Jean says, “You know how people talk about having psycho relationships with animals? They mean me.” As the dog became more menacing, her world narrowed. Boarding the dog was unthinkable—Jean couldn’t imagine how he’d handle being around strangers twenty-four hours a day—so she ditched vacation plans for a year. Walking the dog became an ordeal, so she began taking him out at odd hours—one A.M., two in the afternoon—when the streets were likely to be empty. Inviting people over became impossible and exhausting, so she whittled down her social life, gradually increasing the distance between herself and others. “My whole life became me and this big dog,” she says, and she understands that in an odd way this served a powerful, if only semiconscious, purpose. ‘Within a year of getting Sam,” Jean says, “I was spending almost no time with other humans. It was difficult in a way, but in another way … well, talk about safe. No one could get near me.” Jean had set out in search of a safety net; instead, she’d constructed a fortress.
It is one thing to humanize a dog—to weave little myths about his feelings, to trot out human explanations for his behavior, to see spite where it doesn’t exist, or to prepare him a special meal lest he “feel deprived.” It is another thing to draw him into more complicated human dramas. Dogs are highly sensitive creatures who read and respond to the cues we give them, even the subtlest ones. As such, they aren’t merely objects of human emotion; they can also become unwitting participants in it, and as Jean discovered, the feelings we bring to the bond can affect our relationships with them in striking ways.
Our dramas, our dogs: welcome to the dark side.
In some ways, living with a dog is like being followed around twenty-four hours a day by a mute psychoanalyst: you get that blank screen—nonjudgmental, trusted, noncritical—but no interpretation, no words of insight or guidance, no quiet voice of reason helping you to connect the psychic dots. Feelings float up from inside—rational ones, irrational ones, ones you didn’t even know you had—and attach themselves to the dog, who will not question their validity, or hold your behavior up to scrutiny, or challenge your perceptions. Freud in fur; Freud without the therapeutic agenda. In the dog’s presence you are free to act—and act out—any way you want.
In their book, Between Pets and People: The Importance of Animal Companionship, Alan Beck and Aaron Katcher write about a young woman who went to her vet with lacerations all over her abdomen and thighs, complaining that her dog, a medium-size female, was attacking her. Under questioning, the woman revealed that she slept with the dog at night and clutched her so tightly that the dog struggled to break free, scratching her in the process. The vet told her that this was a perfectly normal response on the dog’s part, a reaction to being so tightly confined, and suggested that she give the dog some room. The owner began to weep. She said she couldn’t sleep without hugging her dog: she’d been depressed for years, was completely alone and friendless, she needed that level of contact. She then asked the vet to prescribe tranquilizers for the dog, so that she wouldn’t struggle against her embrace. When the vet refused, she began to cry again and asked to leave.
This may be an extreme story, and a very sad one for both the human and the animal, but the idea that a dog can unleash so much need doesn’t surprise me. Dogs have an uncanny ability to tap in to that level of feeling, a kind of evocative power that helps knock down our defenses and expose sides of the self we tend to keep hidden in human interactions. Dr. Carole E. Fudin, a psychotherapist in Manhattan who specializes in the psychology of veterinary medical practice and relationships between people and animals, thinks that capacity has to do with the canine gaze. “In grief work with patients,” she says, “you often hear that the animal was almost a perfect mirror to human emotion: if a client was feeling something intense—sadness or loss—and they looked into the face of their pet, they could not only get a sense of the animal being present to the emotion, but also a feeling of connection, that the animal was truly connected to whatever was going on within the person.” Canine sympathy is easy to romanticize, and I don’t want to overstate its power. (The first time I wept in front of Lucille, when she was about sixteen weeks old, I looked over at her, hoping to find a little model of empathy—big empathic eyes, an expression of concern; she glanced back at me, then turned, yawned, and calmly began licking her genitals.) And yet I also know what Fudin means. As she’s matured, Lucille has become a wonderful solace in the face of tears. If I cry, she sits quietly and watches me; in a gesture that seems to encompass both worry and compassion, she will often place one paw on my arm or knee and just hold it there. This kind of silent sympathy—an ability to sit with someone in pain, to communicate a sense of understanding—is rare among humans, and it helps explain why a person can experience such emotional freedom in a dog’s presence.
The language barrier between people and dogs can have an enormously liberating effect, too, inhibiting the internal censors that tend to keep both words and the feelings behind them in check. One day last summer my friend Hope’s parents stopped by the dog park to pick up Hope’s dog, who was staying with them for a few days while Hope left town on business. When they arrived, Hope’s dog raced over, jumped up, and licked them, and I watched all this with complete nonchalance: Oh, Hope and her folks, isn’t that nice. And then, not two minutes later, I turned and saw Lucille sitting on the grass, quiet and calm and perfectly expressionless, and I heard myself say aloud, “Oh, Lucille, are you sad because you don’t have grandparents?” Was she sad? I went home that night, vaguely worried that Lucille was “depressed,” and it took an entire evening for me to tease out the truth: it always pains me to see people my age, mid-thirties, who still have their parents; it always stirs up flashes of sadness and resentment, reminds me of how suddenly my own parents seemed to vanish from the planet, and while this was a classic example of projection (it was far easier to see sadness in Lucille than to acknowledge it within myself), it was also an example of the way a dog’s expression can spark human emotion, touch off feelings we might otherwise keep submerged.
And then there is the dog’s profoundly accepting nature, perhaps his most treasured quality. Dogs don’t judge us. They are oblivious to the standards humans use to assess one another—appearance and social status, color and class and profession—and so we’re often less guarded in their presence, freer to do, say, and feel things we might not do, say, or feel in front of humans. You can roll around on the floor with dogs, sing off key, free associate, and you just don’t think about it, just don’t think about how stupid or weird you might look or sound. Likewise, you can deflect your sadness onto them, you can communicate to them oceans of fear, you can clutch them while you sleep, and while they may struggle to break free of your embrace, they won’t call you on your behavior. In other words, you can be as crazy as you want with the dog, and the dog will never utter a word.
This, of course, is the most wonderfully liberating feature of the relationship—people often talk about being their “truest self in front of the dog, accepted, unburdened by self-consciousness and fear of judgment—but it can also be a complicating feature, for sometimes that “true” self is not very pretty. And sometimes it can lead you and your dog in some very strange directions.
Example: Lucille is five months old. She is at home, in my bedroom, and I am at the movies, writhing with a degree of anxiety so intense it takes me by surprise. I hate leaving the puppy alone. Hate it. Every time I make a move toward the door, I see that little dog face focused on me, alert and questioning, and I crumble inside. She looks so sad. She looks so alarmed. She … I just can’t bear it. So I sit in the theater and squirm, check my watch every six minutes. Is she all right? Does she feel abandoned? Does she know I’ll be back, or is she terrified?
This is not an uncommon fear: most people I know struggled with guilt and anxiety about leaving their dogs alone as puppies, and virtually all attached dog owners I know admit to melting at the sight of the disappointed dog, the dog who stares after you when you head
for the door without him, that picture of dejection. We worry about the dog’s sense of time. (Does he know the difference between five minutes and five hours?) We worry about his certainty about our return. (Does he really know what “I’ll be back” means?) We are reminded of the domestic dog’s essential helplessness each time we leave him alone, of how dependent on us he is. So my anxiety is by no means unique, but the depth of it baffles me. I tend to see myself as a fairly self-sufficient and bounded person, someone who neither needs others too much nor expects others to need too much of me, and all of a sudden—within days of acquiring Lucille—this sense of independence has vanished, and being separated from the dog—even for a two-hour movie—seems like a life-and-death proposition. I check my watch again. I sit. I writhe.
When the movie—interminable—finally ends, I speed home as if heading to an emergency, unlock the door, and race upstairs. Lucille careens toward me, little puppy body jumping up and down in glee, and my relief at the sight of her mixes with a heavy-hearted despair. The room looks like a twister has blown through. Lucille has knocked over a wicker hamper and emptied the contents; the floor is strewn with debris: tattered gym clothes over here, shreds of torn underwear over there, bits of wicker everywhere. She has also pulled down a set of silk curtains: the rod is lying on the floor, and she has eaten a hole in one drape the size of a grapefruit. I sit down on the floor. Oh, Lucille! I don’t quite realize this at the time, but the two of us have entered into a very complicated little drama, one part puppy behavior and six parts human emotion. We have become a textbook study in separation anxiety.
Here’s what happened, anatomy of a behavior problem: my issue with leaving the dog cropped up within days of acquiring her—just couldn’t do it, couldn’t leave her alone for five minutes, couldn’t imagine leaving her alone. The anxiety wasn’t entirely unreasonable—Lucille was young and helpless and untrained; I worried she’d be frightened, that she’d pee all over the house, chew up my furniture—but the idea of leaving her alone touched me on a more elusive plane, too, something I couldn’t quite identify or understand. All I know is it made me crazy. I’d stand there with my keys in hand, and I’d see her watching me, her whole body a question mark, and I’d want to die. What’s happening? Are you leaving me? That’s what I’d see in her eyes. But what about me? What will become of me?
Experts give very concrete advice about acclimating a dog to your comings and goings: crate the dog, they say; leave for short periods to get the dog accustomed to your absences; make the departures and arrivals as low key and undramatic as possible so you don’t freak the dog out. I read all this, understood all the rationales, and then proceeded to ignore every last suggestion, adopting (to me) a far less stressful tactic: I simply stopped leaving the house. My first six months with Lucille, I don’t think I went out to dinner a single time, and if I had to leave her alone for any length, I’d take her to day care, then squeeze everything—lunch, errands, medical appointments—into a single frenzied afternoon. If friends wanted to see me, they came to my house or I brought Lucille to theirs. I took her to all manner of places where she wasn’t really welcome—stores, coffee shops, AA meetings—and (more often) I simply wrote off old activities. Shopping? Can’t bring the dog. A massage or a manicure? Nope, no dogs. Travel? Are you kidding?
On the rare occasions when I did leave the dog alone, I did so badly. I oozed anxiety. I’d lure Lucille up to my bedroom with a biscuit, and I’d stand there and coo reassurances at her: “I’ll be back! I promise!” I’d set up a baby gate to keep her confined to the room, and I’d shoot nervous glances at her, and then I’d turn and flee. Want a behavior problem? This is the recipe. Dogs, after all, are extraordinarily malleable creatures: this is what makes them both so wonderful and also so complicated to live with. As a pack animal, a dog’s very survival is dependent on a thorough understanding of his environment—how is the pack operating, who’s in charge, what’s his place—so he is hardwired to read his owner constantly, to pick up signals about what’s appropriate, what’s safe, what’s dangerous, what’s expected of him, what’s happening. Unlike cats, so characteristically independent and aloof, dogs are highly attuned to their owners, often exquisitely sensitive to shifts in our moods and feelings, and extremely adaptable. That’s not to say people don’t get emotionally enmeshed and overinvolved with cats—they do—but cats tend to get less involved with us: they get up and leave the room if we’re bugging them; they don’t join us in the social world; they don’t absorb and respond to our internal lives in such vivid and direct ways. By contrast, a dog is like a sponge: his instincts are triggered by our moods and behavior, his emotional state shaped by the needs and wants and feelings we communicate to him.
And so it was with Lucille. The more anxious I got about leaving her, the more anxious she got when I started to go, and the harder departures became for both of us. I’d beseech her—“Be good!” and “Please don’t eat the pillows!”—and, hearing not the content but the tone and its underlying distress, she’d register only the fact that something very big and scary was taking place. And then I’d leave, and Lucille would do what any self-respecting, distressed pup would do: eat the laundry hamper and chew up six pairs of underwear. I, in turn, would interpret the destruction as evidence of the depth of her distress, and I’d feel even worse about leaving the next time. Problem snowballed. Vicious cycle ensued. In short order, my internal drama about leaving the house became her internal drama, and I ended up more or less trapped in my own living room, held hostage by a twenty-four-pound puppy.
In truth, Lucille herself wasn’t holding me hostage at all; a host of old associations were. One restless night, when she was maybe ten months old, I was lying in bed thinking about how hard it was to leave her alone, and my mind drifted to summers I had spent at a camp on Cape Cod, when I was twelve, thirteen, fourteen years old. I have fond memories of this place—it was a riding camp where each girl got her own horse to take care of, and it’s the sort of experience I’ve categorized internally as relatively happy and carefree: nice girls, nice horses, nice setup. But that night, for the first time in years, I remembered that I always spent the first few days of camp battling waves of sadness, a sensation I couldn’t explain. The feeling would come up during down times—after a riding lesson, or in the free hours after lunch—and it rose up like a kind of dread, an anxiety laced with a terrible sense of aloneness, as though I had no safe place in the world. The other girls would be doing things—laughing, reading in their bunk beds, polishing their riding boots—and I’d lie on my bed with my face to the wall, pretending to take a nap and choking back tears. I always called the feeling homesickness, but I think it was something else, a different kind of need. My mother used to drive me to camp, a two-hour ride from our home in Cambridge. She hated driving, and we’d spend long chunks of the ride in silence, her hands gripping the steering wheel. I used to sit there on the vinyl beside her, aware of some vague longing on my part, hating that silence, hoping for something to fill it up.
As I lay in bed recalling this, I realized that what I’d hoped for was reassurance: I wanted my mom to tell me on that drive that she’d miss me while I was gone, to tell me she loved me and would look forward to having me back home at the end of the summer. And then, when we got to camp, I wanted her to hug me good-bye. She didn’t, though. My mother was too undemonstrative and shy either to verbalize love or to express it physically—she and my father loved their kids in their own deep and very private way, but they were both markedly reserved people, with an almost pathological aversion to touch—and so when she left me at camp, she’d just give me a shy peck on the cheek and jump back into the car. I’d stand there and watch her drive away, seeds of worry cropping up inside as she disappeared around the bend: Was her reserve a direct reaction to me? Was part of her glad to be rid of me? Would she ever come back? The pain of that is what surfaced when I lay in my bunk at camp, all weepy and forlorn. And the pain of that is what surfaced when I left Lucille
. There I’d go, walking out the door without a fuss, without a hug or a kiss or a word of reassurance, and I couldn’t believe—just couldn’t believe—she didn’t experience the same thing I had as a kid.
Such is the power of the dog, that evocative blank screen. If Lucille were a human, she could have looked up and said, “Hey, don’t get tied into such a knot about leaving, I know you’re only going to the movies—I’ll be fine.” Because she’s not, I read into her eyes what I felt: But what about me? What will become of me? Those, of course, are my questions, the big dark existential questions I’ve lugged around my whole life, and in the inadvertent, wordless way of a dog, Lucille has slowly circled me back to them, back to the central insecurity I felt as a kid. This is ancient stuff, territory I’ve stamped across over years of psychotherapy, but when I’d leave the house and see her worried expression, it all got reflected back, that whole history of fear and doubt. Those eyes: I’m twelve years old, waiting for my parents to come home from a party, certain they’ve died in a car wreck and won’t return. That look of alarm: I’m thirteen, watching as my father swims in the ocean off Martha’s Vineyard; he’s a tiny dot of a man in the sea, and I can’t take my eyes off him, can’t lose sight of him, because if my vigilance wavers for even a fraction of a second, he will surely drown, disappear out there before I’ve mustered up the courage to tell him I love him. That anxious gaze: I’m six or seven, I’m ten or fifteen or even thirty-five, and I don’t know—I just don’t know—if the people I love love me back, if they can give me the things I need.
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