What Dogs Teach Us About Ourselves

Perhaps it’s because I watch too much Cesar Milan, or because I need to correct my own dog after he’s spent several days with my ex, but it seems far too many people struggle with their dogs.

On any given day I see dogs walking their owners, pulling them down the street, barking at other dogs or people, peeing on whatever they like. These dogs are exhausting, unpleasant and sometimes dangerous.

Milan is a master at correcting this unwanted behaviors, and he does so by correcting the human nearly as much as the dog.

And yet less apparent is the therapeutic impact all this has on the human, profoundly transforming not just their relationship with their dog but with themselves and their fellow humans as well.

Starved for love

Most humans anthropomorphize their dogs. They see their dogs, often unconsciously, as simplistic reflections of themselves, of their own needs.

The reasoning goes something like this: Give the dog affection because that’s what I know and like and (rather more narcissistically) because the more affection I give to this creature the more I will likely receive.

We are indeed starved for love. Dogs, potentially unlimited suppliers of love that they are, would seem then to be a perfect remedy for this lack.

But this misses something vital.

Dogs don’t want our unconditional love. What they want is our leadership, and the structure and direction provided through that leadership.

For most people this proves very difficult to grasp.

Talking less, feeling more

We’re a very verbal society. We see evidence of this everywhere, from tv and movies to podcasts and therapy itself and its emphasis on “the talking cure.” We use words to state problems, sometimes to create them, and often to solve them.

In fact we talk so much that we’re routinely hardly aware of what we’re really saying, let alone why we’re saying it. We could call this our talking habit.

Over the years—from the hiking trail  to the hunting field to the parks of Mexico City—I’ve had a chance to see phenomenal leaders of dogs. Other than issuing a few key commands^[1]In short they are: yes, no, sit, down, stay, come/here and leave it. they are a remarkably untalkative, almost stoic lot.

They lead not with their words but with their actions, and most notably their bodies. Their posture is erect, their quiet confidence palpable.

Being around these people has had a notable effect on not just how I rear my dog, but on the way I carry myself through the world and interact with people. I believe if we open ourselves to what’s required of a healthy human-dog relationship this effect is universal.

So what does leading our dogs teach us?

Feelings as our guide

Through the process of dog leadership we become different people.

To lead our dog we must begin first to feel our bodies, we must begin to feel what we’re in fact feeling. Dogs are highly sensitive to this.

How sensitive? Dogs can not only see our emotions—via our musculature, posture and behavior—they can smell them.

The magic of dogs, the pure magic, is that they symbiotically respond to this, adjusting their functioning to accommodate our disposition.

This symbiosis, assuming we engage in it, connects us to a part of our minds and bodies from which we habitually divorce ourselves, often through obsessional thinking and the anxious chatter that follows.

When we lead with our conscious actions and not our words^[2]We’ve all seen the person walking their dog and having a full-fledged conversation with them. Rest assured the dog has no idea what the the person is talking about. This talking has no actual … Continue reading we enter into a space that’s highly sensitive and observant. We rely on an inner energy—our feelings—to understand what’s going on, with our dog (an other) and with ourselves.

Most significantly by learning merely to observe our feelings we cease to react to them. This is for many a wholly new way of existing.

The dog relationship requires us to do over and over, and we therefore create a new habit, one we’re ready to carry into our other relationships, with profound effect.