie met her head-on, lunging forward and nipping her nose. He let go right away, and for a second, everything went still.

  Barbie stopped as if she’d received an electric shock. Willie stood his ground and stared straight into her eyes. A second later, she charged him again, and again he threw himself forward and, at just the right instant, nipped her nose. She stopped, backed up, and appeared to reappraise the situation. No one breathed. It was abnormally quiet, as if even the birds had stopped singing. And then Barbie turned her head, grudgingly walked into the pen, and the rest of the flock followed.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Aladdin, a lithe mixed-breed dog with long eyelashes and expressive eyes, came into my office because he had a bad habit: He lunged at people, seemingly randomly. His big brown body would charge at them, mouth open, teeth sharp and hyperwhite inside coal black lips. His owner, a young woman named Clara, looked as vulnerable as Aladdin looked strong. She dissolved in tears and melted into her chair as she told me about the times Aladdin had frightened her friends. Her eyes scrunched and swollen, she explained how much she loved her dog and couldn’t imagine living without him.

  And yet there were those lunges. All potential aggression from dogs should be taken seriously, but being lunged at by a large dog with jaws powerful enough to break your arm is especially hard to ignore. Clara had a time bomb on her hands, but Aladdin was the family she’d never had, and now everyone was telling her to put him down.

  Aladdin hadn’t read his rap sheet. Rather than entering the office on high alert, he padded up to me with his body relaxed and swaying. He bowed his head for neck rubs and then lay down comfortably between Clara and me. Clearly, his behavior had little to do with being afraid of strangers.

  As I talked to Clara, I looked for a pattern in Aladdin’s behavior. The more predictable a behavior problem, the more likely it can be solved. But Aladdin’s lunges didn’t seem to follow the usual format. He wasn’t more likely to go after men than women or strangers rather than friends. He had even lunged at Clara one day when she came home from shopping. He’d lunged over the backseat and terrified a girlfriend when she entered the car. He’d charged after one deliveryman, but not one from the same company as the day before. His veterinarian had found no health problems that could explain his behavior.

  I knew there had to be a reason for Aladdin’s behavior, if only we could have asked him. Mostly, I think it’s good that dogs can’t talk; I’m not convinced that we’d always like what they have to say. However, their lack of voice makes it impossible for them to tell us what is wrong, to explain their behavior in ways that we can understand. All I could do was gather information, to look for some pattern that we had not yet identified.

  In hopes of learning more, I suggested that we leave the office and go for a walk in a secluded area behind my office. I asked to take Aladdin’s leash once we got outside, being as concerned about the safety of others as I was about Clara and Aladdin. It was chilly but sunny, so in preparation to go outside, I put on my jacket and sunglasses. Aladdin took one look at me and leaped up at my face.

  He didn’t bite me. For that matter, he’d never bitten anyone, and he’d had ample opportunity to do so. But he was scary, and the potential of serious injury loomed. I knew that we had to figure out what it was that set Aladdin off before someone got hurt.

  After Aladdin lunged, I took off my sunglasses to talk about what had just happened. As soon as I did, Aladdin put his head down and shook his entire body, as dogs often do after being stressed, and flashed me a sloppy grin.

  Sunglasses. That was the trigger that had set off Aladdin when Clara entered the house, when her girlfriend got in the car on a bright sunny day, and the difference between the deliverymen. Sunglasses off? Aladdin loved you. Sunglasses on? Aladdin responded as if you’d pulled a gun out of your pocket. In his mind, you had. Lots of dogs respond to sunglasses, which must appear to them as huge round eyes with dilated pupils. Eyes of that description are signs of trouble, and not just in a canine society. Butterflies, caterpillars, snakes, frogs, and even whales use false eyespots, circles much larger than their actual eyes, to startle predators or to confuse them. People interested in gaining or maintaining power often wear sunglasses, not just to conceal their eyes but also to enlarge them to look more formidable. Conjure up an image of a young military man in a country enmeshed in political turmoil, and looming behind the ubiquitous AK-47 will be a face punctuated by two large black circles staring at you, the lenses unwavering like a hard eye of a dog about to bite.

  To Aladdin, I had morphed instantly from a relaxed, benevolent acquaintance into a highly aroused and potentially dangerous one. Aladdin was just going to get me first, before I could get him.

  It was an ideal discovery, the information every behaviorist hopes for: a clear trigger that can be replicated safely during training. Sunglasses are a perfect fit for a treatment plan, because an owner can have complete control over when the dog is exposed to them. Clara began to wear them in the house while she was feeding or playing with Aladdin. We taught Aladdin that “sunglas
ses on” meant he got to play ball or eat chicken or get his belly rubbed. Friends came over and, with Aladdin safely behind a gate, began throwing treats to him immediately after putting on their glasses, then taking them off and withdrawing the treats.

  This linking of “trigger” with “treat” is as effective with people as it is with dogs. You link a low-intensity version of the trigger (or “bad” thing) with a high-intensity version of a treat (the “good” thing), so that one’s response to the treat becomes one’s response to the trigger. This was the method I had been using to help Willie with other dogs and tall, unfamiliar men. It is the legacy of Pavlov and his own dogs, who taught us that one can transfer positive emotions to a neutral or negative event if done with the right timing and in the correct order.

  While sunglasses were the trigger that elicited fear in Aladdin, it’s not always so easy to figure out what scares a dog. Or a person. Until I began therapy, I never associated having a man fall “out of the blue” and die at my feet with the feeling that someone behind me was about to smash me in the head with a baseball bat. In some ways, those scenarios bore no relation to each other. But their essence—the part that was recorded in the most primitive part of my brain—could not have been more similar. Their message was: “At any moment, when you least expect it, something horrible and life-threatening is about to happen.”

  Sometimes the triggers that set someone off don’t seem, at first glance, to make any sense. Nancy Venable Raine, the author of After Silence, began having flashbacks about her car falling from the Golden Gate Bridge after viewing scenes from an earthquake in Japan. Superficially, there are no connections between a horrific car accident, an earthquake, and being raped. Neither are there obvious links between watching a man die and the sensation of being stalked by a bat-wielding psycho. But logic isn’t always relevant when talking about a brain changed by trauma. What is logical is that once they learn to expect the worst, traumatized brains can be set off by a wide range of triggers. Part of healing is figuring out what they are.

  • • • • •

  Aladdin’s story ended happily. After a few months of perseverance by his owner, he paid little attention to sunglasses. He did still have one problematic behavior: On occasion he would forget his manners and run up to a stranger who was wearing sunglasses, but his intentions were now friendly, and his message was some doggy version of “Hello, HELLO! I see you have on those strange eye things. Could I please then have an order of chicken, or is it turkey that comes with sunglasses today?”

  Aladdin taught me never to approach a dog I don’t know while wearing sunglasses; I reflexively take them off when I see a new dog, and I always ask anyone beside me to do the same. My husband has probably heard “Jim, you’d better take your sunglasses off” more times than he cares to count, because he has helped with scores of reactive dog cases, and because sunglasses are a perfect example of a seemingly innocuous thing that can elicit dramatic responses in the brains of any mammal, including dogs and people. I should know—dramatic responses used to be my middle name.

  • • • • •

  I was at the local airport not too many years ago, where I’ve been so often that I have a visceral reaction to Willie Nelson’s song “On the Road Again.” I’ve flown so many times that airports, the last place you’d think anyone would look to for solace, have a sense of comforting familiarity. But this time I was trembling with fear as I stood in the security line. I began deep breathing, trying to calm my pounding heart. My local airport had just installed the whole-body scanners in which you stand with feet spread apart and arms raised overhead while an image of your unclothed body is analyzed by a TSA agent. I’d been in them before, and each time I walked out shaking, sometimes on the verge of tears.

  I can’t say exactly why this one experience was such a powerful trigger. Was it that I had my hands over my head while I was being raped? Or was it just the generalized sense of being violated, of being told to spread your legs apart and hold your arms over your head, where you can’t use them to protect yourself, while a stranger looks at your body? As is often true of traumatic triggers, it doesn’t really matter all that much why it sets off the primal part of your brain that is screaming, “YOU ARE IN DANGER OF DYING”—it’s just that it does.

  As the line moved forward and the machine loomed closer, the woman behind me recognized me and said hello. I attempted to engage in casual conversation while hiding my shaking hands. At other times I had avoided the scanner and elected to be physically searched, but often that felt equally intrusive. Just seeing the scanner became almost as upsetting as going through it.

  Finally, it was my turn. I must have been ashen-faced, because the agent, a strapping young man, couldn’t hide his look of disdain. Condescendingly, he said, “It’s really nothing.”

  “Not if you’ve been raped, it’s not!” I snapped. I didn’t plan to say it—the words darted out of my mouth like a frog’s tongue after a fly. And I didn’t say them quietly; everyone within twenty feet heard them. I’d been writing about being raped before this particular trip, and doing that must have given me the courage to say the word “rape” out loud instead of keeping it enclosed like some ugly, oozing wound hidden under a bandage. No one moved for the longest time. I had no idea what the acquaintance behind me was thinking; I never turned around to see her face.

  The agent was immobilized after my comment, so I spoke more softly, saying something like “It might be helpful for you to understand that for some people, based on their experience, this is actually a very difficult thing to do.” He nodded, still shocked, and I walked inside, spread my legs, and shook even harder than usual while I raised my arms over my head and tried to breathe.

  After that trip, I realized I had to get a handle on my response to body scanners. I needed to use the same method I’d used on Aladdin for sunglasses and Willie for other dogs. I took a low-intensity version of something that scared me and had it lead to a high-intensity version of something I love.

  Linking something scary with something good sounds simple, but this kind of conditioning is so powerful that it can cause problems if you don’t do it right. Nancy Venable Raine covered a new apartment with the scent of roses and gardenias in order to associate it with beautiful things, and ended up conditioning herself to feel anxious any time she smelled those particular flowers.

  The keys to making this work are timing (trigger first) and modulating the intensity. Intensity is the tricky part. The trigger has to be presented first at a high enough level to be perceived as relevant to the problem, but at a low enough intensity to avoid eliciting real fear. That is not always as easy as it sounds. Decades earlier, I worked with Marcus, a sound-phobic golden retriever who couldn’t handle hearing any kind of loud noise, including a truck’s backfire on the adjacent highway. Some kids had thrown a firecracker that landed on the formerly confident dog’s back. Ever since then, he had gone into an uncontrollable panic at any abrupt sound. The owner called me after Marcus turned the better part of a front door into a pile of toothpicks on July 4. On my first attempt to condition him to accept loud noises, I accidentally taught him to reject pieces of lamb, formerly his favorite food. I had thought the sounds we created (a gun going off over a quarter mile away) would be soft enough, but the trigger overwhelmed the treat, so that Marcus’s fear of noise transferred to even the best of snacks. We went back to square one and eventually taught Marcus to be less frightened of loud noises and to go into his crate if the noise still scared him. That experience taught me a lot about starting small and easing a dog into linking the trigger and the treat.

  To work on my own reaction to a body scanner, I called up an image from a heavenly vacation when good friends rented a sailboat in the Caribbean. I had been able to lie on my back as the boat gently rolled, hands behind my head, listening to the Beatles singing “Let It Be” while watching cushiony clouds drift across the sky. In the safety of my own home, I practiced bringing that scene and those emotions
into my mind as I stood with my feet apart just a little bit, arms raised just a little bit, picturing the sky, feeling the boat, singing along with the lyrics. As time went on, I practiced in the stalls of airport restrooms, then performed muted versions as I waited in security lines.

  This would not have helped if I hadn’t had years of therapy. But it is why, if you are stuck in line behind me in an airport, you will see me in the machine, eyes closed, trying not to sway to the waves of the ocean and the music of the Beatles, smiling a little as I walk out. And this is why Willie, after innumerable pairings of unfamiliar dogs with food or play, now greets dogs who come to visit the farm with excited anticipation. His body may be a tad bit stiff, just as I am not completely happy to be in a scanner, but neither of us reacts with dread at what used to trigger extreme fear, and both of us get through it to the other side: me to a flight to somewhere, him to an exhilarating run with a new playmate. Willie and I say, “Thank you, Pavlov,” from the bottom of our limbic systems.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  One January, I was in a yoga center, an expansive room with high ceilings. The winter sun streamed through the windows, gaining strength from the glare of the snow, which lay like a sparkling white bedspread over the grass below. The light ricocheted off the old wooden floor, highlighting the dust bouncing between its beams. The room still held the energy of a thousand souls who had come to buy hardware in this small country town before the building was converted into its present use.

  I was talking with my instructor, Scott Anderson, about why so many people didn’t do the exercises he advised them to do. This was not a theoretical discussion. For each hour-long session with Scott, I was enraptured by his knowledge of the mind/body connection, soothed by his sonorous voice, and inspired to go home and do my exercises on a daily basis. And then I went home and I didn’t. Sometimes I’d do nothing for two or three weeks and begin doing them only a week or so before our next session. Sometimes I’d do them for a week or so and then let myself get caught up in the pull of other things. I’d skip a day, then another, and eventually the only thing I exercised was my ability to feel a vague but pervasive sense of guilt.