by Douglas Green
No less a storyteller than Leo Tolstoy famously wrote, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” As a family therapist, I generally agree, but only because I’ve never once met a fully happy family – and the happiest and least happy I’ve known have all been deeply unique.
But what would old Leo have said about dogs? We have the image of the ‘bouncy, floppy-eared pup,’ cheerful and loyal, with a tongue hanging out in perpetual dumb grin. And maybe such pooches have lived a continuously happy and secure life, never impounded or abandoned or threatened or injured or terrified or beaten.
However, as with families, I have never met this dog.
The most secure dog I ever knew was a three-month-old I found in a pound. One of hundreds in an overcrowded room for only four days, she had already developed a reputation and a nickname, “Knucklehead.” She was confident, playful, and overwhelmingly loving, and would take charge of and change my life forever (and become the basis of my book The Teachings of Shirelle). But even so, her traumas showed. Any time water lit onto her, from a slight rain or shower head, she’d shrink down at the sensation. I guessed this came from being sprayed off in the pound. And then there was her terror of being left in any institution – from the most luxurious doggy day-cares to the kindest veterinary offices. Early imprisonment, it seemed, had left a permanent mark.
Another pup I adopted didn’t appear to have enough brains to remember bad experiences, but spent his 18-year life terrified of being put inside cars. The fact that young Ygor had been found alone in rural Kansas (and that he was quite a homely mutt) made it easy to determine that someone, unhappy at his birth, had tossed him out their passenger window somewhere outside the Wyandotte county limits.
The truth is that all dogs have brains not that much smaller than ours, and absorb experience, good and bad, in much the same ways we do. And what the brains sort those experiences into is what we call stories. While we surpass them in our abilities to interpret – and misinterpret – those experiences, every dog’s life, like ours, becomes a collection of tales of triumph and failure, love and betrayal, beauty and horror.
The great dog novels tell such yarns. Lassie’s journey is no less harrowing or heroic than Jason’s. And Buck’s trek to his wild call is as epic as those of the Joads or Bagginses. Of course canine epics cover less time, given dogs 1/7 lifespan. But because we share their feelings and cares, their tales ring powerfully in us.
We psychotherapists work with our clients to figure out what stories they tell to themselves (“I’m a failure,” “No one can ever love me,” etc.) and hopefully to help rewrite them (“My few successes could lead me to triumph,” “I can find the love I’ve never known”). But we have the advantage of these humans verbally relating their histories. Dogs can only give us evidence (as with my dogs’ fears of water and cars). Or can they?
A few years ago, I adopted an adult rescue dog. Instantly, she started revealing her past to me. A story I’d known included abandonment, but which developed into much more.
While Aria craved contact, she would sit yards away from me, as someone must have taught her to (along with her perfect housetraining). She wasn’t big or particularly fast, but proved the best hunter I’ve known, from her streetwise ability to lie still for hours awaiting prey. She cowered from people, but would bark at any dog on sight – apparently not intending to create a fight, but out of fear, to prevent one.
And then, the first time we took a leashed walk, she lunged at another dog. And the second she realized I was displeased, hit the ground on her back, pulling in all four paws, blinking quickly, begging me not to kick or whip her.
No storyteller ever wove a clearer tale.
For the next year I worked to fill in the missing chapters. Her mixture of fear and love, her trust in only certain strangers, her constant desire for security, even her goofy joy in yowling along with humans – these were her truth, her essence.
Doing so accomplished two things. First, it brought us closer together. As any good therapist can tell you, curiosity about someone builds their trust and openness. The dog felt my interest, my empathy, my fascination about her. Qualities she wasn’t used to.
And secondly, this work resulted in the plot of my second book, A Dog of Many Names. A sort of 21st-Century Jack London novel, about Aria’s earlier life and adventures.
But how exactly did this process occur? Dogs have stories. But when we translate them from the dog, are we just imaging what might have happened? Or has that pooch actually told us, intentionally, what they wanted us to know?
Or, in other words, did I write this book, or did she?
Returning to the master, Tolstoy once recommended to a beginning writer, “You should only write when you feel within you some completely new and important content, clear to you but unintelligible to others, and when the need to express this content gives you no peace.”
Well, okay, that describes my experience. But was that urgent need my own hunger to write, or was it…?
Dogs have stories. Maybe more interesting than we even surmise.
Douglas Green has turned his talents to many areas — he directed the 2000 film “The Hiding Place,” wrote the fan-favorite inspirational memoir “The Teachings of Shirelle: Life Lessons from a Divine Knucklehead” in 2015, and spends his days working with teens and children as a psychotherapist in LA. Doug’s latest project, inspired by his dog, Aria, is A Dog of Many Names., a courageous story of survival about an abandoned dog forced to fend for herself in the California wilderness.