The Education of Will

by Patricia B. McConnell

  • • • • •

  Lesson learned: I will never finish dealing with trauma. But when I take the risks necessary to face it, I get better and better at it.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  The farm. It calls to me when I’m away, like some organic siren song that won’t stop, a tree-lined tinnitus always singing in my ear. Twelve acres of wild geraniums and dandelions, wild deer and domestic sheep, the farm becomes a single entity to me when I am gone. It won’t let me go.

  The farm is my most important therapist. I told Jim when we first began dating to never ask me to choose between him and the farm. Every day I give thanks for being able to live in the country, and every day I savor the peace that only nature can provide. My farm is nestled in the Driftless Area of southern Wisconsin, a region skipped by the glaciers that bulldozed much of the state into flat plains. The land is a rolling pastoral mix of woods and pastures, fields and streams. It is simply lovely. Frank Lloyd Wright once said, “Nothing picks you up in its arms and so gently, almost lovingly, cradles you as do these southwestern Wisconsin hills.”

  It’s not always so benevolent. One summer, there’d been a drought and a heat wave for months on end. It had been like living in an oven. The wilting roadside plants broadcast the weather report on a daily basis, and the crisp brown grass began to crackle under my feet as I walked to the barn. The neighbor’s soybeans curled up and began to die. Each individual cornstalk in the fields surrounding the farm looked increasingly desperate. Corn is a grass—just a big, tall one—and when it is starved for water, the normally fat green leaves turn silver and skinny, stretching upward with spiky tips like pineapple plants. It was painful to watch them degrade as the hot, dry days went on, the sun beating down as in a movie scene titled “Guy dying of thirst crawls through the desert sands under the scorching sun.” By the time the rains finally came, the pasture where the sheep used to graze was mostly dirt. It was hard to imagine that not long ago it had been a lush, tiny forest of Kentucky bluegrass and white clover, wetting my shoes with dew as Willie and I walked the sheep to the orchard pasture in the morning.

  The dogs and I were confined inside much of the time, the heat so extreme that going outside was a kind of physical assault. The sheep lay in the barnyard like dogs in the tropics, flat on their sides, legs extended, desperate to disperse whatever heat they could. People began selling off their livestock. I didn’t take my usual walks, or work Willie on sheep, or weed the perennial garden. I used what little energy I had to save the trees, hauling hoses from one end of the yard to the other.

  Yet as brutal as living with the land can be, I wouldn’t trade my connection to it for anything. Sometimes I think I owe my life to it. It might seem strange to talk about the healing force of nature, and how it has helped me specifically, by telling a sad story about the effects of a drought. But it is not just beautiful flowers and awe-inspiring vistas that do a body good.

  Living in the country includes sprained ankles, wasp stings, sunburns, and droughts that break your heart. It means bitter winter nights in the barn, trying to save a dying ewe gasping for air, her eyes rolling, her chest heaving, while your fingers are so cold they sting like fire, or extracting a deer whose leg caught in your fence only to learn she was killed the next day by a neighbor’s dog.

  But I love it still. I love the good and I love hating the bad. The fact that the farm is not all pretty and comforting somehow makes it even more valuable. One day there’s the shocking finality of a dead newborn lamb in the barn. The next day the healthy ones frolic, my spirits rising with them as they toss their heels to the sky. Bearing witness to the inevitable link between the living and the dead helps me to feel centered, with the earth holding me up and the land surrounding me with something bigger and better than my own little life.

  • • • • •

  I’m not the only one who values the natural world. Our universal attraction to life on earth is visible everywhere you look for it. Hotel rooms with a view of trees or water cost more than those that don’t. Homes with bushes and mature trees are worth more than those without them. We cherish flowers and send them for comfort after the death of a loved one, or to celebrate a victory, or to woo a mate. That’s an amazing range of contexts, if you think about it—comfort, congratulations, and courtship.

  This attraction to plants and animals is therapeutic in many ways. We know that spending time outside decreases the incidence of depression and anxiety in children, increases their scores on standardized tests, and, according to one report, makes them “nicer” to others and enhances social interactions. Viewing a nature video speeds recovery from stressful events in adults. Living next to a park or even having a tree outside the window reduces domestic violence. Spending time out-of-doors reduces stress and mental fatigue, restores mental clarity, and increases one’s sense of well-being. Richard Louv, author of Last Child in the Woods, sums up the value of being in nature: “These are the moments when the world is made whole.”

  What the research rarely mentions is that spending time outside isn’t always pleasant. Anyone who camps on a regular basis knows what it is like to huddle inside a tent for hours on end while the rain dumps down in buckets. The beauty of a pristine forest can be hard to appreciate when there are clouds of mosquitoes hovering around your face. That is especially true of farming, where the weather, the plants, and the animals decide your agenda, and you have no choice but to comply with their demands. A difficult lambing cancels your plans to see the play you’ve had tickets to for months. Spring planting can’t be put off until summer because you hurt your back. No matter how impressed we humans might be with our superior intellects and skills, we don’t get to call all the shots. That’s not always a negative. It’s not such a bad thing to have a primal understanding that we are not above nature but a part of it.

  • • • • •

  You don’t have to live on a farm to retain a connection to nature; perhaps nothing gives us the same sense of connection with the rest of life on earth as dogs. Although our relationship with them is no less than a biological miracle, it is a mixed bag. Dogs bring us joy one moment and a mouthful of cat poop the next. They make us laugh, and soothe our souls, and destroy the quilt our grandmother made especially for us. Sometimes they lick away our tears in the morning and bite our faces in the evening. The balance between happiness and hardship varies, depending on the dog and the home into which it has come. Some dogs bound into our lives as pure light, a living version of television’s Lassie, enriching our days and warming our nights. Others come with baggage and, like many of the dogs I saw as a behaviorist, cause us no end of problems. But no matter who they are or how they behave, dogs have become our most important connection to the rest of the natural world. They become a part of our families, and yet they have teeth that can rip open a deer hide. They sleep on our couches but lure us outside, alerting us to the squirrel in the tree, the dead earthworm in the grass. One moment, they swell our hearts with love, just as a sunset fills us with awe. Minutes later, we grimace in disgust as they smear their shoulders with the stink of dead fish. But like our connections to the rest of nature, being with dogs makes us whole. It doesn’t have to be pretty all the time to do that.

  • • • • •

  My relationship with Willie wasn’t always pretty. At its darkest time, it barely seemed worth it. But somehow I knew that Willie was not only my connection to nature, he was my connection to my deepest self. Knowing one’s self is not always sweet sunrises and daisies waving in the breeze, either. Sometimes it is thunderstorms and drenching rain, or a morning so bitter cold that the air burns your lungs. But when you have a dog, you have to go outside no matter what the weather. Willie taught me that as long as I was dressed for the weather, I’d be glad I went.

  • • • • •

  Every summer, barn swallows chitter just a few feet away from my study, skimming the air currents, landing precariously on a rope we strung up on the porch for the attachment of holi
day lights. When Willie and I go outside, the birds swoosh away and begin swooping over the grass to snatch up more insects. Last spring a swallow nested in the garage, her nest built of mud and fiber on top of a light fixture. It was a foolish choice, because each day I’d leave the farm and close the garage door, keeping the parents either shut out or trapped inside while I was gone. I’d drive back up to the house, press the automatic door opener, and the adults would swoop in or out, squawking in what sounded like avian anger, desperate to get to the nest or out to feed. After a few days, I left the garage door open, unwilling to witness the slow death of a poorly placed clutch of baby birds.

  Each day the chirps of the babies got louder, and soon they were so big their bodies leaked over the edges of the nest, like a blousy woman overflowing her bra. They began flapping their wings and leaning precariously into the air. I worried they would fall before their wings were strong enough to hold them. I kept the cat inside, and while she paced and yowled behind the door, I talked to the birds: “Hurry up, it’s time to move on.”

  And then one day when Willie and I left the house on our morning walk, all five baby birds were straining so far out of the nest that I knew their first flight was inevitable. One at a time, they dived out and flapped in sloppy circles all around us, their movements uncoordinated and seemingly inadequate to keep them aloft. At the last minute, as they descended closer and closer to the ground, their wings took hold, and they managed to stay airborne. They fluttered for a few more seconds, seemingly at the edge of disaster, and then slalomed out of the garage and crash-landed into a nearby spruce tree. But they took off again, and gradually, flap by flap, the movements of their wings became more coordinated. Their paths through the air became cleaner, more purposeful.

  They began to dip and turn, faster and faster, until within just a few minutes I was surrounded by five expert flyers, zooming right and buzzing left, streaking toward my face and banking away at the last minute, so close I could see their eyes shine. Willie and I stood together, still and silent, smack in the middle of the most amazing air show on earth, performed by five miniature pilots with the right stuff. As they swooped and soared around us, they appeared to be overwhelmed with the beauty and power they had inside themselves all along—they just had to take the risk to find it.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Forgiveness is something you can’t force. It has to be approached indirectly, like two dogs avoiding eye contact while they greet each other in carefully paced semicircles. It began for me by first having the courage to acknowledge all that had happened and seeking help to resolve the aftermath. I then had to acknowledge a red haze of anger and fear, each like a mythical monster imbued with the power to eat me alive.

  However, dragons can be slayed; that’s why we made them up. But first you have to face them.

  In part, I found forgiveness in hearing the stories of others. Listening to my friends tell their stories filled me with compassion and made it easier for me to feel compassion for myself. There can be no forgiveness without compassion, which is no doubt why it is a key tenet in the world’s religions.

  However, it is harder to forgive ourselves than it is to forgive others. We are hardwired to remember negative events over positive ones, so we ruminate on our mistakes and the slights of others. Our ability to use language means that we can spend hours mentally criticizing what we did in the past or worrying about what we’ll do in the future. No wonder we love dogs, who don’t need meditation retreats to get over the shame of getting into the garbage last Thursday.

  What dogs can’t do is tap into the knowledge that they are not alone; that they can be special as unique individuals and yet be a part of a whole that cradles and supports them. The solace I got from hearing the stories of others came in part from learning that my reactions to trauma were common and understandable, and from the sympathy and compassion that flowed between us. Bathing myself in compassion for others helped me redirect some of it toward myself. Talking to vibrant, intelligent, and accomplished women who had survived sexual and physical violence inspired me, awed me, and began to chip away at one of the darkest effects of being a victim of trauma: hanging on to one’s “victimhood” as a way of feeling special.

  We are a culture that idolizes “special.” Our children need unique names now, or if they have a common name, they need to spell it differently. I did a book signing once in Los Angeles, and a man asked me to sign the book to him. His name was Bob. Except he spelled it B-o-b-b. The same need to be special exists among some dog lovers. Dogs adopted from neighbors or as retired breeding dogs are “rescues”; simple behavioral problems are explained in hushed voices with the words “I know he’s been abused.” But being special isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be, because what comes along with feeling special is feeling different—which makes it all the harder to feel the strength that comes from sharing one’s experience with the rest of the world.

  Dogs can’t have discussions such as this, but perhaps they don’t need to. Their lack of language keeps them better connected to the universal truth that we are all a part of a bigger whole, and that the boundaries between “me” and “others” are not as clear as we humans often think. Language may be much of what makes us human, but putting our experiences into words creates a kind of distance from them, a form of simultaneous translation that is never quite the same as the original.

  Language, however, was an important part of what helped me find my way to forgiveness. My therapy sessions with Anne and Mare changed my life. My sister Wendy, whose boyfriend molested me, has cried multiple times with me about what happened and has stood by me like a warrior woman on the road to my recovery. So has my other sister, Liza.

  After I told my mother what had happened “that night” and why I had done it, she began to open up to me about her own life in ways she never had before. She had endured her own traumas, including barely surviving a historic fire at her boarding school, Battle Abbey, in which she and her classmates made it out of the conflagration with seconds to spare. The roof caved in behind them as they marched out of the building, the flames from the fire so high they were seen for miles. My mother was the only girl whose parents did not come to take her home the next day, believing the headmistress’s admonition that she’d be “fine, just fine” without any help from her family. It all sounded so very familiar.

  She repeated this story often as she lay dying in 2004. Clearly, it had been one of the most defining events of her life, and yet she never got the chance to acknowledge her terror and her sense of being abandoned. All she had was the belief that she should bury the memory and be strong, using nothing but the force of willpower to get her through each day.

  I was lucky. I had so many resources that she never had. Sometimes I conjure her up as a little girl, wild-eyed and alone with the sky in flames behind her. I hold her in my lap and tell her she’s not alone, just as sometimes I imagine myself at fifteen and tell the confused, frightened girl that it’s okay. It’s okay.

  • • • • •

  Somehow, after facing what had happened to me and learning how to rise above it, I began to sleep again. I had barely slept at all for eight months after my mother asked me what had happened, and years later, Willie’s excessive startle response had set me back to sleeping only a few hours at a time. But gradually, all the work began to pay off, and I began to sleep through the night again.

  At some point, I stopped feeling—no, knowing—that someone was about to slam a baseball bat into my head. Not long ago I was walking down a street and realized with surprise that it had been a long time since I’d been compelled to turn around so the faceless man with the bat would disappear. Nor do I envision my home and dogs burned to ashes, as I did for years every day when I drove down the road that flows like water toward the farm.

  • • • • •

  My life now has changed in other ways. I don’t see clients anymore. I write and I speak about animal behavior, but I am done working with aggressi
ve dogs. I loved it, thrived on it, but twenty-three years of it was enough. Although not every one of my cases came to a successful conclusion, I helped thousands of dogs and the people who loved them, and I am grateful to have had that opportunity. In part, I stopped because I am slower to react now; I don’t have the reflexes I used to. But perhaps as important, I no longer feel the need to face my fears in the same way I did before. Psychologists know that people seek out familiar situations, even when those circumstances are dangerous or abusive. And there I was, putting myself in danger every day, working with dogs who could have badly injured me if I made the wrong move.

  But in that case, unlike in my past, I wasn’t helpless. In my work with aggressive dogs, I had knowledge and skill and, in a short period of time, enough experience to face the threats and turn them around. Perhaps that was why I loved working with fearful dogs even when they were dangerous. Not only did I empathize with them, but I was able to deal with danger in a context where I had control.

  That didn’t mean I was fearless. Early in my career, I called John Wright, one of the country’s first PhD animal behaviorists, and blurted out that a black-eyed standard poodle had scared me to the core when he began leaping up to my face and snapping at it. “That’s good!” John said. “Listen to your body; it will tell you if you are in danger. Don’t ever be afraid of being afraid.”

  Working with dogs taught me, as well as anything else, about listening to that inner voice and facing my fears rather than running away from them. I learned to reclassify my own fear as valuable information that I could use to change a dog’s behavior. I began to sense early on when a dog might be dangerous to me and when it was not, to figure out what the dog wanted or needed, and to use that to change his behavior. When that little voice inside of me—the little voice that I spent so long trying to ignore—said, “Be afraid,” I learned to welcome it and thank it for the information. I learned to carry the fear while relaxing my body and breathing deeply when I was nervous, signaling the dog to relax, too. I learned that you could be frightened and get away with it—as long as you didn’t run from the fear, and you learned how to control it.