Last January I rescued a dog from Battersea Dogs Home.
I prefer not to recall December in detail. Read about my Christmas if you wish, or suffice it to say I fell ill. I wanted to somehow kick-start my recovery and knew dogs provide love, companionship and at least an hour a day outside walking, come rain or shine — all of which provide pretty powerful recuperation. So, perhaps a bit impulsively, I dragged my housemate up to Battersea, convinced the re-homing staff (eventually) my being at work in the day would have no adverse effects on a dog.
These days the dogs home mostly houses Staffordshire Bull Terriors, one of my least favourite dogs. One of the re-homing women decided I might like a collie. Well not “a” collie, but “the” collie — the only one homed there at the time. I adopted a collie cross the first time I adopted a dog. I called her Lullaby and I loved her to bits. But she was very hard work. High intelligence gifts the breed, which may not always be a good thing. An ability to think abstractly (e.g. associations), however rudimentarily, leads to a high proclivity towards — what’s the correct adjective here?
I can’t say “bad behaviour.” That implies a moral dimension. In animal ethology no moral component exists, of course. Dogs exhibit fixed behaviour patterns based on breed characteristics and the rest are learned. In the case of the dog I adopted, he shows typical collie behaviour — chasing everything that moves, nervousness, high sensitivity, good at reading facial expressions, etc. For whatever reason, he also tries to run away every chance he gets, prefers to pull hard on the lead, bites strangers, eats post, follows me from room to room, whines and cries and destroys things if forced into a separate room.
He learned the latter set of behaviours. He came with no history, probably a runaway. So what caused the hard-to-deal-with behaviours I can only guess.
Re-training him proves difficult. Well I shouldn’t say that. I’m not re-training him, I’m re-shaping his behaviour. My previous dog came with his own issues, but nothing in comparison. At first I felt stressed trying to deal with it — it’s proven costly and made me rather unpopular with less-than-understanding (to put it mildly) neighbours. And, because he’s a collie, he has a long memory so changing his associations will take some time and effort.
I found it stressful because I wanted him to be just like Rizla, my previous dog. I wanted to be able to walk him without a lead, control him with just words, to stay home without being bored, anxious and destructive watch TV without biting the screen and so on. I wanted a dog as a loving companion, not as a set of hard-to-deal-with behaviours right?
You know what? I couldn’t have been more wrong to initially feel that. Firstly, he acts purely as responses to his upbringing — presumably one without boundaries, walks, and alone time. And underneath that he’s lovely, a heart of gold. He demonstrates a sensitivity to my feelings Rizla never did. He tenses up when I’m tense, he boings around feeling confident when I feel happy and when I cry he jumps on me, puts his paws on my shoulders and tries to “clean” my face until I stop. The reason he nips is he tries to protect me when we walk.
Nearly three months in I learned to appreciate his good qualities while helping him be himself in more socially acceptable ways.
Funny thing is, I came around to this way of thinking in an utterly roundabout way and changed the way I see myself in the process.
I often blog about my illness. I write other things too, but currently I focus on getting better and my blog reflects this. In fact I started blogging to help me get better. A litany of personal disasters left me in a bad way. If you don’t know already I suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, brought on by a childhood filled with gross neglect, abuse and abandonment. With PTSD, generally you get better or get worse – life circumstances and luck determine whether you get the help and support you need (you really need both of those) or experiences that reinforce the negative associations and exacerbate the condition. Since moving to the UK 13 years ago I feel the latter to be true.
People learn responses to extreme situations, responses that help them cope at the time. Being intelligent, complex people we can carry these associated responses to similar stimuluses a long time, much like my dog reacts in anti-social ways as a response to a poor upbringing — learned responses to an environment psychologically unhealthy to active intelligent dog.
Earlier this month, while still stressed and struggling with the dog’s hard-to-deal-with behaviour I found myself acting out in a similarly Pavlovian way to behaviour patterns carved in my younger days by my highly-dysfunctional relationship with my dad.
To understand where I’m coming from, if you’ve not done so already, read the first of my “Time To Change” articles. The last few paragraphs in this post probably won’t make sense without the background.
Despite pondering the time I lived my father in horrifying detail in therapy and long after that, I never considered the actual nuts and bolts of the relationship – that is, that my reaction becoming ingrained as a stimulus to a response. I thought about the negative effects, I thought about those ad nauseum.
A few weeks ago I found myself acting in a similar way to a situation which at the core mimicked that of my teenage experiences with my father. But until someone both incredibly intelligent and supportive mentioned my reaction was being drawn out of me, the penny never dropped.
I started thinking about my dad’s abuse from his point of view. I can’t really work out why he was so abusive towards me. Maybe he was abused. From the few stories relatives told me his brothers used to fight a lot as kids – I know he had to have toenail removed because one of his older brothers threw a table at him and it caught his big toe. He came from a family of nine children and I suspect with so many children and a family business to run kids were largely unsupervised. My dad, being right in the middle probably felt lost in that middle somewhere. He normalised abusive behaviour towards the weaker members of the family as normal. I get that.
What I never got, and what hurt so much, was when he called me crazy, threatened to have me put away.
When I found myself triggered earlier this month and my friend mentioned this sort of response was the hoped-for one, I found myself not thinking so much about the current situation; I thought about my Pavlovian response to a familiar stimulus. And I finally realised why.
My dad needed the scenerio to be played out exactly as it did. He needed that opportunity to call me crazy. Without it he was abusive. With it he was blameless. He didn’t make me cry every night, I was just crazy. Nothing to do with him.
In his life he never said sorry to me – not once. But he was a man who was capable of guilt — a great deal of guilt in fact. He needed to draw out a breakdown in order to stay guilt free. He played me. All these years I’d been played to keep him blameless.
Ding. The penny dropped, finally. I hit three lemons on the fruit machine and it all made sense. Funny how one astute sentence from someone else can suddenly make something so clear. Then again, for fellow fans of my favourite TV sow, it is how Dr. House solves all his cases so I’m in good company, no?
I wonder, at the same time, how to feel about people like my dad – people that try to cause pain and chaos but remain blameless. Some suggest revenge in various forms. I myself suggested, often, anger as part of the healing process. But I can’t start to convince the world that reacting to triggers the way I do is merely a Pavlovian response that needs to be unlearned and hold other people up as moral failures. To be the sort of person that thrives on pain and chaos or desperately needs to be blameless — surely that’s a similar situation: coping tools learned as children in dysfunctional environs being utterly inappropriate and anti-social. The failing is one of recognition, self-awareness and ownership of those behaviours.
I’m sure I’ll never convince some people. I’m sure there are people out there who refer to me with phrases like “emo bitch” or “crazy” or whatever. That’s okay, there are so many nice people, so many reasonable people who get me and where I’m coming from, who can see my good qualities and like me for who I am that I don’t need the people who don’t get it. I do need to stop hoping they will get it some day. I’ve carefully explained my illness to people with whom I’ve been intimately acquainted, detailing the triggers and how vulnerable I am to sudden changes in behaviour to these stimuluses. I often analogise my illness with that of someone with a severe peanut allergy in hopes they’ll understand the occasional extreme response to sometimes-seemingly tiny things.
No amount of explaining induces understanding. Seems like people either are the types to be understanding without explanation or won’t even after very careful explanation. In fact, explaining my vulnerabilities to the latter just makes me more vulnerable — after all if I tell you what triggers me and you want to draw out a response, I just give away exactly how to do it. And if people need me to act crazy in order to feel blameless then I just make it a whole lot easier.
Put now that the penny has finally dropped, I can just see it for exactly what it is and say to myself “I’m being played.” and not respond. I don’t have to bear any malice or feel vindictive, I can hang out with the people who get me, and who like me for my good qualities. I know those good qualities outweigh my illness a zillion fold and people who know me well know that too.
So, back to the dog. While realising this I started to see him in a different light too. Not as a bad dog, but a set of learned responses that need love, support and guidance to be replaced with ones which foster good relationships with the outside world, instead of ones that keep getting us in trouble. And while I’m doing that I can appreciate his good qualities and love him as much as I’ve loved the previous two.