The thing was, the exercises that Scott suggested were helping me heal. When I did them, I felt better. I could tell that they strengthened my emotional core as well as my physical one.
The question is obvious: If the exercises made me feel better, why didn’t I do them more often? It wasn’t because I was too busy. None of us is too busy. Unless you are working in a coal mine fourteen hours a day, you are not too busy to do anything for a couple of minutes a day. Seductive as the “too busy” excuse may be, somehow I managed to find time to read novels at night, to watch television shows too ridiculous to mention, and to have a long lunch with a girlfriend every week. Neither was I lazy. Of all the nasty things a person could call me and be more right than wrong, “lazy” was not one of them. But somehow I found myself struggling on a daily basis to do the very thing that I knew was helping me recover.
It was yoga master Scott and my current therapist, Mare, who helped me uncover the driving force of my intransigence. You know those retractable leashes that tighten as the dog pulls forward? I had my own metaphorical leash attached to my own imaginary collar, pulling me away from the very thing making me feel better. The resistance that was dragging me back from what was good for me was this: If I am no longer the woman whose life is scripted by a series of traumas, then who am I? What would be my story now?
Stories are more than fictional accounts that we read in novels or tell our children to help them go to sleep. Stories are a way of telling ourselves who we are. Our stories can take on lives of their own and write the scripts of many generations. You can be born a Hatfield and revolve your life’s narrative around the McCoys. You can be raised in one religion and taught that all others are sinful, while your twin adopted at birth is raised to believe the opposite. Every family has its stories, passed on as powerfully as chromosomes within a DNA spiral. Sometimes these stories are spoken out loud; other times they are passed on indirectly but powerfully, as if by directors who control the action of a play but never appear on the stage. Thus, our own life legends are combinations of the accounts that we inherit from our parents and what we learn from our own experiences.
As important as stories are, we are often not consciously aware of our own narratives. But we should be. As Jill Ker Conway writes in When Memory Speaks, “All of us live with a life history in our mind, and very few of us subject it to critical analysis. But we are storytelling creatures. So it’s very important to examine your own story and make sure that the plot is the one you really want.”
If you don’t want the script you’re holding in your head and your heart, how do you write a new one? What is more primal than the internal story of your own life, whether conscious or unconscious? Changing your internal identity is as hard as having major surgery on your face without a vision of the result, a random slice here, an addition there, cutting and molding you into something you can’t imagine until it’s done. Once you look at it that way, resistance becomes understandable, like a friend trying to protect you from grievous harm. After I realized that part of my resistance was the need to hang on to a familiar narrative, I could feel a shift inside, subtle but discernible, like the soft change in light just before the sky begins to glow at dawn.
You can’t change your story until you know the current one. Putting words to your life story has tremendous value and can take away the power of a negative narrative. That can be true as much with our dogs as it is with ourselves.
• • • • •
Blazer, a seventy-pound mix of who knows what, crept into my office with his body tense and his ears back. Blazer had the flat, tight coat of a retriever, the muscles of a sumo wrestler, and the dull-brown coat of a street dog. His eyes were black and his teeth glowed in that hyper-white-television-personality way. But his looks belied his behavior. At first he was too frightened to even look at me. It took him a good twenty minutes to come over and sniff my shoes. When he did, I offered my hand for him to investigate, but I was careful not to reach toward him. After a few minutes, he leaned in to my hand and rubbed against it like a cat, then turned and sat quietly while his owner, Margaret, explained that she’d adopted him from a shelter a few months ago.
He’d begun biting her husband three weeks after he was adopted, and now he was charging after men on neighborhood walks. Margaret was quick to defend Blazer. “Blazer was abused by men, I’m sure of it. He doesn’t like men, and there’s no question he was beaten by one. He pulls away from them every time they reach for him. His previous owner must have been a man who was terribly cruel to him. You know how mean men can be.”
“He was abused” are words that trainers and behaviorists hear almost daily, but they often aren’t true. Thank heaven for that. If all the dogs who are afraid of men had actually been abused by them, the world would be a more dangerous place than it already is. However, most dogs who become defensively aggressive around guys aren’t frightened because some horrible man did horrible things to them. Fearful dogs are almost always more afraid of men than they are women, no matter how men have treated them in the past. We don’t know exactly why. It could be the way men are built (big chests and square jaws, the better to bite you with?) or the way they behave (in general, men move more assertively than women), or even the scent of testosterone, but being more afraid of men than women is almost universal in shy dogs. Women especially are quick to have stories as to why. I am reminded of the words written by Gavin de Becker: “At core, men are afraid women will laugh at them, while at core, women are afraid men will kill them.”
Blazer and Margaret’s story was a familiar one to me. A dog of an uncertain history comes into a new home and is so disoriented and fearful that at first the owners observe no behavior problems. Fear has many manifestations, and one is to suppress behavior, both good and bad. It is common for a shy or undersocialized dog to enter a new home and appear to be a stellar citizen for a few days or weeks. Like people, when a dog is frightened and overwhelmed, he often becomes quiet and compliant, especially if he feels helpless in contexts where he has no control. (Sound familiar?) These quiet, “obedient” dogs aren’t inherently well behaved; they are simply shut down. As the dog becomes more comfortable, the constraints on his behavior lessen, and he becomes able to act on his fears. That’s when the barking and the growling and sometimes the biting begin.
It appears that was what happened in Margaret’s house. Blazer wasn’t aggressive to her husband, Ted, at first, but she admitted that the dog avoided him whenever possible. In a “road to hell paved with good intentions” kind of way, Ted attempted to make friends by holding on to Blaze’s collar while petting him, not noticing that the dog froze and stopped breathing while he was trapped and unable to get away. Unable to speak, Blazer asked Ted with body language to please stay away, but like many well-meaning dog owners who miss signals of fear in their dog, Ted tried his best to make friends with Blazer by forcing the issue. Sure enough, the first nip was when Ted hugged Blazer, a sign of love and affection to us primates and a rude, threatening action to some dogs. Blazer had finally had enough, and after three weeks, he came out of his behavioral fog to defend himself.
As time went on, the dog gained enough confidence to act on his fears outside the home. He barked and lunged at unfamiliar men while walking in the neighborhood, and he learned that was an effective way to keep scary men away. Inevitably, he got worse.
Margaret came into my office with a story about Blazer, and in her case, it probably wasn’t an accurate one. We replaced it with one that was more likely and more effective at changing his behavior. Yes, we needed to acknowledge his fear of men, but it wasn’t going to help Blazer if Margaret also perceived them as potential enemies. Margaret was doing a lot of things right, including understanding that his behavior was motivated by fear, and seeking out a coach to assist her in turning things around. However, as we talked, I suspected that Blazer wasn’t the only one who had some deep-seated fears about men. While Blazer’s behavior wasn’t Margaret’s fault, her own story a
bout men was getting in the way of helping her dog.
No one can blame Margaret for having a story; we all have stories about our life, including the dogs who share it. How can we not? We are storytelling animals; stories are part of what makes us human. Everyone wants to tell stories about their dogs, me included: I am doing it right now in this book. Because of my profession, I have the luxury of writing about my dogs and talking about them in seminars, lucky me. Others don’t have those outlets, and once they learn that someone is a behaviorist or trainer, they cannot resist telling the story of their dogs. They do it on planes, at the supermarket, or when we’re at the dentist having oral surgery. I have had people follow me into the restroom and talk to me about their dogs, sometimes even after I close the stall door. I once felt compelled to say, while sitting on the toilet and barraged by a stream of information about someone’s five fighting dogs, “I’m sorry, I’m pooping. Could you wait a minute until I’m done?”
But when it comes to our dogs, there are stories and there are stories. On the one hand, there are Mark Twain–like ramblings of the amusing things our dogs have done, whether it is chewing up the dog training book you just bought or humping a pillow when your puritanical aunt came to visit. The other kinds of stories are the important ones—the narratives that define our dogs, giving them a history and an identity all their own. “This is Blazer, and he was abused.” “Cleo is the dumbest dog I’ve ever had.” These stories define a dog’s identity and frame our expectations. They can help us predict our dogs’ behavior and manage the environment to their advantage, but they can also fold our dogs inside of boxes that limit their potential. Just as parents slip into putting their children into categories (Trisha: the pretty one; color = red), well-meaning dog owners often can’t resist doing the same.
I would love to tell you that I am above this storytelling, this need to define my dog with a narrative history that filters my expectations, but animal behavior experts are human, too. I’ve held Willie’s story in my heart as carefully as if my hands held a bird that stunned itself flying into a window. This is not all bad. There would be hell to pay if I weren’t aware of Willie’s history. Years ago he exploded in the vet’s office, a barking, frenetic flurry of panic, when he was surprised at the door by a bullmastiff. The dog and owner had left but returned unexpectedly a few moments later and come face-to-face with Willie at the door. All the ingredients of trouble were there for Willie: Tight quarters. On-leash. No way out. Huge dog. Out of the blue.
Willie took one look and burst into wild-eyed barking, but in a microsecond it was over, because I know Willie’s story and was always on alert anywhere there might be another dog in a potentially problematic situation. We quickly backed up a few strides; I asked for a watch and then a sit. Willie complied and calmed down. As soon as his face relaxed, I withdrew even farther, teaching him that he could make what scared him go away by relaxing, not by charging forward.
Our stories about our dogs make their lives better in innumerable ways. We buy them padded dog beds when we see that they are aging and their joints might hurt. We arrange playdates with the cocker spaniel next door but avoid the beagle across the street who elicits a growl. Willie may be 98 percent comfortable around other dogs, but I don’t take him to dog parks or dog “parties” where he would be overwhelmed by a crush of dogs he doesn’t know. I am alert during walks when he may or may not meet an unfamiliar dog, one whose temperament is unknown to us both. And yet I barely pay attention to him greeting other border collies at a sheepdog trial, the context where he is most relaxed and comfortable meeting others of his own species.
• • • • •
Does Willie have his own stories? No one knows. We know that dogs can’t use words to tell us a story, but we don’t know if dogs can tell stories to themselves. Can they internally construct a narrative with a beginning, a middle, and an end? Perhaps they can, but not through the use of language. Certainly they can’t do what I am doing now as I write and what you are doing as you read. They can’t use a series of symbols to help them process events in their past or use them to inform their future. My best guess is that dogs share a need with people to make sense of the world, and perhaps they have some rudimentary ability to construct stories to try to do so. But their lack of linguistic ability is not to be taken lightly, and surely for them this is both a blessing and a curse, just as our own verbal skills both help and hinder us.
• • • • •
Talking can be a profound help to us when recovering from trauma. In Trauma and Recovery, Judith Herman writes that, as long as it done in the right way and at the right time, telling the story of a trauma is an important part of healing from it. Repeating the story over and over gives the events within it less power.
This was true for me. At first it was almost impossible to write about the things that had happened to me. Writing about being molested, being raped, and watching a man die at my feet was exhausting. And horrible. Emotions are contagious, even one’s own, and at each revision, it was as though I were reliving the actual event. I wasn’t able to quit my day job during this process, and sometimes I found myself reeling during the transition from reexperiencing a rape to running a business or giving a speech about canine behavior.
However, as I retold each event, the power of its effect on me was diluted. It seems that one can use up a story. Like sandpaper, it loses its edge after enough use, and changes from an object that can rub you raw to a mere piece of paper.
And so I will tell you the rest of my story—the part that has been unspeakable for all of my adult life. It is a burden I would like to lay down and turn into just another part of my life’s narrative. I am not bored with it yet, but I would like to be.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
“Trisha, what happened that night?”
The question hit me like a gunshot. My mother and I were sitting at a white-clothed table in a restaurant that overlooked a river in Quechee, Vermont. She had been talking about her English cocker spaniels and plans to redecorate her lakeside home. We’d had some wine and leg of lamb and were sharing a piece of chocolate cake for dessert. My father had died years before, and my mother had moved to New Hampshire to live year-round in a cottage on Squam Lake. I was there for a short visit.
Mom looked down and placed her coffee cup back in its saucer, her bracelets jingling. Her jewelry, always gold, always beautiful, set off her burgundy Burberry jacket. Behind her, beyond the ceiling-high windows of the restaurant, the brown waters of the river churned dramatically over a dam. Except for the sound of the river rushing outside, the restaurant was quiet. Waiters spoke in hushed tones about braised short ribs and halibut on risotto. Glasses clinked softly. The diners beside us laughed quietly. Mom turned her face back to mine, her brown eyes uncharacteristically soft. “I’ve been afraid to ask you,” she said. “But I’ve always wondered what happened that night.”
“That night?” That night had happened over thirty years ago and had never been discussed since. Not within the family, not with my friends; not even in an internal conversation with myself. “That night” had been smothered so deeply by thick layers of shame and denial that at first I didn’t even know what she was talking about. I asked, “What night? What do you mean?” But as I spoke, the realization of what she was asking flowed through me in slow motion. My heart stopped beating for a moment and then began to race as my throat tightened. I tried to keep my hand from shaking, but as I put down my fork, it rattled against the plate.
I couldn’t answer for the longest time. Suddenly, I was back in the desert, lying in the sand and listening to the owls. Paralyzed. Speechless. I hadn’t spoken then about what had happened that night, and I thought I would not be able to speak about it now, with my mother sitting, waiting, staring at my face.
Her question came as a shock. I had been so successful at burying my shame about what I’d done that it had never occurred to me to wonder about my parents’ experience of that night, or how they’d lived w
ith the questions they must have had throughout the years.
I looked up at my mother’s face and saw none of the black-eyed displeasure that she could express as “Queen Pam,” as my sisters and I would sometimes call her. Elegant and noble in so many ways, my English-born and -raised mother could have moments of imperious, pursed-lipped anger. This was not one of them. Her eyes were misty and her face so open and vulnerable that I knew I had to answer her. Initially, I had buried the truth to protect my family, but staying silent wasn’t protecting anybody but myself.
“I faked it. I made it all up.” My hand, now hidden under the table in my lap, continued to shake. The shaking spread to my body until I was shivering, as if the temperature in the room had plummeted. “I couldn’t tell you what had really happened back then. I just couldn’t. I didn’t know myself why I did it; I couldn’t even allow myself to think about it. Now I think I did it because it was the only way I could say that I needed help.”
I told her more about that night, how I had looked down at myself as if perched on the ceiling, watching someone who looked like me get ready to drive to the stable. I told her that Bruce had been creeping into my bedroom, just a few feet from her own, and giving me the choice: “Accept having your body violated, or speak up and devastate your sister and your parents.”
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