Fear Season - Off Season | When Empathy becomes Toxic
It’s the middle of summer, and we’re in currently “off season”, but fear exists all year round, and there are still cases we work during the summer months. In this article, we cover a crucial topic of working with fearful dogs - the difference between the Empathic human experience, and the concept of ‘mirroring’ - how these two psychological experiences clash, and become dangerous when working with fearful dogs.
Being an Empath is a core component of my ability to do my job.
When it comes to working with dogs and people, one of the most important elements of my personality in helping me to be better at my work is being an empath. From early childhood, and as long as I have been able to remember - I have been known for my ability to recognise and understand how people are feeling, at a much deeper level than normal. As a child it wasn’t an easy thing to manage - because for a young person to have an advanced ability to understand how people feel was a bit like having a key to peoples private lives. I was the child that everyone else was happy to open up to, and it was often the case that people (adults and children) would share a great deal of their own personal struggles - because I was someone who could genuinely understand. And at a young age, without the ability to properly boundary and filter this ability, it was often a heavy weight to carry - making friendships difficult to manage.
The psychologists amongst you will know that empathic children develop their skills in hostile home environments and as a response to childhood trauma - a defence mechanism that makes it easy to predict behaviour patterns and see warning signs in the subtle details that most people would miss. Not something that anyone should want to go through, but being able to take those raw and unpolished skills into adulthood, in a way that can be put to good use - has been a true blessing now that I have the ability to direct it towards helping dogs and people.
Empathy is the keystone of much of the work I do - it is a gift that I am incredibly grateful for and one I use every day. But when working with dogs, empathy comes with a warning label. If not used in moderation, it can become toxic to our dogs.
“ The inability to keep control of our emotions, to regulate our breathing and tension, our vocalisations and decision making - is not a small factor, but the substrate upon which most fears in dogs are allowed to continue to grow. ”
The Human Empathic Experience | I feel in my heart the fear and anxiety that you feel. I understand why, and I want to use all my love to protect you from it.
In the Human world, empathy is more than just about understanding. It is about connection, it is about providing comfort and reassurance, about letting someone know that their emotions are real and that they aren’t on their own. We match people and resonate with them at their level - we help to connect the fragments of their emotional experience together so that they can heal and move forward. We share compassion, we lend an open ear, and we do what we can to help people find solutions in their own lives.
The Canine Instinctual Experience | I sense in my body the fear and anxiety that you feel. I smell the pheromones, I see the body language I feel the tension. I do not understand why, so I choose either to ignore it, to attack it, or to mirror it.
In the canine world, the expression of fear and anxiety is not intellectually or emotionally understood, it is felt through the senses, and responded to. For all of the ways in which our dogs are deeply connected to our emotions, they do not empathise. Different dogs respond in different ways, but in the case of fearful dogs, it is most likely that they will choose to mirror it - and this is where the outward expression of our empathy can very quickly become dangerous.
Fear at its route is momentary - a ‘blink and you’ll miss it’ response to certain overwhelming stimulus. To be startled or surprised, if given no room to grow, passes as soon as it arrives. But when the instinctual experience of a dog is combined with the empathy of a human being, the way in which we respond gives life and longevity to our dogs fear. By the time we realise it, the fear is already embedded and in need of uprooting. And if we share in our dogs fear, if we start to worry and panic, to anticipate and to avoid - and if we start to pour all perception into our dogs, it very quickly becomes a slow acting poison that starts to impact every moment of our dogs day.
Our outward expression of our empathy becomes an anxiety that impacts ourselves and our dogs, if we do not learn to keep it under control.
It is a wonderful thing that we can relate to another species in the way that we do, but we have to be deeply conscious of the fact that our dogs will copy us. They have no capacity to understand that we are worried about them, and their instinctual response to things like our muscle tension, the worry in our voice or the scent we produce when anxious is to also switch into a defensive state. Our empathy becomes a trigger for their fear.
It is an incredibly difficult reality that some of my hardest clients to work with when it comes to fearful dogs are those whose concern for their dogs becomes raw, unfiltered and uncontrolled anxiety in themselves. They don’t recognise it, but they become the token hysterical screaming relative that has to be thrown out of the operating theatre in every episode of “Casualty”. The inability to keep control of our emotions, to regulate our breathing and tension, our vocalisations and decision making - is not a small factor, but the substrate upon which most fears in dogs are allowed to continue to grow.
Trauma bonds, and recognising our own psychological damage
There are rare situations that go beyond empathy, when we have ourselves experienced traumatic events - either separate to, or alongside our dogs in the moment. I have worked with many clients who have been present when their dogs have been seriously injured or scared - whether that is a dog attack, a freak accident, a dog directly rescued from abuse or trauma in the streets, a vehicle collision, or being in close proximity to an explosion or pulled from a war zone.
When we find ourselves in a situation beyond simply empathising with our dogs trauma, and instead finding ourselves witness to it and woven into the story of it - it is a precarious situation that we put our dogs in if we choose to try and help our dogs heal, before we have also taken the time to heal ourselves and ensure that we are in the right state of mind to help others. As it has often been said, you cannot pour from an empty cup - and the bonds of trauma are something that more often than not means it is better to seek external support.
We need to embrace the role of the Paramedic in our dog’s lives.
It is essential that we compartmentalise the emotions we feel when working with fearful dogs, so that we can outwardly project a fundamentally peaceful, confident and trustworthy body language that we can use to further influence how our dogs feel. Knowing that our dogs mirror our own emotions, the best way to calm our dogs down and to build confidence is to truly be calm and confident in ourselves. I know first hand that it isnt an easy thing to ask. But it goes beyond a request - its absolute essential to our dogs success.
I talk to my clients about the role of a paramedic in an accident or emergency. Imagine that you found yourself in a spot of trouble. Perhaps an adventure gone wrong and a broken bone - something that needed the attention of a medical professional. Its important to thing about who we would want to turn up to assist us - not just someone with a professional competence, but the right energy and attitude. Would you want a paramedic to turn up that was full of an outpouring of empathy for your predicament? Would you want them to sit and share your sadness and pain with you, to hug you and console you and share their memories of that time they had a similar injury?
No. You would not.
When we are in distress, instinctively we know that what we do not need in that moment is empathy. Save it for later when we’re in the hospital bed. What we need in that moment is a calm, confidence presence that has the experience and expertise to get us to safety quickly. Someone level headed, and pragmatic, with a clear idea of how to help.
And here’s the rub. A good paramedic might have to make decisions that in the immediate short term are more stressful or uncomfortable in order to make our situation better and get to a healthier outcome. It is the nature of healthcare to weigh up the balance of the needle and the scalpel against the pain that we are in. And the same is true when it comes to helping dogs through their fear. There are limits to how useful empathy can be when it comes to crisis.
