Who's got the damn dogs?

Back in the long ago my sweetie was in San Francisco with a work colleague and they were on a call while at Pier 49 where the sea lions hang out. I don't know if you've ever heard sea lions en masse but they were carrying on and making such a racket that one of the other people on the call, rather than just ask people to mute themselves hollered out "Who's got the damn dogs." Gary and his colleague cracked up because it wasn't dogs at all, it was sea lions. Years later when I was briefly in San Francisco on my way to Santa Cruz I decided to go and see them for myself. I wondered how I would find them and then I got out of the cab. They are loud, even at 6:30am which is when I was there on account of waking up on the west coast while still on east coast time.

Moving on from the sea puppers to rez dogs.

A lot of communities just let the dogs walk free. We saw this in Quito, Ecuador earlier this year. Just dogs taking themselves out for the day, getting snacks and resting in the park before taking themselves home again as the sun begins to set. I say this so you know that dogs living la vida loca isn't unique to reservation communities. These dogs have a bad rap, in part because of stories where they have been aggressive. It's how their raised I guess, the things they expect from other beings and the courage that these descendants of wolves get from being in a group. Most of us are braver in a group than we are by ourselves.

Which brings me to trauma dogs.

What the heckity heck are trauma dogs?

I came across this description of personal trauma in Maya Chacaby's dissertation, Fallout 250: Anishinaabe Post-Apocalypse Survivance Handbook. As you can infer from the title, it's written as a gaming handbook which is a very engaging way to deal with some pretty intense material. I came across it again in a trauma-informed practice certificate course I took through York University and it was with much gratitude and relief that the one week I had to miss because of a previous engagement was about trauma dogs.

My own trauma dogs.

No thankyou.

I dislike thinking about them.

Unfortunately in order to get my certificate, and idk what I'm going to do with it anyway but it's something I committed myself to, I have to write a reflection on each week which means I can't actually skip the trauma dogs. My trauma dogs.

Back to the earlier question. What the heckity heck are trauma dogs?

Trauma dogs are a way of thinking about our trauma reactions, the emotional charges that get barking when something triggers an alert. And trauma dogs are nothing if not alert, hypervigilant, and always ready to warn you or launch a pre-emptive attack on the perceived threat. The problem is that trauma dogs rarely if ever react to what is actually going on. They react to what created the trauma in the first place which means that their response is all kinds of disproportionate. The current situation just reminded them of what happened before and they are damn certain that won't happen to them again.

It's a nice way to think about the trauma we have stored in our minds and bodies isn't it? Because I don't know about you but I will stop watching a movie if the dog gets hurt. That's just wrong. Dogs deserve better than that and this framework gives us an opportunity to think about that, think about what set them off and what they need instead.

Name and describe your dog. Just pick one, we don't have to worry about the whole pack all at once. The first dog that comes to mind for me is anxiety. Going to call her Annie. Annie the anxious dog. She is always worried about things she can't control and will read rejection and anger into almost anything. And the trouble with Annie is that she's never alone, she's always hiding a handful of others along with her and because she's so noisy it's often hard to see who's behind her. It could be anger, could be fear, could be any number of things but Annie's the one I notice.

Dislikes: Annie hates instability. Hates, hates, hates it. Hates it with the fire of a thousand suns. Which isn't to say that she needs everything scheduled and laid out, she doesn't. If I let her know ahead of time that we're going to wing it, like on a road trip or something, she's completely fine. Ok maybe not completely but mostly. Stray whimpers rather than a full blown panic attack. She has likely learned to trust my judgement and knows, or hopes, that we aren't going to wind up hungry and alone on the side of the road. And she also understands that circumstances change. Again, likely learned to trust my judgement when we can't be certain about something. I did social work for 16 years with this pup, and she got very used to the social work answer to almost everything: it depends. It's ok if the answer is "it depends" as long as she knows what it depends on. If what the answer depends on is unpredictable, well she hates that very much.

She's not very good at reading silence either, probably because it is hard to know what's going on when nobody says anything, but she's learned to scroll back in people's previous interactions with her and look for patterns related to silence so if things have a history of being fine she's ok but if that history is unpredictable? Bark bark bark bark bark bark bark.

I wonder if she's an American Eskimo. I never saw such an anxious pup as our Eskie.

Likes: Annie likes to know what's going on, she likes to make educated guesses (predictions) about what's next so she's a big fan of me writing things down, reading, and gathering information for her to look at while I'm doing stuff. The more information I can gather about a situation, the quieter she will be.

So, now that we know Annie we can think about how best to take care of her. What boundaries may need to be set with others who set her off because Lord save us, I do not need her carrying on all night and for days after. She loves to hoard information and will scroll for patterns. Past behaviour is the best predictor of future behaviour and Annie knows that. If somebody's past behaviour is unpredictable? Annie is all over it.

Part of taking care of her is understanding how she emerged in this world. It means understanding what she's scrolling through while she's looking for patterns that will make the future less opaque or help her read the silence. And let me tell you. My generation (Evangelical subset of GenX) was raised to be extremely anxious. Because it wasn't bad enough that the world was going to end in a nuclear war at any minute, but we had the most unstable, unpredictable version of Christianity as our guiding light.

I came across this series of Instagram posts from the kindred space and it nailed the impacts perfectly.

Death or rapture was always imminent. You could get hit by a bus, Jesus could come back, ARE YOU READY? Yes yes I got saved I'm ready. But did I really get saved or was I just going through the motions? I can't tell you how many times I got saved because my behaviour (normal pre-teen or adolescent behaviour really) was often met with accusations of backsliding and a need to rededicate my life or clearly hadn't been truly saved after all.

The messaging is, as kindred space notes:

1. you are not safe
2. you are going to burn in hell (forever and ever and ever)
3. your life could be over just like that (finger snap)
4. be ready all the time and know that God is watching you. (creepy)

It promises safety, if I'm saved then it's all good but the salvation is very precarious. Not because it could be taken away (once saved always saved!) but because the probability that I hadn't truly surrendered or meant it or anything like that was always there. Maybe I repented too early, hadn't really thought about what I'd done. Maybe I repented too late, too far into the warnings and whatnot, so maybe I only repented to make it stop. Either way I wasn't sincere. Attempts to prove that I meant it were always subjective. The devil could say this, knew that, would do whatever. The only thing the devil wouldn't do was die for it and I'll tell you. Bonus anxiety for the constant reminders that your friends were about to jump off a cliff to hell and you might be the only person who could share the gospel with them!

That is fucked up. That is not good news. They raised a generation of kids willing to die for their faith, or be mocked for it which is a kind of social death, because that's the only way to be truly certain? Fawk. No wonder Annie's so hypervigilant. Obviously that's just part of a larger ecosystem of instability she emerged from but this is a blogpost, not a book.

I promised you tarot didn't I.

So here it is. And this is also from that certificate course I took, although they didn't use tarot. It's just where my brain went when I read the materials for that week. We were meant to think about how love, strength, and generosity are relational forces rather than personality traits. They are things we choose, learn how to do, and help us take care of each other as well as trauma dogs like Annie. To me, that sounded like a tarot reading.

Love. Any one of: the lovers, two of cups, ten of cups, and the Empress.

Strength: It's own card.

Generosity. Any one of: 6 of pentacles, 6 of cups, the Heirophant, and Queen of Pentacles.

So for my intuitive 3 card pull, I'm going with Empress as the past, the Heirophant as the future, and Strength holding them together in the present.

For this pull I decided to use The Good Tarot which I picked up at Blind Forest, a used bookstore in Sackville, New Brunswick. It's a really nice deck, interested in the highest good for a situation or person. The artwork is lovely, all ancient otherworldiness and whatnot. Seems like a nice deck for Annie who isn't a bad dog. She just needs some care and softness.

The first thing I notice is that the cards are all women. Strength and the Hierophant are typically rendered with a man or an androgynous person. This deck is all women, which sets a slightly different tone for the cards. The Empress also looks like she's holding on while the Heirophant is casting, raising something above her head as if to send it off or at least make it visible to everybody.

And that lion seems to be roaring at the Empress, which is a valid way to read the cards by the way. What are the figures looking at in the layout? The lion is definitely roaring at the Empress, who clutches her sheaf of wheat and stares straight ahead. The woman in the strength card is also leaning towards the Empress, turned slightly so that she may be hiding, a little bit, from her. And the Heirophant stands alone. Nobody is looking or gesturing towards her ... unless .. idk. Upon reflection that woman in the strength card looks like she could be turning towards the Hierophant. Do you see it? As if she's confident that the lion has got control of the situation and she's about to turn away and participate in or receive whatever the Heirophant, somebody who brings others into the presence of the holy, often acting as an interpreter of sacred mysteries, is offering.

Empress: Fertility. New ideas and experiences. Nourishment, co-creation, a world brimming with potential.

Strength: Endurance. Go the distance and know that everything happens at the right time. Courage to manifest miracles, spirit working through me. Strong enough to move mountains and overcome any obstacle.

Hierophant: Spiritual practice. Being committed to spiritual practice as a daily thing, a regular connection to higher power.

(from The Good Tarot guidebook)

In this context I would think about what was short circuited or denied to me that resulted in Annie's emergence. What ideas and experiences cause me to hold onto things so tightly. Her eyes and head are a little covered too aren't they, head coverings in tarot can often symbolize a cutting off from the spiritual, her vision is a little distorted. Despite all the religion and palaver about a personal relationship with Jesus, I would say that I was cut off from an active spiritual life. Empress can be wonderful, but placed in the past I've described, the interpretation shifts. She's holding on, barely perhaps. The woman in the present (strength) is more confident. She's learned some things, gained some kinships that put things into a different perspective that allows her to move forward into a spiritual practice/relationships that isn't/aren't fear driven. That softens the Empress' shoulders a little I think. I like the movement from contained to expansive, from holding on to generous.

And all it took to make that shift was a little strength. The right friends.

So think about your own trauma dogs. Give them names, try to understand them, and show them care. Use the lessons from the Empress, Strength, and the Hierophant to keep you from staying stuck in the past, clutching that sheaf of wheat and ignoring what you are being invited into. Think about what happened to you instead of what's wrong with you. Then do that for others, with a caveat. Yes, others deserve care and softeness as well. Asking, or considering, what happened to them instead of what's wrong with them. But don't let people weaponize that against you. If you are setting boundaries to protect your dogs, don't let somebody else twist this language into letting their trauma dogs run wild and bully your dogs into silence. This isn't a rez or even a dog park. Boundaries may help their dogs too.

Baamaapii!