Work Like a Dog

Source: Tracy Strauss

We often think that the journey to reaching a goal—getting in shape, making new friends, advancing in a career, or healing from trauma—is linear. When we’re in personal hell, we might envision climbing up a ladder to better days. But if you’ve ever lived through difficult times, you know the climb isn’t straight up.

The Spiral Staircase

If you’ve ever been in therapy, you might’ve heard about the “spiral staircase” as a metaphor for personal growth. With the spiral staircase, we may find ourselves facing a past problem, habit, or negative belief that we thought we "put to bed," or perhaps it's one that we’ve struggled to overcome for years. Climbing the spiral staircase, we're not circling the same level—we're advancing upward.

In 2020, I adopted Beau, a rescue dog with severe separation anxiety. I didn’t know he had an anxiety disorder, and neither did the rescue that found him as a stray puppy in Mississippi. A first-time dog owner, I didn't know the difference between clinical separation anxiety and normal puppy adjustment issues and figured that with a little bit of time the problem would resolve. What I'd learn over the next 10 months was that Beau had a serious clinical anxiety disorder, one that needed expensive medication and behavioral training. A behaviorist trainer explained that recovery would take not weeks, but months.

It took four years.

Source: Tracy Strauss

From crisis to growth opportunity

Many people don't know that dogs can have separation anxiety, or how affecting—debilitating—it can be. With clinical separation anxiety, some dogs are so panicked they resort to jumping out of windows or destroying doors to get to their guardians. I once saw a photo of a ravaged doorframe streaked with so much blood from a dog self-injuring while attempting to break through the barrier that the home’s entrance looked like a crime scene.

Separation anxiety can be debilitating for not only the dog but for the human. For a long time, I felt like Beau's prisoner. Whenever I'd try to leave, even to check the mail, he'd rush to the door with his barking orders, hyperventilating, peeing and pooping, and injuring himself.

In the process, I began to develop anxiety about even attempting to leave home. Because I couldn't go out to socialize, I stopped dating and I lost friends I'd had for years. (In reality, my crisis showed me who my true friends were.) You might wonder why I didn’t just return Beau to the rescue. Many times, when I wasn’t sure how much longer I could withstand being housebound, I thought about re-homing him, but he was my family. His anxiety disorder aside, he was a loving, loyal, sweet, and intelligent dog, and I couldn't bear the idea of losing him.

Stay Dogged

Doggedly, I worked to free Beau, and myself, of anxiety, in daily training. The four years it took to desensitize Beau to his fear were not linear in progress: at first, he couldn’t tolerate two seconds. After a couple of years, he was able to stay home for 45 minutes, but not consistently. Something would happen that triggered him: a noise that scared him, or, more dramatically, getting attacked at his daycare so severely he needed emergency surgery to repair the damage. When we lost daycare, Beau’s progress unraveled and we had to start all over again. It was another year before he rebounded.

Source: Tracy Strauss

A month ago, we moved from the place where he was able to stay home for a few hours solo. I knew there would be a period of adjustment, but I didn’t anticipate how hard it would be for me, mentally, to go through it. We began with a one-minute absence. Over the course of a week, we moved to ten minutes, then twenty, twenty-five, and after two weeks, a half hour. I still couldn’t leave him home long enough to do anything basic, except for a jog around the new neighborhood. My mood began to plummet. I felt isolated, lonely, and trapped. After the first three days, I wasn't sure how I ever withstood the situation for three years. But as the days progressed, I kept reminding myself about how quickly he was adjusting compared to our first time around. Just yesterday, he made it to one hour solo, a time that once took him over three years to be able to tolerate consistently.

There’ve been moments when I’ve been anxious about a crash, an unraveling back to zero minutes, zero seconds—ground zero. But what I’ve seen instead is his learned behavior, which I can observe via a pet camera feed on my phone: in his new surroundings, he’s rediscovering the routine we spent years establishing; despite the unfamiliar place, he’s recalling in his mind and in his body what to do to feel secure after I leave, where to lie down, where to nap, where to go when he has a wave of worry, and to trust the bedrock of our relationship: I always return.

In the process, I’ve realized I need to recall the spiral staircase: We may be revisiting an old problem, but we are at a higher level than before. Doggedly, we continue to climb.

The next time you find yourself back in the trenches, remind yourself that you've already been through the worst. You know what to do. Stay dogged.