By any standard, I was a fearful child.
Sometimes it seemed like I feared everything.
I feared being kidnapped, I feared getting a terminal illness and dying, I feared my parents getting terminal illnesses and dying. I feared them being killed in car crashes, I feared me or my friends being killed in car crashes. I feared my closet and monkeys, including the wooden articulated monkey that hung in my closet. I feared the dark. I feared being ridiculed at school and I feared public speaking. I feared roller coasters. I feared nocturnal wolf home invasions. I feared lint disappearing down the drain. The list goes on and on.
I would get my fears from the evening news – whatever macabre story I heard there would get added to my list of worries. It was seemingly endless.
My parents would go out for dinner every Friday night. Being in the age before cell phones, I was unable to track them or know if they were ok. But I often felt like I had premonitions of disasters. I would be unable to go to sleep until I was able to know that they were ok. I would look up the phone number of the restaurant where I knew they were and I would call them and ask them to please page my parents to see if they were there and safe. I did this multiple, even many times, earning myself quite the reputation as a worrier and as a sleuth.
All of my fears, admittedly some were on the peculiar side, were real to me.
The fear itself: a description
My most prevalent fear by far, the one that impacted my life the most, the one that changed my daily activities, was my fear of dogs. I was actually afraid of all animals (as was evidenced by a future terrifying encounter with a 2-month-old kitten when I was in my early 20’s). But dogs are the animal that you tend to encounter the most during daily life. Actually this fear of dogs transcended the word fear – this was a phobia. It was crippling and irrational.
Now I’m not only talking about fearing gigantic, feral dogs with razor-sharp teeth that might ferociously kill me if I step into their fenced yard. That might be considered in the realm of a normal fear. I’m talking more about about fearing the neighbor’s dog, Freckles. Freckles was some type of Cocker Spaniel and wanted more than anything to greet me, jump on me and slobber. Now Freckles might not sound ferocious to many but I. was. terrified. One time, I went to this neighbor’s house and they had forgotten to put her away, like they usually did when they knew I was coming over. I couldn’t just stop by unannounced to my friends’ houses. I had to warn them, so that I didn’t get mauled by their “frightening” dogs. That visit ended quite abruptly with me crying and running home.
This all sounds almost comical from this many years out, but I can tell you that it changed my life and was the furthest thing from funny at the time. Everybody wanted to know why I was so scared. Had I been attacked by a dog in my youth? Had something horrific happened to me as a child? I mean, the simple answer was always no. Nothing had happened. Oh, how I wished that I had some fabulous story to tell – that I had been viciously attacked by the neighbor’s poodle in my sleep when I was too young to remember it, and I had almost died. If that had been the case, I imagined, people would understand. They would care. They would be on my side, empathetic. Instead, my fear was so incomprehensible to most people that they tended to ridicule me. They also tended to be offended by my fear. Why are you afraid of my Shih Tzu, Fluffy? What if she is afraid of you? She would NEVER hurt a flea. Of course I don’t want to put her in a closed room behind a locked door – she is MY CHILD! Would you want to be put behind a locked door?
I think you can imagine why I didn’t get invited to many people’s homes.
Over the years, I would turn down too many invitations to count – invitations to friend’s houses, relatives’ homes – invitations to parties and events. Over the years I did get quite good at self-advocacy – if there was something I really wanted to attend, I did ask if it could become dog-free. I definitely got some judgment from that. And, inevitably, in the moment that the dogs actually had to be banished from the family, I would be cited as the reason for this horrific, unthinkable decision. And I would feel myself blush head to toe. I would be so ashamed that I wanted to disappear. Sometimes though that shame would morph into anger. The cover of anger was what I guess you might call self-protection. The cover of anger was a part of me trying its very hardest to defend me from what were frequently protests indicating a complete lack of understanding of my bizarre fear. “But my dog is a part of the family. Little Tickles would never ever hurt you.” They would beg and plead with me to just understand that their dog was different – their dog would never hurt me. They usually felt sure they could convince me and they never could. I was terrified, and I wouldn’t budge. It seemed pretty obvious to me at the time that they wished I would just leave. But I stayed and then the rest of the gathering would be uncomfortable and embarrassing. Oftentimes, the dog would get let out accidentally (sometimes I wonder how accidental it was) and the three-year-old version of me would again make her appearance and all hell would break loose. That’s when the shame really kicked in. And the anger.
As I got older and my reaction to dog encounters didn’t change, the fear started to look stranger, I began knowing how to approach people by verbally disarming them before they followed in the ever-common footsteps of most dog-owners, insisting that their dog was sweet and not like the others. I began saying, I know your dog won’t hurt me, it’s my problem, but I’m scared. The thing is that I had to do it before I actually got into the situation with the dog, because when that happened, whether I was 3 or 23, the fear was so complete that my reaction would be very childlike. My brain would turn off and I seemed to have no control over the reaction – it simply happened. All it took was hearing that jingle of a collar to send me shrieking and running away. This happened when I was 5, it happened at 15 and it happened at 25.
I can vouch for the fact that dogs can sense fear, though. While I don’t know for sure if they can smell it or see it or feel its vibration, through the quarter-century that I lived with this phobia of dogs, I heard more than my fair share of phrases like – “I’ve never seen my dog do this before!” or “Little Foxy never acts like this.”
I also heard the ever-common “Just act like you’re not scared and they will leave you alone.” That was akin to asking somebody to come face-to-face with a snake or a tarantula and just stand there acting unafraid. That just wasn’t possible.
I did have one experience that, while having absolutely nothing to do with the origins of my fear of dogs, seemed to confirm it. This happened when I was 6 years old. I was playing outside with my older sister and our friend. They were only one year older than me, so we were all quite little. We were playing outside doing what small children do when somebody (and I honestly don’t remember who, but certainly would put money on the fact that it was not me as my fear of dogs was firmly cemented already) decided that it would be fun (maybe funny?) to “play” with the dog next door. Mind you, this dog was a very large Doberman pinscher that would chase us when it got out of its fence. It would chase us until we would go up on our porch and for whatever reason, it would then immediately stop and just stare at us. I suppose I was grateful that it 1.) never got its jaws around us before we made it gasping to the front porch and 2.) stopped short of munching on us as we struggled to get in the front door. So, on this Sunday afternoon, we collectively decided to climb on the wood pile by the fence and dangle a stick down towards the dog. The dog (and I don’t remember his or her name or anything more than the fact that it was a Doberman pinscher that was a very dark color) was “playing” with us. Everything was fun and games until my sister’s friend accidentally dropped the stick down to the ground inside that dog’s fence. So even though we were standing on a woodpile, and even though there were bound to be countless other branches nearby that we could have substituted for this teasing stick, she opted to jump over the 6-foot-high fence to retrieve this particular stick. Being a small 7-year-old girl, she hoisted herself over the fence and hung down on the other side ready to drop down into the yard. But before she could do so, the dog, the dog that lived there, the dog we had been playing with/teasing relentlessly decided to defend its territory. My sister’s friend did not drop into that yard. Instead she somehow hung there, hanging onto the fence while the dog repeatedly bit her legs. My sister and I ran for help – unsure of what to do and way too small to be able to help her ourselves. Luckly there was an adult in the house and I honestly have no recollection who was available to help us out that day – but the adult that was there was able to climb onto the woodpile and hoist our friend back up over the side of the fence. Her legs were riddled with dog bites – I can still see the numerous black and blue and green marks on her legs. I think we learned a very important lesson that day – don’t mess with a dog’s domain. For me, this only cemented my fear in that much more.
It also didn’t help that when I was about ten my mother’s friend was attacked by a dog while they were jogging in the pre-dawn hours around the block. The two of them would often go out jogging before the kids woke up, and before they went to their teaching jobs. This morning, I suppose that their running by one of the neighborhood houses didn’t sit well with the dog that lived there and my mom’s friend had been attacked. I remember my mom coming back to the house to call for help – no cell phones in those days. I remember feeling certain at that moment that I would never be caught running in the morning hours (or ever, let’s be honest) for fear that might happen to me.
I had other experiences too – dogs crashing through screen doors while I was inside. A dog chasing me on my bike with the dog’s owner yelling at me to run for my life. (In retrospect, I wonder if that owner was being facetious, but I’ll never actually know. I was terrified. I ran for my life.) Dogs making a beeline for me from across parking lots and streets. I had experiences that never seemed to happen to other people. When meeting a new friend my first question would always be – do you have a dog? The subtext being – if you do, I doubt we can be friends.
Now people do understand phobias and most people would say they are afraid of large spiders or snakes or something else like sharks. But having a phobia of dogs made me a bit of a freak. People didn’t really understand this phobia.
Service dogs, emotional support animals, family pets, puppies (puppies are actually the worst!) – I was scared of them all. I do remember the first time I met a dog that didn’t send me trembling and running in fear. I was a pre-teen and his name was Buster – he lived at a distant relative’s home in Arkansas. As was befitting a dog of that area at that time, he was mostly an outside, wandering kind of dog. And he was older than the hills. This was the reason that I could actually tolerate sitting next to Buster for hours. I don’t think Buster could really move much, probably due to arthritis or other age-related ailments. While the others played cards indoors, I was eating up my first opportunity to actually interact (minimally of course) with a real live dog without running away or screaming like a blithering idiot. I sat with Buster in the dirt and sparse grass while the adults sat in the screened-in porches playing cards, drinking iced tea and swatting flies. I sat with Buster and I felt almost normal.
I never heard about Buster again after that trip. I’m pretty sure that Buster must have died pretty soon after we left as he could barely move the week we were there. But he lived on in my heart. I thought about Buster a lot – he gave me hope that I might actually have the potential to be normal one day.
I even entertained thoughts that perhaps I was reincarnated straight out of a life in which I had been murdered by my very own family dog. That idea took up quite a bit of space in my head through the years and I can’t honestly say that I don’t believe it now.
I loved to exercise outdoors, but I couldn’t really do it. Not without arming myself with dog mace and sometimes a large stick. Most of the time the dog owners that I encountered seemed to want to turn whatever method of defense I happened to be wielding around and use it on me. I did not make many friends by seemingly implying that peoples’ dogs were terrifying menaces. I reassured them through my cries that no, it wasn’t their dogs, it wasn’t them. It was me and I was afraid and PLEASE GET YOUR DOG OFF OF ME! Where is the leash anyway? Deep sigh. Those encounters never seemed to end well. I would be so full of shame and so embarrassed that I would end up getting angry and not being able to comfortably stay in the situation after the encounter had happened.
Once though I had a dog run at me across a golf course while out for a walk as a young adult and the owner, not knowing how to control his newly adopted dog, yelled at me to kick the dog, spray the dog with my ever-present Mace, hurt the dog. He frantically conveyed that he didn’t know the dog well and didn’t trust the dog. I couldn’t bring myself to kick his dog – I was scared to touch it! And he couldn’t call the dog off. I simply don’t remember how that situation resolved.
I often wondered what I was really scared of when it came to dogs. Even when somebody had a very sweet dog and I BELIEVED them, I would be afraid. Even when somebody had a dog that honestly looked like it couldn’t hurt a literal flea, I was afraid. I was so afraid, but I couldn’t quite articulate what it was that I feared. If I knew the dog wouldn’t hurt me, why was I afraid? Unless I wasn’t afraid of being hurt. Sometimes I wondered if my fear was more about loss of control. Sometimes I wondered if my fear was more about not understanding dogs. Maybe it was just fear of the unknown.
Since I had been a little girl, I had had a recurring nightmare about dogs. In those dreams, the dogs were never your average friendly pet Fifi – in those dreams, the dogs were human-sized and standing on two legs, but they wouldn’t speak to me – I would always try my hardest to reason with them, but they were always wanting to attack. I would wake up in a sweat with my heart racing. Perhaps this was a clue to my fear, but I wouldn’t understand this dream, even if I do today, for several decades.
The entire dog phobia became a core part of my identity. It was one of my primary characteristics. I was “the girl who was afraid of dogs.”
Conquering the fear
I believe that I have conveyed the impact that this fear had on my life and on my core self. Through the years, I had given up friendships, events, forms of exercise and, in all honesty, connection with the dogs themselves because I didn’t know how to conquer this epic phobia.
I desperately wanted this fear to go away.
When I was in the third grade or so, my mom made an appointment, presumably to try and help me conquer this fear, but the appointment was at a veterinary clinic. I was mortified! My sister teased me relentlessly – I had an appointment at a vet – I must be the dog! I was so ashamed that I seem to remember refusing to go. Even if they were able to get me into the building, I am certain that my mind was closed off to anything they might have had planned for me. As an adult thinking about this, I sometimes wonder what might have actually been planned – had my mom intended to introduce me to animals in a controlled setting? That, in itself, seems very smart! However, at a vet? Interesting venue – scared or sick animals aren’t usually in the best states to meet new people, especially scared people.
I also tried to talk my own self out of the fear using my intellect. As an adult, I bought multiple books claiming to describe the animal mind and I read them. That didn’t help.
Other than these feeble attempts, though, I never really tried to conquer this fear. I had accepted my fate.
I would eventually find my way out of this imprisoning fear, though. My motivation to finally leave it behind was born out of desperation – a desperate need to belong. I had finally endured too much and became exhausted by this fear. Not to mention that my need to belong and connect finally outweighed the fear. Something had shifted.
At the age of 26, I was visiting my in-laws in a distant state. My brother-in-law and sister-in-law had a beloved dog (Tinker, a very spirited black Labrador Retriever) and therefore, I couldn’t visit their home. I had previously and many times asked them to put the dog away, but this particular time I became annoyed with my own self. I was so tired of this whole routine. I was ready for it to be over. I wanted to have my own children someday and I knew that I needed to not be the mom hiding behind her three-year-old child when passing a dog on the street. It was time.
So, on a whim, I drove to the nearest humane society, boldly walked through the doors and explained my predicament. I told them that I had a dog phobia and that I needed to get over it. I asked if there was a dog that I could interact with. The people working there, at that humane society, that day likely don’t understand how vastly my life was changed in the next 15 minutes.
It just so happened that that morning a dog had been brought in that was very afraid, but also very sweet and wanting and needing to be held, he wanted love. (One could argue that we had all of those things in common on that day.) One of the employees went to fetch that dog for me. I was shaking, sweating, terrified, but determined. When they brought that dog out to meet me, I approached and nervously petted his head. Then they put him in my arms. With a few people standing by me for support, I endured several moments of utter discomfort that could practically be described as terror. But I survived. I ended up holding that dog for maybe 5-10 minutes. He was shivering and afraid and longing to be loved. I think he was more afraid of me than I was of him. And I have to admit that I did fall a little bit in love with this puppy. If I had been anywhere near my home state instead of across the country, I’m pretty certain I would have taken that dog home with me. But as it was, I handed the sweet little guy back over, thanked them profusely and headed out into the world to meet Tinker, the black lab.
It only took a few minutes to drive to their house, so I didn’t have the chance to lose my nerve. With my breath quickened (think panic attack) and my body shaking and fighting every single instinct to run away, I entered my sister-in-law’s home. I had told them what I was trying to do, and they knew my history, so they were barely holding onto this rambunctious, eager, jumpy dog while I sat down on the couch, preparing for the worst. But I was determined.
Once I was situated and let them know, they let go of Tinker. She bounded straight over to me – as dogs always did in those days. My heart was racing, my jaw was clenched, my hands gripping the couch – I was hellbent on staying in this scene instead of running. And I didn’t have any idea what was going to happen. I hated those moments of Tinker jumping on me and around me and going a little crazy. But I endured it. I don’t know how long this lasted, but I imagine now that it was probably pretty short. Once her initial curiosity about me was satisfied, Tinker simply sauntered away. Wait. Was that it? That’s all it took? It had been less than an hour since I had arrived at that humane society, less than an hour since I had even made the decision that today would be the day. I was almost disappointed that it wasn’t harder. I stood up from the couch and spent the rest of the evening easily socializing with Tinker in the room. She never approached me again. My fear had been conquered. 26 years worth of fear erased in a single hour.
It would be an extreme understatement to say that I was filled with relief, but the frustration was almost as intense. How had it been so easy?! Why had I wasted so much energy and so many years missing out on friendships, events, and life when it ended up taking such a short amount of time, and being so simple, to get over this fear?
Regardless, I was happy and maybe a little embarrassed for having waited so long. But I guess that day was just my time.
The discomfort of being with dogs did not vanish in that hour. But what happened is that I had proven to myself that I could endure that discomfort. In the subsequent days, weeks, months, and years I would follow that same pattern over and over – enduring the discomfort that came with meeting each new dog, knowing that this discomfort would be short-lived.
I knew now that I could survive.
Years on, I would think often about this fear when my own children began struggling with fears of their own, and each of them did. Their fears included the fear of closed doors, the fear of bubbles, fear of deep pools and fear of wind.
In working with my daughters through each of their fears, I was struck with how easy it would be for me to just ignore them, to turn away and roll my eyes at them. It certainly would have been easier to let them figure out for themselves how to get over their fears, as I had once done with my fear of dogs. But I knew that I could potentially cut short their suffering by helping to guide them through the process of conquering.
When one of my daughters decided she wanted to join the swim team, but the fear of deep pools was keeping her from it, I knew what we had to do. We headed off to a deep pool to conquer this fear – a fear I would learn in the process of helping her conquer it that I shared.
Mind you, she was reluctant to do this – perhaps even angry about my insistence that we do it. Once in the water together, I told her that I wanted her to swim across this deep pool 20 times, and that I would be with her. She was very afraid, but she agreed to do it. After the first crossing of the pool, she told me that she didn’t like it. My response to her was: “You don’t have to like it, you just have to do it.” It’s ok to do something that makes you feel uncomfortable. Sometimes the payoff is worth it.
So I swam with her across this pool several times until she said she thought she could do it without me. That day, she completed her 20 crossings of this very deep pool, and she did not love it, but she was able to join that swim team.
I like to think that she learned through this process that you don’t have to like something in order to just simply do it. Liking it isn’t the goal – learning to endure the discomfort is the goal. When your wanting to do something becomes more important than the associated fear – that is when the real magic happens.
Assumptions I had to change
Looking back I think I believed that if I had to endure discomfort, I would not survive, I would cease to exist. That is quite an irrational thought – ceasing to exist – and I never overtly thought that, but I do believe that I had some deepdown belief that I wouldn’t survive something that was so incredibly uncomfortable for me.
I also needed to recognize what was at risk for conquering this fear (ceasing to exist) and what was at risk for not conquering this fear (continued lack of connection).
When the lack of connection finally became far greater than the fear of discomfort, when the lack of connection became unbearable, it finally became worth the risk of ceasing to exist. Once those scales tipped, it was finally more important to me to connect and to belong than to stay in my comfort zone.
Another risk for getting over my fear was the risk that I would find out that there was nothing to fear all along and that I had wasted those years. Even though this risk ended up panning out, I am so glad that I didn’t waste another moment avoiding the truth.
What would I tell a younger version of me
If I had to go back in time and talk to a younger version of me about this particular topic, I see clearly that the talking wouldn’t have been able to make much difference. Talking doesn’t cure phobias.
What I would like to do is hold little me while she cried, I would tell her that I would hold her hand while we met a dog or two. I would tell her that she was ok just as she was, that I loved her, and that she could survive this. I would tell her she didn’t have to like it, she just had to do it. I would tell her that I adored her and that I would be with her no matter what.
I would honor her and tell her that she had done an excellent job of keeping herself safe, but that this risk would be worth the reward, as many others would prove to be as well.
And all of this would be true for her at any age – I would have talked to her at 5 or at 15 or at 25, or at any other age that I would have had the honor of encountering.
She was ok. She was snazzier than she thought she was.
In closing
I have now lived more years unafraid of dogs than I lived afraid of them and even still, when I hear the jingle of a collar, sometimes I startle. I have even adopted several dogs through the years with varying degrees of success. I still don’t like dogs jumping on me, and find myself afraid of puppies’ tendencies to use their teeth. And I won’t play tug-of-war with a dog. Some remnants of my fear do remain. But my life was freed up on that day decades ago.
One thing I took away from these decades of fear is a huge compassion for other’s fears, and when somebody asks me to put a pet behind closed doors while they visit me in my home, I will always do it.
Today when I find myself afraid of something, I now know that it might just be easier than I think to leave that fear behind.
However, I just might still be afraid of that articulated wooden monkey who hung in my closet, wherever he ended up.