When I adopted Riley, I was in a bad place mentally. I had PTSD, depression, and anxiety. I had a plan to end my life that day. Physically I was dealing with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Fibromyalgia, and Sensory Processing Disorder. I had a house I was struggling to maintain, and I had just started powerlifting to see if that would help.
My counselor had mentioned that a dog might be a good idea and suggested I consider it, but I had disregarded the idea almost immediately. I didn’t have the energy or capacity to care for a dog.
But then I saw this adorable puppy on the Humane Society website, and I had to meet her. It wasn’t a want; it was an inexplicable need.
Even though I didn’t plan to adopt her or any dog, I left the Humane Society with this beautiful, confident, spunky, wild, 8-pound puppy with the hope of training her to be my service dog.
As I studied and researched how to train her, I read something that really struck me – “Your dog will feel about something the way you feel about it.”
It was this shocking jolt of reality. In my mind, it meant that if I wanted to take her anywhere that caused me anxiety or distress or panic, I had to learn how to manage that response so I could train her to be calm where I needed her to be.
It was interesting.
Suddenly I had a responsibility that didn’t center on me and my pain and my perspective. I had a responsibility to help her see and experience the world differently than the way I did, so she would not be crippled and limited by the things that were crippling and limiting me.
Riley needed me to be brave, confident, and strong so she could learn to be. She needed me to show her the world was interesting, exciting, approachable, and safe to explore and engage with – the exact opposite of how I saw it at the time.
It was an unexpected turn of events and, because I loved her so much from the moment I said, “Yes” to her, I had to choose to put the things I was learning in counseling and books and in my times of prayer into practice for her. To give her the fullest, best, most fulfilling life I possibly could.
Saying it like that makes it sound easy. Like suddenly I was okay. Suddenly I was confident and fearless. Suddenly I saw the world differently. But it was WORK.
I can’t tell you how many times I shook and cried and prayed before taking her somewhere that scared me; how many times I had to allow myself to be aware of what was going on inside – my emotions, my thoughts, and the stories I was telling myself. I had to stop giving place to worst-case scenarios and the belief that every person was a threat.
Gradually I went from being paralyzed with fear, to looking at things through her eyes.
There were things I couldn’t change. I couldn’t fix how I felt, the actual emotions, but I could explore the thoughts and stories I believed that led to them. Not every emotion is based on a belief or story, but many are. And this, I discovered, was the place I had power. The power to change my emotions by changing my story and beliefs.
It was finding this power that began to change things for me.
I went through a process that looked something like this:
- What am I feeling?
- What story am I telling?
- What parts of this story are true, if any?
- What parts of this story are untrue, if any?
- For those parts that are untrue, what is the truth?
- How does this truth change the story?
- Now, what am I feeling?
I engaged God in that process, prayerfully asking Him to help me see the truth, searching scripture to find truth when I didn’t know it.
Did I mention this was work? Hard, emotional, challenging, and rewarding work.
I found myself constantly questioning, “Is this emotion or feeling based on the truth? Is the emotion telling me the truth?“
I discovered that very often emotions lie, and I saw it profoundly in Riley.
Something would startle her, and she’d run and hide.
She wasn’t in danger. The thing that startled her wasn’t going to hurt her. But her nervous system didn’t know that and generated a fear response, which she acted on because that’s what animals do, they let their nervous systems lead. I’ll talk more about this in another post because it’s important.
She didn’t have the benefit of a mother to show her how to engage with the things she might encounter in the world, so it was my job and, at first, I didn’t know how to help. in truth, I’m still learning.
But, as I learned how to work through my stuff, I began trying to figure out how to help her work through hers too.
Here’s an example:
Riley was terrified of the toaster. If I put it on the counter in the kitchen, she would go to her crate and hide. It didn’t matter if I put bread in it and pushed the button or not. The simple act of me putting it on the counter sent her running.
To the best of my knowledge, she had never been harmed by a toaster, certainly not while she was with me. I couldn’t figure out what it was that scared her.
I talked to a trainer about it and they asked me to try remembering the first time she was around when I used the toaster. Did it startle me when it popped up? Did I jump? Maybe she saw that and decided based on my reaction that the toaster was to be feared.
Remember, she feels about things how I feel about them.
I couldn’t specifically recall ever actively jumping or being startled by the toaster. But, at that time, I really hated making noise. It was a significant trigger for me. Even alone in my own home with no one around to bother, I had an internal fear response anytime I made noise, and that included the toaster.
That’s when I realized that Riley wasn’t only responding to my outward actions, but to the emotions I thought I was doing really well at masking. And she was taking those emotions on herself. My emotions were her narrative for anything she didn’t already have context for.
In the case of the toaster, she did what everything inside me wanted to do every time I made noise – she ran and hid and waited to make sure there was no aftermath. It was irrational to me, and I’d had years of practicing not responding to that engrained nervous system response to run and hid, but she didn’t. Riley became a barometer for me, mirroring back to me my own needs, fears, and stories.
Owning Riley and working with her through all these different things continues to bring me healing and freedom. She raises my awareness of things I used to try to bury and avoid and reminds me it’s okay to acknowledge my emotions while not allowing them to narrate my story.
If someone had told me that understanding that Riley feels about situations how I feel about them would be one of the keys to breaking free from many of the PTSD triggers that imprisoned me, I wouldn’t have believed them. But God has used her again and again to get me to look closer, move slower, and do regular truth-checking on my narrative.
Here’s the thing, it’s not just Riley who feels how I feel about situations, people, and things – but your dog does too.
Have you seen it demonstrated?
Where?
How can knowing this empower you to not only make their life experience better but maybe even transform your own?
You may find that in some areas your dog doesn’t need training, instead, you need to recognize and upgrade the stories you tell and your beliefs. Sure, training can help, but co-regulation is a real thing (we’ll talk about that in another post, too) and you learning to work through and regulate your emotional responses can go a long way in building confidence and resilience in your dog.
IMPORTANT NOTE: I wanted to train Riley myself, in part for financial reasons. However, because a dog feels how we feel about the situations we find ourselves in, especially when you’re dealing with mental and/or emotional health, it is ideal to have someone else train your service dog. Having someone with a neutral take on the world rather than one heightened by anxiety, depression, fear, PTSD, etc gives your dog the foundation they need to be able to better serve you without putting you in the position to have to do what I did. As it is, Riley has plenty of her own anxieties and some of that probably could have been resolved by having someone else train her for the public access part of her work. So, this is just something to consider as you read this. My recommendation would always be to let someone else train your service dog, if possible, to maximize their ability to help you with the things you need help with.
