My mother’s face crumpled like a paper napkin. I said, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” over and over again. Tears streamed down her cheeks. It was the first time I had ever seen her cry. We both waved the waiter away as he approached, our heads turned away from him and each other, looking out the window at the roiling river. I said nothing to her about the man who fell nor about being raped a decade later. It was too much for her to hear. It was too much for me to tell.
Pale and shaken, we sat in the restaurant for the longest time, tears flowing down our faces. It broke my heart to see my mother so upset. What mother wouldn’t be devastated to learn that her daughter had been molested in her own home, just a few feet away from her? We must have said “I’m sorry” to each other a hundred times. Finally, the waiter, who had studiously avoided us for the last half hour, gathered the courage to bring us the bill. We left the restaurant, heads held high, putting on a good face, willpower propelling us to the car in the parking lot.
My mother did not hug me; she was never a hugger. She didn’t like being touched, not even by her own children. I knew that she loved me deeply, and I also knew that my family’s mantra—that a stiff upper lip can get you through anything—was no longer going to work.
• • • • •
Within days, I found a counselor, Anne Simon Wolf, who may not have saved my life, but she helped me save myself. I was lost for a while in a fog of recovery, and I’m not sure where I would have ended up without her. I told her my story, the whole long, nasty truth of it. I poured out my guilt and shame in between gulping sobs that engulfed my body. Anne didn’t ask questions; she just listened. After my words began to slow and my crying began to wind down, she began to respond.
She explained that what I had experienced the night I faked the kidnapping was called “disassociation.” It is a relatively common effect of severe trauma in which one detaches from one’s self, as I had that night in the kitchen. Being molested, and watching a man fall through the air and die at my feet—while being part of a family in which troubles were to be soldiered through silently—had caught up to me. By faking the kidnapping, I was reaching out in the only way that I knew how. Giving voice to what was happening at the time was impossible to contemplate. You have to believe that you have a choice in order to make one.
I also told Anne about the rape in Minneapolis, although I had never thought of it with anything but shame. How could I call it a rape? It was my fault, pure and simple. Yes, I was still reeling from my marriage falling apart; yes, I was desperate to feel lovable and attractive and to be able to laugh and enjoy being a woman with a man again. And no, I did not give him permission to overpower me and flip me upside down like a rag doll and hurt me more than I believed to be physically possible. But really, rape? No stranger had leaped out of the bushes with a knife and threatened to kill me if I didn’t submit. The loaded gun in the bedroom may have sat next to my head, but he never picked it up.
But the guilt and shame over the sexual abuse was nothing compared to my guilt over faking a kidnapping. In my mind, I had switched from victim to perpetrator, and initially, I found the knowledge unbearable.
• • • • •
Once my story spilled out to Anne, I felt as though I’d slammed into my past at a million miles an hour, as if into an impenetrable wall. Have you ever seen powerboat races, the kind in which boats go up to 250 miles per hour until some tiny thing goes wrong and the boat explodes as if hit by a bomb? That was me: Trisha the exploding boat. The term “fell apart” had an entirely new meaning for me now. It felt like “I”—whoever that was—was strewn about in the water like the result of a dramatic crash. Sometimes you don’t find all the pieces.
I was dumbstruck from the shock. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t think. I canceled my appointments for the rest of the week. I felt like some metaphorical bottom had dropped out from underneath me and I was falling into an infinite abyss. I had no sense of where I was, who I was, or where I fit into the universe anymore.
The day after I told my therapist the entire story, I sat on my couch in a state of emotional intensity that was unbearable. I called Anne and told her I kept thinking about leaping in front of a car; that I was positive that I would not and yet was equally sure that I could not bear to live another minute feeling as I was. She got me through that hour, and then I lived through to the next, and then the next.
I blurted out to the people in my office that I’d been raped—that was the easiest story to describe. Karen London, a PhD animal behaviorist doing consults in my office, showed up at my door with flowers. I hope I thanked her—her kindness meant the world to me—but I might not have. I found myself unable to speak after having finally given voice to much of what had happened in my past. After a few days, I was able to function, and I read voraciously about sexual trauma. Mostly, I cried so much it was hard to see the print on the page.
This happened when I was living alone at the farm. In some ways it was good to be alone; to let my sobs turn into screams without needing to censor myself for the sake of others. It was also hard to be alone, but really, I wasn’t. Willie’s uncle, Cool Hand Luke, lay beside me night after night, licking my face, curled up against me. His warmth and his love helped me to pull out of the high-speed emotional spirals, staying alive one breath at a time.
• • • • •
I would like to tell you that after the truth about my past came out, I was soon able to process it and move on. On the contrary, all of my fears became conscious ones. I became more afraid of being alone, of entering the dark barn at night, of loud noises that came out of nowhere. I lost the ability to sleep well, managing a few hours a night at best. I had nightmares and flashbacks and was jumpy and exhausted. As Anne told me in one of our talks, “There is a reason why people repress things.”
But I kept at it. I wrote in a journal every morning. I saw Anne often, and although the sessions were exhausting, they were helpful. Anne suggested that I name and describe the voice inside me that saw the world as a place of relentless danger. I named her ONO, because she reacted to much of life by saying “Oh no!” just as my father had. Anne suggested that I name all the personas within me and sit back while they had a conversation. It might sound a bit crazy, but in reality, it was the opposite. We all have different parts of ourselves that are often in contention, and as with the boy who cried wolf, ONO’s cries of warning were so frequent that I had tried to ignore them for decades. “What if ONO was right? That there really are dangers lurking around you?” said Anne. “What if ONO could stop yelling all the time if she was taken seriously?”
I named and described all the different aspects of my personality, from the academic who loves logic and algebra (Margaret, short, clipped hair, always wears biological brown) to the brave warrior woman (Xena, long dark hair, wears leather and has biceps like a rock climber). These two and several others sat down and let ONO speak. “You have to listen to me!” ONO said. “Haven’t you all figured out how dangerous life can be?” Margaret, Xena, and everyone else did indeed listen and thanked ONO for providing an important service. “You are right, the world can be a dangerous place, and it is good that you are there to keep us alert.” They also reminded her that she was not alone. That Xena the warrior woman was always there to protect her. That Margaret could logically analyze situations and decide when real trouble was on the horizon and when it was a false alarm.
This exercise helped me immensely. I became less fearful once I learned that the frightened voice within me would stop yelling once I listened to it. When a sense of panic began to rise up in me like water on a rising tide, I learned to gather the facets of my personality and listen to what they had to say. “Yes, ONO, we hear you. Entering a dark barn at night can indeed be scary; that’s a perfectly reasonable fear. It probably reminds you of the rape. But has anything ever happened in all the years you’ve walked into your barn alone at night? And wouldn’t your dogs notice first if there were someone inside? Why don’t you op
en the door and send one in first if you’re feeling nervous?”
These imaginary conversations were not so magical that they transformed my life. I doubt there is any one thing that can help those who are recovering from multiple traumas. But accepting everything that was inside of me, especially the fear I had squelched for decades, made life profoundly easier. It was only one part of what I did during my recovery—which included the Hoffman Process, practicing yoga, meditating, and telling my story—yet it helped. A lot.
• • • • •
However, life continued to remind me that you never close the book on dealing with your past. You just keep reading the chapters over and over, until you begin to understand them on a deeper level.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
In early 2010, Lassie died of liver cancer. Just days afterward, I found myself sitting at the computer, searching on the Internet for another dog. After any of mine had passed away in the past, I hadn’t been able to think about another dog for a long time. It took two years for me to get another Great Pyrenees after my first one died. And while it simply is not possible to love a dog more than I loved Lassie, it was different this time. I’m not sure why. True, I couldn’t rely on the often injured Willie as my working sheepdog, and I also wanted him to have another playmate. But there was a yearning inside me to get another dog that I still can’t quite explain. Being without Lassie was like a sentence without a period, a sip of liquid without a swallow.
Finding a good match for Willie wouldn’t be easy. Just like relationships between family members, some interactions between dogs are sweet and easy, others prickly and difficult. Hundreds of my clients have had a well-behaved, happy dog until a newcomer came onto the scene and blew the household’s contentment out the window. Granted, at four years old, Willie was profoundly improved. Few would believe that his behavioral problems had been so serious, because now he got along well with a variety of dogs. His best friends included a huge Doberman, the Serena Williams of dogdom, who told him once in no uncertain terms to stop trying to herd her. Willie flattened his ears and grinned like a schoolboy and thereafter worshipped the ground she walked on. He loved visits from the sweet, submissive border collie Max; they’d race each other up and down the swales of the orchard pasture, running shoulder to shoulder like Thoroughbreds on a track, tongues lolling, eyes bright as water droplets. Willie went on country walks with a pack of dogs with minimal management. At times he and another dog would posture and things would begin to look tense, but a quiet “Let’s go” would break the ice.
Indoors, it was a different matter. It’s common for dogs to be more comfortable where there is room to maneuver, and Willie could be fine with a dog when they were outside. But once he was in the house, his eyes would harden, and he’d flick his tongue in and out like a snake testing the air. “Tongue flicks” are often signs of low-level anxiety in dogs; you can see them in the lobby of any veterinary clinic. And in this case, size mattered. Large dogs made Willie so nervous that I stopped asking them into the house while we worked our way up the scale. The smaller the better, as far as Willie was concerned.
So, after Lassie’s death, it seemed wise to get an adult lap-sized dog; or, if I wanted another border collie, to start with a puppy.
I searched all the shelters and rescue sites, but nothing showed up that motivated me to check further. The dogs either chased cats or fought with other dogs or, for some reason, didn’t grab my heart. I kept at it sporadically, and eventually, a good friend mentioned a breeding of two working border collies who were famous for their good dispositions. The puppies from previous litters were reported to be bombproof—lovely with people, good with other dogs, and good working dogs besides. My plan had been to rescue a little lapdog first, then complete the picture in a year or two with another border collie. But here was a potentially great litter of sheepdogs, calling to me to check it out.
Finding the right pet dog can be a challenge, but it is particularly difficult to find a dog who is both a great companion and a competitive working sheepdog. I have had innumerable clients who wanted help in their search for a “one-in-a-million dog” to replace the one they had. After they listed their criteria—friendly with people and all other dogs, no behavioral problems, healthy, always obedient, nonshedding, tolerant of grandchildren—I had to remind them that one-in-a-million dogs are just that. By definition, we know the odds of finding another one.
I knew enough not to ask for perfection, but after twenty-three years working full-time with dogs who had severe behavioral problems, six years of dealing with medically challenged elderly dogs, and years of working with Willie, I needed a dog who wasn’t going to present extreme challenges. Not a perfect dog; just a normal one who needed patience and training but didn’t need extensive physical or behavioral therapy.
First and foremost, the dog had to get along with Willie. After hearing raves about the parents and siblings of the upcoming litter, Jim and I drove a few hours north to meet the parents. I’d known the father dog for years and loved him for his stable benevolence. Mom-to-be was tiny and squiggly-sweet; as soft as silk around people; and a force to be reckoned with around sheep. Everything suggested that this litter could produce a great pup for our family, so back we went two months later to pick one out. We left Willie at home to avoid the overwhelming cacophony of barking dogs, and because I wasn’t confident he’d behave appropriately around a litter of puppies.
We settled on a tricolored pup named Mick. He cheerfully left his littermates to follow us away from their pen, and paid little attention to the wind slapping the leaves around in the trees shading the grass. He leaped after a thrown piece of paper like a coyote on a field mouse, picked it up, and returned it to me, eyes glowing, tail wagging.
I liked the looks of him, I liked the genetics of the litter, and I liked the way he responded to everything we did. I picked him up and asked for just one more test. Given Willie’s extreme reaction to unfamiliar dogs, it seemed wise to see how the pup behaved around dogs he didn’t know. I asked the breeder to let out a dog whom the pups had never met. The litter stayed inside a large circular wire pen set out in the open while an unfamiliar adult dog was allowed to run up to the pen and greet them. All the pups ran to the fence to say hello, tails thumping back and forth, whining with excitement. Except one. Mick ran to the center of the pen and sat as still as a statue. Damn. Okay, take a breath; maybe he’ll relax. But no, as the older dog ran circles around the pen and the rest of the litter followed him like particles of iron being pulled around by a magnet, Mick stayed motionless, head down, mouth closed tight.
As the wind continued to blow, Jim and I sat in the car and talked about whether we should take Mick home. Everything looked so good except for this one red flag. How important was it? After going back and forth for thirty minutes, we agreed to take the pup home for a three-day trial to see how he and Willie got along.
When we got home, we let the pup explore the yard a bit before letting Willie out to meet him. Willie’s reaction was all you could hope for—he met Mick with a relaxed body and a loosely wagging tail. Mick’s reaction, however, was déjà vu all over again. He was terrified of Willie. He slammed himself to the ground, yipped in terror, and tried to run under the car. I stood still for a moment, trying to breathe normally, my heart sinking. Was I going to go through this all over again? Spend three or four years working on getting a dog to behave normally, as I’d done with Willie? Too soon to say, I reminded myself.
We let Mick become accustomed to Willie as the afternoon shadows lengthened and the sheep came down with their lambs for the evening grain. By nightfall, Mick was approaching Willie for attention. Good! By the next morning he was mounting him. Relentlessly. Mounting in general doesn’t worry me; puppies and adult dogs do it often in play, and unless a female is in heat, it is related to social relationships, not reproduction. It is a behavior you’d expect to see between puppies or two older dogs, but a tiny pup mounting an adult male just hours after mee
ting? Hmm.
More problematically, Mick didn’t look like a dog mounting another during play. He did it with an intensity that was chilling. He looked like an adult dog breeding a female in estrus. Experienced stud dogs don’t mess around—they take an evaluative sniff every time they pass the female, and if she’s ovulating, they hop on and clasp the female’s hindquarters with locked forelegs. As they penetrate the female, they pin their ears to their skulls, squint their eyes shut, and flick their tongues in and out. There’s nothing playful or even pleasurable-looking about it. The dogs look focused and serious, as if they have a difficult job that requires all their attention and concentration. That’s exactly how this tiny dog looked: serious. And grown up. It looked very, very wrong.
He did it continually, obsessively, and Willie did nothing to stop him. If Willie had just snarled him off, it might have stopped there, but Willie stood looking downtrodden and helpless while it happened. The dog who insisted on full control over interactions with adults became as helpless as a newborn lamb around a puppy. I intervened when I could, but every time I turned around, it began again. In all my years of working with dogs, I couldn’t remember seeing a pup this age behave in the same way.
What should I make of it? Was it predictive of trouble down the road? There’s no way to know for sure if it was an indication of problematic behavior later in life. However, a young pup who is both terrified of unfamiliar dogs and behaves like an adult male at eight weeks of age around familiar ones is not within the bell curve of normal.
At times like these, we behaviorists wish we knew less. Ignorance truly can be bliss, and I wondered at every moment whether we should keep Mick or not. On the one hand, Mick was almost a dream dog when away from Willie. In under two days, he’d mastered sitting and lying down on cue and was learning to walk politely on a leash. There was one exception: He urinated more often than any puppy I’ve ever had. Although I took him out every ten minutes, he’d pee in the house in a heartbeat, barely pausing to squat while the urine flew out from underneath him. It was frustrating and time-consuming but hardly a deal-breaker. Border collies are famously easily to house-train, so after getting the all-clear from the vet, I expected the issue to resolve itself soon.
The Education of Will Page 17