Fear: Encourage, Acknowledge, Repeat

How did your parents teach you to react to things that scared you? Did they laugh it off or tease you in an attempt to normalize the experience so you wouldn’t react so strongly? Did they get angry with you, tell you to get over yourself, as if your fear was inconvenient to them or somehow a major character flaw? Did they cuddle and soothe you to such an extent that you thought they were scared, too? Did they ignore you? Or did they teach you about whatever scared you? Did they encourage you to get closer to the edge while holding their hand, or explain what the doctor was doing, or pet the big dog with you while he sniffed and slicked and generally turned himself into a wriggling, happy  rug? Fear is a universal experience, but it can also be an isolating one; if we do not choose to empathise with the fearful, we will never understand their experience of fear, and they will never understand our experience of courage.

I am afraid of bees. There was an unpleasant backpacking trip involving too many yellow jackets that turned all buzzy stingy things from mere annoyances and occasional hazards to a force to be reckoned with. I sued to be afraid of hairdryers and curling irons; I’m still not a huge fan of hot metal making loud noises near my face, but if it’s 20 degrees out and I have to shower before church, I’ll suck it up and pull the trigger – on low heat, thank you. I am afraid of re-injury and exhaustion; after spending too long swinging between overexerting and voer-favouring a hip after a car wreck (no, I wasn’t driving 😊 ) I began to doubt my physical integrity, and I’ve had to work hard on overcoming that. Still working on that, but I think I’m doing better with my currently sprained ankle.

What is Greta afraid of?

Well, at the moment, the big snow-drift shaped pile of smooth, white solid stuff that I didn’t bother touching to identify. It was piled hip-high on the grassy verge between the road and the sidewalk on one of our favourite walking routes this morning, and Greta wanted nothing to do with it. It made a nice big pile of contrast against the dark cement, and reflected the morning sunlight well enough that I could see it from about 20 feet away (a great distance for me0, but I didn’t know there was a problem until we were nearly parallel to it. Then Greta stopped. It was like a cartoon, where the dog skids to a halt with its paws outstretched bracing against forward momentum, head down, ears back. This is called balking, and it means “Nope, not gonna! No way, no how, no!’

Balking is a common response in animals. Dogs do it, horses do it, cows, sheep…anything big enough to dig in heels and neither avian or feeling probably does it. I don’t know if fish do it, but I imagine balking is less effective in fluid than on solid ground so they probably exhibit flight. AT The Seeing Eye I was trained to recognise balking in two situations, 1) there is an obstacle or other hazard or 2) my partner is afraid of something. Obstacle avoidance balking is usually followed by an attempt to find an alternate route, such as going out into the street, back-tracking to a different branch path, or making some other kind of wide detour but still generally moving in the right direction. Fear balking can be accompanied by barking, growling, retreating, whining, or avoidance techniques.

The #1 rule of responding to a fear incident with a service dog, I learned, is DO NOT SCOLD.

Scolding and correcting a dog for being afraid of something will exacerbate the fear. Now not only is there a big unknown, but it has become associated with negative consequences. You’ve just made the situation worse. On the flip side, TSE also teaches handlers not to coddle the dogs when they are afraid. “Oh, if my human’s reacting this way, then there really is a reason to be scared! Yikes!” When I took both of my dogs on their first plane ride, both of them tried to crawl into my lap during takeoff. I don’t blame them for being intimidated by the sudden noise, increase in vibration through the floor, and heavy shift in g-forces. What’s a dog supposed to do with all that unknown going on around it? My trainers, in both instances, told me to gently but firmly shove the dog back down under the seat where she belongs, give them a treat, praise, and go back to sleep. “No big deal, here’s some positive reinforcement, see how unconcerned I am?” After that first flight, neither of my dogs ever cared about takeoff or landing in planes again.

So today when Greta flattened out like a furry pancake and kept scooting backwards away from the big not-snowdrift (it’s still too warm for that down here) I attempted to command her “forward” three times. She responded the same way each time, so I reached my hand and foot forward to examine the territory directly ahead of me. It seemed fine, and Greta did not try to shove me to the side or block me from advancing. That made me reasonably confident that this was a fear response, not an obstacle avoidance. I dropped the harness and took a firmer grip on the leash, commanded her to “heel,” and baby-stepped my way forward along the familiar sidewalk, praising and “hup-upping” the whole seven or eight terrifying feet. Greta pinned herself to my left leg and I could feel the turn of her head as she kept tow wary eyes and ears on the Unidentified Frightening Object (ok, that was cheap, I won’t refer to fear obstacles as UFOs, I promise0, but she walked with me until we’d passed it, and when I picked up the handle of the harness again she resumed work as usual. On the way back, she gave the object one suspicious look, nudged me a little farther to the left, but didn’t hesitate and walked right past it. That thing, whatever it was, will never bother her again because I assured her, in no uncertain terms, that it was nothing to worry about.

Dogs and humans have this in common; they take their cues about fear, and how they should feel about fear, from those around them. This is the danger of the mob mentality, the unifying power of an orator who knows how to remind us all that we have the same enemy. This is the history of fear of law enforcement in racial minorities, peer pressure in schools, and the persistent worry of sexual assault victims that they won’t be believed. We are born with a sense of fear, but it is from our families, friends, authorities, and media that we learn what to do with it – hide it, get over it, learn about it, judge in ourselves and others to be weakness. Unlike dogs, we needn’t fear balloons strung on a mailbox advertising a yard sale, a plastic bag fluttering across the sidewalk on its way to clog a storm drain, or a the noise of a semi truck’s brakes as it turns tight around the street corner you occupy. We don’t fear these things because we have the capacity to learn about them and know their limits, and our own. Dogs don’t have this ability; they rely on each other, or us, to tell them what is and isn’t a danger to the pack. Don’t scold your dog for being afraid, don’t’ coddle her, just keep going and tell her everything’s going to be all right. Offer the chance to sniff, but if the dog isn’t receptive, don’t force it. There’ll be other opportunities to continue acclimating your dog to helium balloons.

The rules for responding to canine fears are similar to those for responding to human fears:

1)                  Acknowledge, don’t dismiss. Don’t mock or silence or label someone for being fearful.

2)                  Encourage, don’t judge. Encourage is a particularly poignant word in this context, given it includes the word courage. Share your courage; share your knowledge, your experience, your faith. To judge a person for fear is hypocrisy. Have you not feared something? Judgment creates distance, not empathy, not community. It isolates both the judge and the defendant.

3)                  Rinse and repeat. Overcoming fear takes time; don’t be impatient with your dog for fearing the same big black trash bag on the curb every time you pass it, and don’t be impatient with a person who needs your explanation reinforced a few times, a couple of exposures, some Xanax, and still has nightmares about getting on a plane despite never having been personally affected by a plane crash.

As usual, I’m not perfect at this. I’ve probably teased or dismissed someone’s fear in the past, and I know I’ve misunderstood canine fear once or twice, too. But through active listening, dog training, and examining my own fear experiences, I’ve learned a lot about fear, empathy, and encouragement in the last few years. Laotse, or whoever wrote the Tao Te Ching, wrote "He who controls others may be powerful but he who has mastered himself is mightier still." Solomon wrote

“Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil. For if they fall, one will lift up his fellow. But woe to him who is alone when he falls and has not another to lift him up Again, if two lie together, they keep warm, but how can one keep warm alone? And though a man might prevail against one who is alone, two will withstand him—a threefold cord is not quickly broken.”

in Ecclesiastes 4:9-12 about the physical, emotional, and security benefits of community. These two men are widely regarded as the wisest men who ever lived, with the possible exception of whoever invented sliced bread, as that is now the cultural standard of “awesome.” Laotse’s advice does not preclude making use of Solomon’s; why should anyone fight fear alone?