Establish a Deeper Connection with Your Dog

This article can also be found on my PsychologyToday.com blog...

4 Easy Ways to Establish a Deeper Connection 

with Your Dog, and with Your True Self

One evening, many years ago I was at an asphalt basketball court on the East Side of Manhattan with two dogs: my Dalmatian Freddie and a client’s Jack Russell terrier named Mack. (Someone in the neighborhood was on the city council, owned a dog, and had pulled some strings to allow us to exercise our dogs there in the evenings.)

The dogs were playing nicely. Everyone was having fun. Then it started to rain lightly, and Mack, who hated the rain, decided to go home. So he wiggled through a small gap in the chain link fence out to 68th Street, and headed straight for Second Avenue.

I went into emergency mode and called Freddie. There was no time to hook up his leash, which was hanging around my neck (along with Mack’s). I just ran as fast as I could to the exit, which was closer to First Avenue than Second. Freddie ran in-synch next to me. We came out onto 68th Street, and I scanned the sidewalk, looking for Mack. He’d apparently crossed to the uptown side of the street. So I checked quickly for oncoming cars, then ran across the street, saying to Fred, “Let’s go!”

We got to the other side, and I looked up the street toward Second Avenue, my heart racing, my mind trying not to panic. I still couldn’t see the little figure of the missing Jack Russell, and hoped he hadn’t tried to cross Second. My goal was to run as fast as possible and find the little bastard. But as I ran I noticed something unexpected and wonderful. Freddie was running right next to me, in a perfect heel, his eyes locked onto mine. In fact, I realized that he’d been running next to me like that the whole time. He hadn’t taken his eyes off me for a second. It was an amazing feeling.

We got to Second Avenue, I asked some people if they’d seen Mack, and was directed to a video store. We got inside and found Mack casually strolling through the aisles, begging for treats.

Although I'd spent many long hours training Freddie in obedience, I didn’t realize until that night how bonded, or connected to me he was. And there was no specific behavioral precedent for what he did that night. It was based almost entirely on our emotional connection.

I also realize now I was a different person before I met Fred. For one thing, the person I am now would’ve never called Mack a “little bastard,” even in my own mind. Mind you, I have no illusions that I’m now a fully-realized human being with no faults or character flaws. But I’m much more centered and grounded than I was before that wonderful, yet difficult, dog taught me how to be human. (I learned later that his being "difficult" was actuallly the result of my resisting the emotional changes taking place inside me.)

People sometimes question how (or why I think) I know so much about how dogs do or don't think, what makes them tick. Part of it comes through countless hours of research, studying various disciplines, from physics, to neuroanatomy to cognitive science to philosophy of mind to evolutionary biology to emergence to systems dynamics,  and more.

But most of my understanding comes from my daily interactions with dogs. Except when they’re asleep, dogs are constantly watching us, reading our behavior.  I’ve found that if we do something similar, just do four simple things for a few minutes each day, it can help us connect more fully to our dogs’ feelings, and connect to our true selves.

Will it make your dog run next to you in a perfect heel through the streets of New York? Proably not. But as they say about chicken soup: "It couldn't hurt!" And what may be even more important, you might find that by doing these four things, your life will, over time, become easier, happier, and more full of joy.

So here are the 4 simple steps that can help make all that happen.

1) Observe - Whenever you take your dog for a walk, or when your dog is playing with other doggies, or even when your dog is sleeping, take a few moments to simply watch his behaviors. Don't make any judgments or assign any + or - values to what the dog is doing. (When we take a walk through a pine forest, we very rarely impose value judgments on the trees, rocks, ferns, and birds, do we?) Just observe the minutia of his everyday actions; keep things as simple as possible. Pay attention to how your dog approaches other dogs. Does he come straight toward them, or in more of an arc? What happens to his face when he smells something? What is his tail doing when he sees a squirrel, or when you call him for supper? 

Don't think about what any of this means, just observe.

One value of this type of objective observation this is that our visual systems are directly-connected to the pleasure circuits in our brains. So the mere act of looking at something, anything, creates a feeling of calmness and well-being. So the more we're able to observe without judgmental thinking, the more relaxed and contented we become.

Another nice effect is that by observing your dog's behavior without judgment or expectation, you'll begin to see things from his perspective. Thinking usually means we project our beliefs and value systems onto our dogs' behavior, which prevents us from seeing them for who they really are. But seeing dogs as they are returns us to nature - to the pine forest, the desert, or the waterfall - if just for a small moment in time.

2) Wonder - Childhood is a time of wonder. When we were young we spent a great deal of time wondering about all kinds of things. Wonder is also a key element in science. Darwin wondered why the various types of finches on different islands in the Galapagos had beaks with different shapes, and his theory of evolution was born. Einstein sat on a moving train and wondered what it would be like to be on a train that could travel at light speed, and the theory of relativity was born.

But there's more to wondering than the if, or how, or why of things. Just being in a state of wonder has an amazing effect on the psyche. Like observation, wonder stimulates the brain. Plus it opens up an emotional connection between you and the thing you're wondering about, in this case, your dog. So try each day to view your dog with a childlike sense of wonder. 

Wondering means you don't know anything, but that you're open to learning something new. If Einstein had thought about it, he would've known that no train could possibly travel at light speed, and that would've been the end of that. But by wondering, he saw something in his mind that no one else could see.

What will you see, that no one else can, when you take a few moments each day to look at your dog in wonder?

3) Feel - Dogs are feeling, emotional beings. So are we. But as kids, we were forced by the rules of society, peer pressure, by how our parents raised us, and by our own survival needs, to put a lid on our emotions. It's an amazing thing that just by tuning in to our dog's emotions now, as adults, we automatically tune in to the emotions we gave up long ago in order to placate our parents and teachers, or to fit in.

So spend a little time each day trying to tune in to what your dog is feeling. Don't think about it. Take a second or two to try and feel it; then let it go. A few moments later you may find that a childhood memory will drift to the surface, or the answer to a problem you've been having, perhaps related to work or family, will suddenly become clear.

A theatre professor of mine once said that whenever we see a great play or movie, or look at a work of art, it has the capacity to change us for the better. And even though a physician or a chemist or construction worker may not feel any affinity for Hamlet's woes, or relate to the life of a Pennsylvania deer hunter, or understand what a Mark Rothko painting "means," each will come away a better doctor, chemist, or builder. True, dogs may not be Shakespeare, but in their own way, they can do that for us too. That's because by allowing ourselves to feel what our dogs are feeling, we reawaken our ability to feel our own emotional connections, the ones we lost when we were pups.

4) Be - Some trainers say, "Be the pack leader! Be dominant!" Others say, "Be the pack parent!" or "Be positive!" 

I say, "Never mind all that, just be!"

What does that mean?

All evidence on how wild canine packs really operate suggests that our old ideas about wolf packs having a leader (which originated with Konrad Lorenz, who later admitted that everything he ever said about dogs was wrong), aren't true. 

However, in every animal group there is always one member who - to borrow from Willie Wonka - has the golden ticket. To me, the golden ticket represents an animal's natural charisma or animal magnetism. So others in the group follow him because of his natural gifts, not because he has to dominate them to make them "obey."

Think about your natural gifts. What are they? Whatever they are, they're yours and yours alone. You don't have to try to be something you're not.

But remember, there are two yous (at least), the authentic self, and the self that evolved as a means of fitting in, satisfying your parents' and teachers' wishes, etc. The authentic self is the one who's able to observe, wonder, tune in to your dog's (and your own) feelings, and is able to just be. The other self, frankly, thinks too much.

If you get angry or frustrated with your dog, that's okay. Just try to own those feelings, but try not to act on them. Remember, they're not real, they're just signposts. So instead of acting in anger or frustration, take five slow, deep breaths - breathe in slowly, breathe out slowly - and remember that you already have your unique golden ticket: your dog's love. Yes, the road may be rocky at times, but those rocks aren't insurmountable obstacles, they're just reflections of the fractured pieces of the authentic self you gave up as a child. Your dog doesn't misbehave in order to dominate you or create obstacles; he does it because he wants to help you reconnect to who you really are.

So those are the 4 easy steps: Observe, Wonder, Feel, and Be. Just spending a few minutes each day engaged in those simple activities can bring amazing results.

LCK
"Changing the World, One Dog at a Time"
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How Man Creates Dog in His Own Image

This is a compilation of 3 articles I recently wrote for Psychology Today.

How Man Creates Dog in His Own Image

Dogs Have Colonized Our Subconscious

Kevin Behan writes, “Whether we know it or not, we all develop highly complex theories for [canine behavior]. Even someone who doesn’t own a dog and never even thinks about why [dogs] do what they do nonetheless develops a highly elaborate theory.”

I think this is due in part to our Disneyfication of animals, which causes us to unconsciously confer "personhood" on our dogs. But it's also the result of something very clever that the domesticated dog, and no other species, does. They read us and react, read us and react, read us and react, over and over. The other part is something exclusive to humans: we form identities that include not only our occupations, our religions, our ethnic backgrounds, etc. We identify with our pets as well.

"I'm a dog person," someone might say.

"Not me," says another, "I'm more of a cat person."

"I like horses!" or “I’m more into birds!”

And just as we need to assign identities to ourselves, we also need to assign them to our dogs. (I don't now about birds and horses, but cats already have their own identities.)

I met a woman on the street a few weeks ago while I was out with a Welsh springer spaniel named Caleb who is probably the most ebulliently social dog I've ever met. The woman had a King Charles cavalier spaniel. And as Caleb went through his bag of tricks the other dog scooted away in a wide circle, making an almost perfect arc with Caleb at the center of her radius.

The woman said, "She's just playing hard to get."

How interesting, I thought. The "dog-as-stuck-up-cheerleader" theory.

Caleb had to pee so he gave up on his attempts to conquer the little dog with love, and started sniffing for a good spot. But once his back was turned, the female immediately came zooming toward his backside for a quick butt sniff. When Caleb realized what was going on he turned around, and the other dog quickly rolled over on her side.

"See?" said the woman, proudly. "Now she's being a total slut."

Hmm. First she's hard to get, now she's too easy.

There are any number of explanations for how this exchange actually happened (and why). I suppose her explanation for the behavior is valid but I doubt it. The most common explanation would be that the female was first exhibiting an avoidance reaction, then she became submissive.

I don't see it that way. Avoidance makes sense until you realize that the female really wanted to make contact with Caleb, she just didn't know how. This is borne out by the way she came zooming in once his back was turned. And submission makes no sense at all unless you were to first change the size, shape, and structure of a dog's brain.

The human mind is designed to find reasons for things, even things that don't have reasons. And dogs don't have reasons for their behaviors; they can't. The dog's brain is designed primarily to process sensory data and emotional information in real time. It would not have been advantageous, in evolutionary terms, for dogs or wolves to take time out to "think" about their circumstances and then use reason or logic to make decisions. In the wild a logical animal is a dead animal. That's because logic is a slow, high-energy, top-heavy mental process. Even chess masters don't use logic to win matches; they rely on pattern recognition and working memory. Yet whenever we see a dog stop for a moment to make choices about which action he wants to take, or pause to "feel things out," we automatically (and mostly unconsciously) believe the dog is "thinking things through," i.e., using an innate ability to reason.

There are several "reasons" for this. One is that dogs have faces. And one of the primary social circuits in the human brain is designed to recognize not only the faces of people we know but to "intuit" what the expressions on those faces "mean." These circuits are equipped with a lot of dopamine receptors, making face recognition a kind of natural high.

When we see footage of wolves hunting, for example, our analysis of what we think is going in their minds (which probably goes back to the Darwinian idea of species having adaptive "strategies") is that the wolves are planning their attack; they've got a "game plan." We see it in their faces. Yet when we see a spider go into a hole and pull a leaf over himself to "hide" from his prey, do we believe the spider is thinking this through logically? Does it have a game plan? Of course not. And one of the reasons we don't do that is that a spider's "face" is expressionless.

Another "reason" we believe dogs use logic and reason may be that dogs don't feel themselves to be separate from us, and on a certain level we don't feel separate from them. Many pet owners report that they grieve more over the loss of a favorite pet than they do over the loss of a parent, a close friend, or a spouse. These owners say that losing the pet is like losing a part of themselves. That may be because parents, spouses, and friends have ego boundaries. Dogs don't. As a result it becomes easier for us to see our dogs as indivisible from our own thoughts, making us susceptible to the belief that they think more like we do than the size and shapes of their brains would suggest or support.

Another anomaly is that dogs are much smarter than wolves in terms of being adaptable to new environments and in terms of their social and emotional intelligence. And yet a wolf's brain is at least 25% larger than the brain of a dog the same size.

Where does the dog get its extra brain power?

I think they get it from our brains. I think they literally hijack parts of our brains and use them to think with. I borrowed this idea from the philosophy of embodied embedded cognition, written and hypothesized about by Daniel Dennett, Andy Clark, Susan Hurley, and others.

Here's how I think this happens: Dogs read us and react, read us and react, read us and react, over and over. And we project our own emotions and thought processes onto their reactions, based in large part on our personal beliefs and identities. As a result, our reactions, in the moment, reinforce whatever small behavioral changes the dog exhibits in response to us in an almost continuous loop. This happens repeatedly, countless numbers of times every day, even when we're not thinking about it. And as a result, the dog begins to reflect back to us many of the same things we're unconsciously projecting onto them.

That's what they do. That's what we do.

So it makes sense that the woman with the female cavalier thought her dog was playing hard to get. It wasn't that being hard to get was part of the woman's persona. In fact, probably just the opposite. But dogs feed off our emotions. So by having an emotional issue with that specific behavior, the woman was unconsciously reinforcing it. If she hadn't had an emotional issue with it, and hadn't labeled it, she would have had more of an idea about what was really going on with her dog (she was anxious), and would have done something to help her.

The Dog as Psychotherapist

None of us are complete human beings. We all have unresolved issues. Most people are aware of the health and psychological benefits dog ownership can have. There’s plenty of research showing that owning a dog reduces stress, lowers blood pressure, etc.

There's another benefit that not many people are aware of; dogs can also be great psychotherapists if we let them.

Years ago I saw a woman in Central Park call her dog to her in a stern tone of voice. The dog had been doing something he shouldn't have; I don't remember what it was. He came to her nervously, head down.

She grabbed his snout and shouted in his face. "Do you have any idea how irresponsible you are when you do that?" she yelled at him. "Do you? What would make you even think that that kind of behavior was acceptable?"

The dog looked "guilty," which satisfied the owner momentarily.

"All right, then. But you'd better never let me catch you doing that kind of thing again."

What I took away from this encounter (other than that the owner was completely unaware that she was talking to a dog, not an unruly child) was that some of us seem to use our relationships with our dogs to work out emotional issues of our own, which we then project back on to the dog's behavior in a circular fashion.

How could a dog act "irresponsibly?" How could he have "thought" his behavior was acceptable or unacceptable?

His owner seemed certain that he felt guilty when she chided him.

But did he?

A recent study done by Alexandra Horowitz at Barnard College shows some pretty solid evidence that the "guilty look" we sometimes see in our dogs is a complete and utter figment of our own imaginations, and is actually the result of the way the dogs have been treated, not an awareness of any misdeed on their part. (Some of the dogs in the study exhibited a "guilty look" — or so their owner's imagined — even when they hadn't done anything “wrong.”)

So clearly dogs don't feel guilty, but people often imagine that they do.

Does this have anything to do with the callow supposition I made years ago, that some dog owners use their dogs as surrogates for their own emotional issues?

Yes. I still think that's true. In my first mystery novel, A Nose for Murder, Jack Field — an ex-cop turned dog trainer — describes the kind of relationship one of his training clients had with her Airedale, Ginger:

"She was using Ginger to work out emotional issues she had with her parents. It's not uncommon. The owner engages in a kind of psychodrama, with the dog playing the role of the owner's inner child and the owner in the role of a parent or authority figure."

Jack also thinks it's possible to determine a person's complete psychological profile by how they interact with their dogs:

"If Sigmund Freud had allowed his patients to talk only about their pooches, instead of free-associating about their mommies and their potty training, they would have all been cured a lot faster."

These are jokes, of course. And yet Freud said jokes are a way of telling the truth.

Our dogs love us to pieces. They also read us and our emotional lives in ways we can only imagine. I'm convinced that they know, on a purely unconscious level, what our issues are. They feel them. And it seems to me that if we can learn how to pay attention to what our dog's behaviors reflect back to us about how we feel, if we can tune in to how their actions might trigger whatever unresolved childhood issues we may have, particularly at times when we get frustrated and angry at them over minor issues, I think we could save a lot of money on therapy. Or we could just talk to our therapists about our dogs. Either way, there's something about the nature of the domesticated dog that can get to the heart of the matter like no other animal on earth.

By the way, about 4 years after I wrote the passages in my first novel I've quoted above, I found out that Kevin Behan, who originated the training methods I use and the philosophy I subscribe to, felt the same way. Here's a link to an article that's been on his website since at least 2001.

The Dog Who Helped Me Forgive My Father

Let me start by saying two things concerning my personal understanding about the nature of emotion.

The first is about memory, which is that there is virtually no difference between physical and emotional memory.

This is something I learned while studying at the NATAS acting workshop in New York. (I was never a very good actor, by the way; I was always too self-conscious on camera.)

Most people think that when a method actor is preparing for a scene, he starts by thinking about an emotional event from his past, and then tries to recapture that same feeling. That's sort of true. But trying to simply recall the emotions doesn't work. Being caught up in a deep emotional state — the only kind actors find worth using — puts you in a vulnerable position, and there's a part of the psyche that tries to prevent us from being vulnerable if it can. So you can struggle and strain all you like to recall the giddy, almost tipsy delight you felt the first time a girl (or boy) you liked told you they liked you back, for example, or the despair you felt later when she (or he) told you things were over. But try as you might to recall the exact emotions, they won't come. Yet if you simply recall some of the sensory details surrounding those events — the color of her eyes, the texture of the walls, something as inconsequential as the angle of light shining off her hair — then the emotions come flooding back, to carry you away once more.

Emotional memory is not mental or abstract; it's visceral and concrete.

The second thing about emotions is that while we may categorize many different types — anger, jealousy, longing, lust, joy, etc. — they all come from the same well, meaning there is essentially only one emotion. And like white light it can be refracted into a rainbow of different emotional colors, something I also learned in acting workshop. For example, if a scene requires your character to be angry, but you're feeling more on the sad side that day, it makes no difference at all. If any kind of emotion is there you're free to use it however you want. Yes, you may feel sad before the scene starts, but once you're in it you'll be absolutely furious.

So the only difference between emotions is their "color."

Years ago I had a black-and-white English field setter named Charley. He was named after a character in a screenplay I'd just sold: The Legend of Charley Maine, about a Manhattan couple — Maggie and Charley Maine — whose youngest daughter is kidnapped by elves on Halloween night. Charley often appeared on David Letterman's NBC show, where he was known as "Charlie [sic] the Bubble-Eating Dog." And when I wasn't waiting for phone calls from NBC, or out on my own auditions, I loved spending long hours in Central Park watching Charley play with the other dogs. A favorite of ours was a young Weimeraner named Flash, a wonderfully exuberant dog.

Flash's owner and I would sometimes make small talk as our dogs played, and in the course of our casual conversations, which took place over several months, outdoors, in a relaxed setting, little tidbits emerged about a kind of love/hate relationship she had with her father. And I slowly began to understand (or I thought I did) something about the curious relationship she had with her dog; she was often red-faced with anger at Flash for doing next to nothing, yet at other times she smothered him with kisses, also for doing nothing. She had a love/hate relationship with her dog too.

So one day I asked her why she'd named him "Flash," and she told me that it had been one of her father's nicknames. Well, of course. It all made perfect sense.

As I thought about it, though, I realized that something similar had been going on with me and Charley as well. I never berated him for playing, but I did get very seriously mad at him whenever he did something I thought might put his life in danger. At such times I felt helpless and out of control, and could feel myself actually becoming my father.

What was going on?

When Charley died suddenly six months later, some answers came.

First of all, my father had passed away 22 years earlier, but I didn't cry at his funeral; I was the only dry-eyed Kelley in the church that day. And I had never cried over his death at any time after that either. And the reason, or so I told myself, was that I was still pissed off at the way he'd treated me when I was very, very young. (Let's just say he'd been overfond of corporal punishment.) But when my poor little dog Charley died, man did I cry. I sobbed for 3 days straight. I couldn't even get out of bed. And it seemed to me that there was no difference in the tears I cried for Charley in 1990 and the ones I should have cried for my father 22 years earlier. In fact the love and loss I felt for that dog, reawakened something in me about the deep nature of the love I'd actually felt for my dad following the mistakes he'd made when I was 3 or 4. Tears are tears, after all, whether we cry them for our lost parents, or while watching the end of a good production of Romeo and Juliet or seeing My Dog Skip on TV, or just because we hear some dumb song on the radio. So I ended up crying for the loss of both animals, human and canine, daddy and doggy. (I also learned that you may be able to ignore your feelings successfully for 22 years but that doesn't mean they've gone away.)

Then, as my grief began to ebb and fade, I realized I'd also somehow forgiven my dad. The burden of anger and resentment I'd carried around in my chest like a dead weight for most of my life was gone, vanished. I finally understood what a great man he was in so many ways. He fought a war, he was part of a unit of soldiers who freed the prisoners at Dachau. He could sit down at the piano and play virtually any song he'd heard for the first time, completely by ear. He was also the most popular dad in our neighborhood because he was the only grownup who'd play with the neighbor kids. Many times when the doorbell rang, and a kid stood on the other side of the screen door with a football or basketball under his arm, he wouldn't ask, "Can Lee [or Jamie or Del] come out and play?" but "Can Jack [my dad's name] come out and play?" And yes, my father made some mistakes when I was a tyke, but bless him, once he realized what he was doing he learned how to control his temper and it never happened again. I should have recognized what a difficult thing that must've been instead of staying angry at him for so long.

So thanks, Charley. You were a great dog. I miss you.

And thanks Jack. You were a great dad. I miss you too.

Happy Father's Day, 2009.

LCK

"Changing the World, One Dog at a Time"

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