Today, I looked out at our kennel area and saw all three of our beautiful dogs lined up. They watched me eagerly, looking for signs of food, walks, or work.
All three are bright and loving, and all three help me to heal by loving people from a distance and helping me connect with others.
All three love people and show me how to love people. Dogs opened me up to love and kept it alive when I needed that. I look at them and see my life.
I’ve always believed – and often written – that my dogs are a mirror or me, a reflection on what I want and how I love and what I need.
When I wrote the New Work Of Dogs, I spent a year studying attachment theory as it relates to animals and people. I know there are personal reasons why I get the dogs I get, and how we always get the dogs we need.
My relationship with my dogs is a perfect mirror of my own attachment experiences, emotions, and notions of love.
I learned that year of study to look at a person and their dog and tell them exactly what their mother was like. It never fails, although it always makes people nervous.
Most dog owners I know don’t like to connect the way they feel about dogs to how they were treated when very young. Yet there is an enormous amount of evidence to suggest we get our dogs for a reason, and it often has to do with our own emotional experience.
People talk about their dog’s behavior and feeling as if they had nothing to do with it. But our emotions have everything to do with it.
Our relationships with our dogs are almost always one of two things: we treat them the way we were treated and raised, or the way we wished we were treated and raised.
Dogs give us the chance to work things out, especially if we can be honest and self-aware. My mother suffered from a tormented and intrusive kind of love, which is why I always choose working dogs of one breed or another.
Our household was angry, my mother profoundly intrusive and disturbed, and I find that I train my dogs intensely and need relationships that are loving, but not outwardly emotional or demonstrative.
I like dogs with whom I can get close, but who have other interests and work. I rarely touch my dogs or speak to them, yet they are always close by. Red and Zinnia are perfect dogs for someone nervous around intimacy – they are (were) not needy or demanding; we do a lot of our loving in silence and some distance.
I am not as a rule drawn to rescuing dogs, too much emotion and drama for me.
I like to know the dog I am getting insofar as it is possible. Bud was a delightful exception. I have no trouble rescuing sheep, donkeys, chickens, or cats. There is always some distance between us.
My donkeys love me, but they don’t often get too close; neither do I. Works for me.
I love these three very much. I love the balance – three different breeds, three distinct personalities, except they are all loving and sweet.