Cat Projection 101
Step Away from the Cat’s Brain!
When you are frustrated, you have picked the absolute worst time to decide you know what your cat is thinking. Projection is a defense mechanism in which we ascribe unwanted feelings onto others; so in this case, the angrier you get with your cat, the more apt you are to blame him, to say that he’s acting out because he hates you.
Disengage and Observe
Instead of creating and living inside interspecies drama, see misbehavior as an opportunity to document patterns. So write them down, including as many details as possible. The more information you have, the easier it will be to figure out what’s going on as you review even a week’s worth of these patterns.
Afterward, given a bit of emotional space to process what I had seen, I knew one thing; I had to learn to sense when Benny was getting overstimulated, and once I knew what filled the balloon, I had to let the air out of it before it burst. I had to train both him and myself. He was teaching me the deeper nature of himself and I owed it to him to do the thing that came hardest to me—listen. I had to also completely redefine the nature of overstimulation; it wasn’t just a petting-induced by-product of the full-body over-stroke, what you would traditionally think of as “ramping him up”; the space itself could cause it—the people in my apartment, the rain on the roof, or just one person whose energy was completely sideways (more often than not). The territory was speaking ill; it rankled his skin and what was underneath just as much as if someone had screamed in his face or slapped him. As I tuned in to his sensitivity more and more in an effort to curb the violent quakes and aftershocks, I realized that he was already telling me about his frustration well before he bared his teeth, and I just hadn’t been listening. Benny’s meow was only uttered in times of disgust or frustration. It was decidedly one syllable and hoarse, the kind of hoarse that came from lack of use. Imagine the vague blend of being pissed off and startled you feel as you clear your voice and answer the phone at 4:00 a.m. That would be the sound, in cat. He would either vocalize, open his mouth slowly, or a combination of both, and then I knew it was about to be game on. When I saw his mouth just start opening, I would correct him—“Unh-unh!”—and his mouth would close and I’d praise him. No more would I give the cute mouthiness leeway, lest I also give passage to the beast underneath. Approaching a hand or a person in general with an open mouth was not an option. It took a long time and painstaking consistency. But it got done.
Energy in Means
Energy Out
There’s no reasoning with an overstimulated cat—you can’t talk him down. You can, however, exercise him down, redirecting his energy onto an appropriate target like an interactive toy or even a laser pointer.
Here are some possible sources of overstimulation you might want to keep an eye out for:
Petting-induced overstimulation
Play aggression
Environmentally induced overstimulation
Energetic overstimulation
Say What?
Cats have over a hundred different kinds of vocalizations. Here are some of them:
Meowing is one of the rare times cats meet us halfway: Once they’ve reached adulthood, they only use meowing for us, not for each other. Just as we do the slow-blink Cat I Love You as a way to reach out to them, they meow as a way to reach out to us.
Purring is often a sign of happiness, but cats can also purr when ill or in distress. The remarkable purr is a vibration of the voice box that occurs at a frequency between 25 and 150 Hz, a frequency that is believed to promote healing and bone growth.
If you hear a cat growling or hissing, she’s probably feeling threatened by something she needs to defend herself against.
If you’ve ever heard your cat make a chirping sound while watching birds, she’s hypnotizing her prey!
Benny didn’t outright kill Jen, though, so he must have been aware that there was something she could bring into my life. About a week after we met, I was on her balcony getting a buzz on from my friends, Mr. Flask and Ms. One-Hitter. When I stepped back in, she was waiting for me, standing a step back from the sliding glass door. “Listen,” she said, “I’m a recovering drug addict and alcoholic.”
Fuck, I thought. Here it comes….
“I have over fifteen years clean and sober. If this goes anywhere, all I ask is two things. First, I don’t really care what you do, but don’t do it around me.”
Well, that works, I continued my inner dialogue.
“Second, come to a meeting with me, just so you can see how I live.” I think my inner dialogue went external for just a second. I might have sighed and looked skyward. I should’ve seen the setup from a mile away, but I didn’t; I just thought that if I didn’t go she’d stop having sex with me. And we couldn’t let that happen.
There were hundreds of people at the Friday meeting, enough to make me feel comfortable going with Jen and disappearing into the crowd, especially because yes, I was very high. Jen had told me it was a speaker meeting, which also was a source of great relief since nobody would get mad at me if I didn’t stand up and say, “Hi, my name is Jackson, and I am so not an addict/alcoholic.” I was free to listen to these automatons, these Stepford Wives, swear on the burning bush that their lives were saved by faith in God and now they were free of the compulsion to get loaded, or whatever they would spew to make them feel better about themselves. Then I could go home with Jen, having done my boyfriendly duty, and get laid with the kind of wanton, furniture-throwing passion reserved for Hollywood summer blockbusters.
The speaker for the evening was Dmitri, a fast-talking lawyer in a business suit that would’ve paid my rent for three months. And even though he probably had been in that suit for fourteen hours, eaten two meals, gone to the gym, and been in court, he still made messy look damn good. He took a deep breath. Drink of water, elbows on the dais, smiled and heaved an out breath with the subtext, “long damned week? Who’s with me?” Straightened back up again. Straightened his hopelessly unstraightenable tie. Finally: “Hey, I’m Dmitri and I’m an addict and an alcoholic.” He said this with pride, almost like the spotlight was shining down on the Grand Ole Opry stage and he was saying, “Hello, I’m Johnny Cash.” At that moment I released judgment for a second—Johnny Cash was an addict. In fact, Johnny, Ray Charles, Miles Davis, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Clapton… for every romantically tragic puke-choking victim, there was a survival story. And not just survival. These were artists who continued to make great art even after they’d abandoned the liquid muse. And this went through my head in an instant, between his intro and the fidgety first words of his story. I should’ve known in that instant that it was going to be a long night.
Dmitri talked for a solid hour, but it only took me five minutes to recognize myself in his film noir treatment of a “regular” life. “When my wife served me with divorce papers two days before Christmas, I mean whatever it shouldn’t have bothered me, I’m Jewish, but in my state any way to shake my fist at God, any way to find a storm to rail against was good by me. Served by the same goddamned process-server punk that I used in my practice!” He laughed riotously, a cue for the sober hundreds to erupt with him. “I knew I needed to sign them but I couldn’t, wouldn’t, it was the last stand of my famous will, on Christmas Day 8:00 the kids were with her somewhere, she wouldn’t even fucking tell me where they were, those poor kids, I imagined, Christmas in a Best Western somewhere without their Daddy because that bitch HAD to stand on ceremony, mind you I’m so shitfaced that I’m actually elaborating this out loud while drinking Courvoisier from the bottle, pausing to curse MY BAD LUCK as I burn my fucking lips on the pipe.” There was no air in the room. Hundreds of people who knew this story by heart—it was their story—and yet, sympathizing with the protagonist of this movie as if his pain, his hubris, his blind headlong swan dive into the abyss, were unique. “She called, in one last act of mercy she wanted the boys to say Merry Christmas to Daddy who was ‘on a business trip,’
I’m not sure if I was just gone, whether it was the burns swelling my lips so I sounded like I was slurring more than I was, I don’t know, she said in a way that cut through all of it, real calm, “I don’t ever want to hear from you again. Ever, Dmitri. Can you even understand that?”
I surprise myself by tearing up. It’s not like I hear his story and follow the trail of lightbulbs in my head to a sign in the sky saying, “I’m an addict and I accept a higher power in my life to restore me to sanity!” On the contrary: I begin squirming like I’m trying to get out of a straitjacket. I turn to Jen and blame those goddamn chairs, but the truth is laughably obvious. His life is totally different from mine, he has completely different problems, I don’t use like him and he doesn’t use like me, and I’m never going to be a God-lover, a what, hit-my-knees person? That is not who I am. I know who I am. Dmitri is not who I am, he is not he is not he is not. I was Houdini with a stuck padlock, upside down in the East River, working so damn hard to keep myself apart from this experience that my sweat began to compete with my surprising tears.
We all hung on his words as his story traced the rise of a spoiled only child—spectacular, golden, über-successful, powerful, professional, virile, desired, doted on by wife, children, and numerous mistresses—who then began the inevitable crossover into desperately numb, jailed, penniless, shamed, before finally hitting a classic, awful bottom. We were all on board, sober, drunk, high, addict, newcomer, or, like me, semicasual observer, as Dmitri described the decidedly unglamorous thud of landing in one of these fucked-up metal chairs. And learning humility. And service. Life outside his own immediate needs. The gap closed suddenly and gracelessly between them and me, and I felt something slip in me, in my ego, like a herniated disk. Equal parts confused and suddenly in pain, I slumped in my chair, exhaling as if I’d been holding my breath for twenty minutes, and thought:
Goddammit.
A slowly evolving combination of mantra and birth contractions.
Goddammit.
I’m suddenly aware of my posture—slumping lower as if, vertebra by vertebra, I were transforming into the class idiot, a humiliated pudding in a metal folding chair. I begin looking for a way out of there without tripping on thirty pairs of legs. That isn’t going to happen. Trapped.
I know—even through my high, my pride, my numb, I know—that I am Dmitri on Christmas Day. We are obviously different, but his story speaks of the kind of person we all are in this room. Everybody is the same, whether homeless or, like me, thinking they’re still pulling the wool over the eyes of friends, family, coworkers, and the rest of the world.
At the end of his talk, he asks all newcomers to stand. I don’t need to, of course, because I’m not a newcomer; I’m a visitor. As if he could hear me thinking, he says that if there are people who see themselves in his story but aren’t sure they’re addicts, there’s a pamphlet on the literature table in the back of the room called, naturally, Am I an Addict? and inside there’s a fairly exhaustive quiz. If you check yes to more than half of the questions, he says, you can stop denying the truth and admit who you are. So while Jen goes off to mingle after the meeting, I sneak off to the back of the room and fill out the checklist. It’s less curiosity and more avoidance. I just don’t want to talk to any of these people.
“Do you lose time from work due to drinking or drugs?” Well, sure, but it’s not like it’s a big deal; the atmosphere at the shelter is really informal. But whatever atrophied bit of honesty there is in me guides my pencil to check “yes.”
“Have you ever manipulated or lied to a doctor to obtain prescription drugs?” Yeah, but that doesn’t—check.
Goddammit.
“Have you ever stolen from your friends and family so you could buy drugs or alcohol?” Check.
“Has your using ever cost you a relationship?” Check.
“Has your using ever cost you a job?” Check.
Goddamn fuck.
I answer yes to every question but one, and that’s only because there were enough people at that party when the cops busted it that they didn’t bother running after me to arrest me. Putting pencil to check box each time feels like a root canal. There’s no squirming out of the dentist’s chair this time.
I went to a meeting the next night. And the next. And surprised myself by going to yet another. I was making friends, not being judged, which was an amazing thing. When you realize that you’ve hit bottom, you do plenty of judging all by yourself; the people I met at meetings all seemed to know that and offered an emotional oasis. Jen was also pushing me, and I wanted to impress her—to show her that I could do anything I wanted to do. I wanted her to see that I was strong, which is ironic because really what you’re doing by going to these meetings is showing your brokenness to the world and to other broken people
It was during my fourth meeting, on November 23, 2002, that Dmitri kept hammering at me, “Jackson, let me come over to your house, listen, it’ll be painless, I’ll take all your stuff, and once you get rid of your stuff, you’re on the road, come on man, make the commitment to be one of us.” And that night I just felt worn down. Dmitri was a verbal jackhammer, and I couldn’t think of a better reason to keep fighting the onslaught. I couldn’t come up with a better argument to stay high.
So I said, “Okay. Tomorrow. When Beth is at work. I can’t take her… look.”
That night I got raucously high and raucously drunk and raucously pilled up; if I was going to go out, I was going to go out in style. I picked up an eighth of the finest smoke in Boulder, I had plenty of Klonopin, I opened two bottles of wine, I got some coke, even a few tabs of Ecstasy that I discovered in a mournful but desperately spastic scavenger hunt. And I did it all. When the boys came over the next morning, there was nothing left but vessels—pipes, bongs, mirrors, corkscrews—and I shook, while Benny looked on, impassive, as they took away the only confirmation I had that I existed, in the same way that some people collect old newspapers until they make a rats’ maze of their homes or others don’t throw away their ex-girlfriend’s sweatshirt. But they were absolutely right to get rid of all of it. I’ve seen people relapse because they happen to have a pipe that had sentimental value and they threw it in their closet, and one day they found it. Besides, Dmitri and his friends didn’t find the Klonopin I’d hidden in several places around the apartment. I was reasonable about it. They were in plain view, for the most part, in prescription bottles. Prescription bottles for chronic heartburn meds, but still… Classic addict “don’t ask/don’t tell.” And then he was gone, toting a surprisingly large garbage bag, like the anti-Santa, and within minutes I began to panic.
The next day was like the worst acid trip imaginable. I was pelted with images and semifamiliar actions—talking to clients, adopters, and other administrators with my studied togetherness—while floating out of body and making fun of my own mouth for the bullshit spilling out of it. “Yes, ma’am, that dog is really cute.” Seriously? Cute? When did I become a character in a rom-com on Lifetime? “Would you like to take him for a walk?” God, this hurts this hurts this hurts now. This can’t be the dope. Do I need a fucking doctor? “Yes, we’ve vaccinated him.” I am a pathetic human being. I was drowning in nudity, shame, and judgment. There was a self-conscious pause between opposite ends of my conversations with everyone that day, like the awful echo that would greet my voice when wishing my grandmother happy birthday through the transcontinental soup-can phone connection. (I still have a complex about speaking foreign languages because of hearing my awful Hungarian echoing back at me.)
Late in the day, though, I was working on a particularly traumatized cat, doing a bit of therapeutic cat touch, massaging his scruff and shoulders, giving gentle traction to his tail, and my ego was so battered that my boundaries simply washed away. I felt I could go deeper with him. Starting with soft, blinking eye contact, telling him this level of trust was good, I put one hand at the base of his head and one at the base of his tail. I relaxed and expected nothing more, just hoped h
e would allow himself to connect with me. And all of a sudden I felt the energy of the earth come through my feet, out of my hands, through his body, into the air, and back to the earth, and I could tell he felt it, too. There was no way I could’ve been awake enough to perceive this only twenty-four hours before. And this was the reason I unconsciously chose asleep; this is not a safe place—this is what source feels like, the great cosmological wall outlet I had stuck my finger into. And I took someone with me and asked him, silently, in a language of compromised gestures, to accept. This could have only happened to someone coming back to life, allowing his synapses to fire and his emotions to grow their own nerve endings.
It was my first moment of serenity in years, and I held on to it desperately for the next ninety days (the first stage in recovery) with every molecule of my being. There’s no willpower in the world that could have gotten me through that first ninety days on my own—none. But every time I went to a meeting, somebody would talk about being sober, and I would look at him and think, I want what he has, I want the promise of being whole again, the promise of being creative again, the promise of feeling any- and everything again. And when I got home, Benny was there to remind me, a breathing symbol of every battered animal soul that had passed through my hands in the shelter years as if he, too, were saying I want the promise of being whole again, and I need you to be whole to give it to me. The way I found that promise, for both of us, was to commit—emotionally, physically, and spiritually—to the job I had with animals. I never did find that kind of blind, unflinching spirituality displayed by politicians and winners of the Heisman Trophy as, through tear-filled eyes, they thank their moms, their coaches, and their Lord and Savior; but in the continuing and unpretty flailing-about that we call spirituality, this call became my higher power.
Cat Daddy Page 9