A Quick Thought on the Use of Denial

"What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence." ~ Christopher Hitchens, aka Hitchen's Razor.

Denial is one of the most simple and frequently used ways to avoid responsibility. The others being Excuses (it has to be this way), Blaming (it's your fault) and the almost miscellaneous and hard to categorize Telling-a-story/Diversion (you know this situation reminds me of...).

While I am open, even eager to being persuaded there is a fifth way to shirk responsibility, with almost a decade of cold calling call center experience (approximating a sample size of some 10,000+ random members of the Australian public I have spoken to) where on aggregate the majority of the general population do avoid responsibility for not wanting to do the survey; the above four - denial, excuses, blaming, diversion - pretty much exhaustively covered every call that did not actually resolve (either through a refusal or a survey). And yes, denial (I don't [subject of survey] so I can't help you) occurred more frequently than excuses (I'm busy), which were more frequent than blame (you always call during dinner time) and much more frequent than diversion (so what do you think about the alien autopsy?). And just so, people agreeing to do a survey was far more common than refusing to do a survey, so I'd guesstimate - having to recall spreadsheets of actual stats that some 60% of the tens of thousands of calls result in having to call again another time.

To be clear, and stay on topic, responsibility is good. I frame it in my mind as literally the ability to respond, it is an empowered position and as such we should seek to take as much responsibility as we possibly can ethically. Because I view responsibility as an empowered state however, this means one should avoid usurping responsibility from others because that is disempowering others. 

This is what I want to say about denial though:

To be guilty of denial requires the establishment of a fact to deny.

Creating a neat and tidy two-step process:

1. Provide sufficient evidence to support your claim.

2. In the advent that someone denies the evidence, you can label them a denier.

This could spare the world a lot of bad-juju. My concern arises from 'denial' or 'denier' being used as a pejorative, specifically with the practical function of discrediting a speaker.

In practice this looks like someone getting labelled a x denier, a visible example being climate deniers whom probably label themselves climate skeptics.

"Here’s a fun fact: Climate change deniers tend to be, on average, more knowledgeable on climate science than those who embrace climate change as a serious threat.

This too, is somewhat intuitive when you think about it: Most of us are perfectly happy to defer to the apparent scientific consensus. So we don’t read the literature, we just say, “well, the scientists believe this, and I trust them.”

However, for those who are disinclined to trust the consensus position, and who strike an oppositional stance – they know they’ll have to justify it. They know their position is going to be unpopular, they know they’ll be bashed as ignorant science deniers. So they are more likely to actually read stuff – including actual scientific literature. They will be more motivated to get familiar with the big issues, identify apparent weak points/ gaps/ contradictions in the literature, to identify dissenters and their arguments." ~ Musa al-Gharbi, Three Strategies for Navigating Moral Disagreements.

The point of this is not that 'turns out, climate deniers are right' but more a promising explanation of how the misuse and overuse of accusations of denial arise. If you occupy a position that is a popular consensus, there is less pressure upon you to actually know your shit. The passage above speaks to my experience, where an excellent piece of programming from Australia's SBS channel program 'Insight' had an episode where one climate scientist responded to a roomful of skeptics:

 

I actually learned things, prompted by the skeptics relatively more informed questions. My threshold for convincing on climate change is low - for me it stands to reason - so I learned both from the skeptics, and the expert who is convinced and convincing.

Climate science and climate skeptics are exceptional though, the excerpted piece from the heterodox academy blog above has the subtle 'on average' giving us four groups, divided in two - non-expert believers, non-expert skeptics, expert believers and expert skeptics - though I've seen no compelling evidence that an expert skeptic exists.

Thus I am persuaded/confident, that the hierarchy of 'knows-least' to 'knows-most' goes: non-expert believers followed by non-expert skeptics, to expert believer. So if you add a small number of experts being deferred to by a large number of non-experts and then divide the cumulative knowledge by the total number of believers you'll get an average that is lower than that of the skeptics that have probably selectively informed themselves of facts that bolster skepticism...

I have not myself been accused of being in denial, unless of course a psychologist explained to me the grieving process. But I have witnessed on the "socials" faceless people being denigrated as a class for exercising the same skepticism I do.

I would like to expound upon a personal example for the express purpose of illustrating how difficult this really simple requirement can be: 

When I first heard the Gender Pay Gap statistic - though there are many, it would have been something like the 70c to a $1. Almost not to my credit, I didn't deny it, I thought 'woah! that seems outrageous, sensational' and I took it at face value. An established fact. Having worked in a professional corporate setting, and having at that point some training in economics through my Bachelor's degree in Marketing requiring I do Macro 1 + 2 and Micro, my next thought was 'how does that happen?' 

Because for me, the picture painted was that if a company needed to fulfill two junior positions in the marketing department - identical rolls and the core requirement was a qualification and not experience. I then thought of constraints on how the pay-gap could arise - the first being that salaries are often advertised with the job, if not there's salary surveys etc. or 'market rates' which is to say, pressure on companies to offer competitive salaries to attract and retain talent. 

So where in the recruitment process did the pay gap occur? Like if me and my classmate Agatha applied for the position and both were accepted - when, how and why would the company offer me $30k and her $21k...

It stretched my credulity that the managers and HR, payroll etc. ever were twirling moustaches and instructing somebody to 'apply the female discount muahahahaha' 

Absence of evidence may not be evidence of absence, but (and this I take from Matt Dillahunty) an absence of evidence where evidence would ordinarily be expected, is evidence of something. And given the ample supply of potential whistleblowers, and ample demand for whistleblowers, the absence of any testimony from a person in payroll that large gaps exist between men and women struck me as an absence of evidence. (For those already going for their hair to tear at it as they say 'the testimony does exist' I know, I'll clear this up shortly) Furthermore, in Australia there are other obvious constraints on how, why and where pay gaps can occur - like the minimum wage.

Of course, when I heard the alarming statistic it was early 2000s when lay-feminists were still mostly men, and so I didn't hear much about it for years. I could have much earlier cleared up the basic mistake I was making regarding the gender pay gap - the methodology by which the pay gap was calculated.

The 70c-to-a-dollar does not refer to 'equal-pay-for-equal-work' under which it is both sensational and outrageous to have someone discounted this way for their gender. The methodology is key:

The gender pay gap or gender wage gap is the average difference between the remuneration for men and women who are working. Women are generally considered to be paid less than men. There are two distinct numbers regarding the pay gap: non-adjusted versus adjusted pay gap. The latter typically takes into account differences in hours worked, occupations chosen, education and job experience.[1] In the United States, for example, the non-adjusted average female's annual salary is 79% of the average male salary, compared to 95% for the adjusted average salary.

 I was treating a non-adjusted pay gap as if it were an adjusted pay-gap. Both are issues, but are very different issues.

From my personal perspective, it is less outrageous if a female waitress is paid less than a male attorney than if a female attorney is paid less than a male attorney. And from my perspective the more interesting of the two problems is closing the 5% gap (how society values men and women differently), more so than the 21% gap which if restricted to paid work is an understatement of that problem. (how society values different work)

It's tempting, very tempting to dig into the juicy topic of the pay-gap, but it is meant to service as one example of where denial can be misapplied - like a 'pay gap denier' or broadly as a category of men in denial of either the pay-gap or 'the patriarchy', as in my experience the pay gap is most oft cited as evidence of 'the patriarchy'.

And since I am a fan of responsibility, if discussing the pay gap, one way to take responsibility is to ask questions like 'which pay gap are we discussing here?' and it isn't the case that one exists and the other doesn't, the adjusted pay gap gets into the weeds of near as I can speculate: how to reconcile paid maternity leave - where child rearing is a public good, with private firms where labor is a private good - and discussing things like UBIs, parental leave, compounding interest and class issues like paying one woman $80,000 for her baby to track her with an equivalent male colleague that chooses not to take parental leave equal to her, and another $15,000 to track her with her equivalent male colleague. Or the other probable source of unequal pay for unequal work which is the cumulative effects of pay rise discrimination based on gender (I get a 4% pay rise where Agatha gets a 3% pay rise, and the same next year meaning I get 4% increase of 104% of our starting wage and Agatha gets a 3% pay rise on 103% of our starting wage.) 

Or alternately if we are talking about the non-adjusted pay gap where you take a macro view of all the earnings of men and women and average it for each total population (or other measure of central tendency), then the discussion becomes things like (my speculation) why is a traditionally female dominated profession (like nursing, or teaching) paid so little compared to traditionally male dominated professions (like construction or policing)? Or alternatively framed as why do men dominate the distribution of top earning positions? which as an armchair economist and milkcrate sociologist I'm happy to discuss but not take a disproportionate amount of responsibility for being an individual and not the macro-economy. 

And I apologise for how 'mansplainey' the above two paragraphs are, but I do so because there are clips on youtube that have racked up 4.5 million views where two men both confuse the adjusted and non-adjusted pay gap:

Where Barack Obama says 'today the average full time working woman earns just 77c for every dollar a man earns' this is referring to the non-adjusted pay gap. He then says 'equal pay for equal work... it's not that complicated.' which while it could be argued is meant to be interpreted as a blanket statement that all work is basically equal so nursing is basically the same thing as construction, 'equal pay for equal work' is a slogan better suited to an adjusted pay gap, combining the two statements as he did paints a picture that a female junior partner in a private law firm is earning $77k to the $100k her male colleague earns holding all else equal. When instead it's $95k to $100k.

Then the egg is applied to Barack's face when we cut to a news story showing that the median annual salary of White House staff in 2013 is $65k to $73k. Helpfully, the graphic also has a source. Unhelpfully, that source is now archived, but with some digging you can get the source data here.

For me the red flags are 'Median' and also the 'Fox News' in the bottom corner, suggesting it's time for the old 'lies, damn lies and statistics' skepticism. Or as my old Market Research professor was fond of saying 'you have to get down and dirty with the data'. Because the 'oh snap!' there's a 12% median salary pay gap.

Here's the thing about a median salary - Imagine that I am the only white man employed in a country that is otherwise staffed entirely by women of color. The company employees 100 floor workers who are all paid $40k per year, they employ 10 middle managers (boo) of which I am one, all paid $50k per year. Then they have 8 executives all paid $120k per year, and 1 vice-president paid $220k and one president paid $600k totalling 120 employees (the math is why I am paid the middle bucks).

The average male annual salary is $50k per year, my wage divided by one - me. The average female salary is (100 x 40 + 9 x 50 + 8 x 120 + 220 + 600)/119 = $52,353. So here the gender pay gap is like +4% or something. The median male annual salary is also going to be $50k, because it's mine. But the median female annual salary is going to be very different to the average female salary - it's going to be $40k because if you arrange all female salaries from lowest to highest and then go to the 59.5th one (59th and 60th lowest wage) they will both be $40k, because 100 of the 119 female workers are floor workers.

The median annual salary of Obama's 2013 White House tells us nothing about the gender pay gaps he himself is concerned about (equal pay for equal work). From my glance at the data, for example: all Employee Analysts are paid $42k per year, regardless of whether their name sounds male or female. The sole exception is a 'Detailee' paid $80k and Detailees are the general exception where they are paid more for identical job titles, which I had to look up.

A perusal of other job titles follows a general rule of employees with the same job title are paid the same, but there are some exceptions like 'Records management analyst' and 'policy advisor' and 'information services operator' and of course the male white house calligrapher is paid more than the female white house calligrapher both of whom are paid less than the chief white house calligrapher who is female. But where there are disparities, I can't conclude that equal job title = equal work, because being policy advisor to energy might be a very different job than policy advisor on sport.

So how does Barrack Obama clean up his own back yard? Close this median wage gap? Well for one thing, he could fire a bunch of women from his white house staff. Because generally speaking increasing the number of employees will lower the median wage, and decreasing the number of employees will raise the median wage, but only if the number is large. The other thing he could do is rig the median wage by giving unequal pay for equal work. So the 2013 Obama White house employed 229 women, he just needs to take every female employee from 114th up to where they start earning $73k and pay them all $73k regardless of job title or what male employees holding the same job title earn. (I would predict with this solution, that Fox news would then report on the disparity in average annual wage, it's hard to get average and median to both be equal)

All of which is really in the weeds of the Gender Pay Gap and what to do about it in a post about denial. 

But this is what can happen when you don't properly substantiate your claim. When in other words, you do not actually know what you are talking about, which I suspect is so often the case in these times. 

At the opening of the post I went through the 4 ways to avoid responsibility, denial being but one of them. I was also taught that the only way to take responsibility, and subsequently what to look for is saying 'how can I help?' 

This is the thing, the people who take responsibility will actually scrutinize your claim because that is necessary to fix things - if you want to close a 12% gap in the median annual salary, as opposed to the average annual salary, or close a 2~3% gap in a specific role these are all different problems with different solutions. (and why Jon Oliver's shit on a table analogy doesn't work as an analogy, it does work as a joke, unless he is advocating that you can fix all pay gaps by just paying everyone everywhere the exact same salary.)

The nefarious aspect of misusing denial - to label others as denying an as yet unjustified claim, is that the people who take responsibility, who want to help are inevitably going to have to scrutinize your claim in order to attempt to resolve the complaint. 

A tangential but also nefarious aspect of misusing denial is the prevalence of undefined terms being slung about. This opens the door wide to Motte & Bailey tactics, probably the two most prominent among leftists are 'The Patriarchy' and 'White Supremacy/Systemic Racism' (I recently experienced a vicarious chafing listening to this interview which overall is worth listening to, and was an attempt to redress an anti-postmodern bias in the interest of heterodox, where at times in the interview, the interviewer asked the guest to define 'power' and 'the patriarchy' and in both cases the guest declined to define them the frustrating climax being 'who am I to define patriarchy?' style dodge, the answer to the rhetorical question is 'somebody who wishes to use it in conversation.') 

The 'Motte' part taking the form of treating the patriarchy or white supremacy as an overt active conscious and malicious system of oppression, a cartoon of which might be a Freemason Type secret society that men like me or us whites are denying the existence of. 

Whereas the Bailey in my experience is that 'the patriarchy' and 'white supremacy' are terms that simply describe that however society operates it favors whites and men. Aka they are synonyms for 'how things are' or 'the cumulative result of all time and space'. In which case, as a holder of a marketing degree - they are really bad synonyms for something that ostensibly passively everybody is participating in, all the time, because they suggest the more nefarious conspiracies by using terms that describe very concrete historical phenomena. 

In conclusion, to be sure, there are people who would deny a substantiated claim, because there are. Look at Young Earth Creation Apologists, their whole job is denying scientific theories. Denial may be the most common way to abrogate responsibility, but one of the other most common ways to avoid responsibility is blame - blame Obama, or blame a random person on the street for their failure to change society. Blame a stranger for not investing hundreds of hours into reading obscure inaccessible texts such that they are up with the abstract concepts of the moment in the discourse. 

Blame someone for being in denial of a claim you haven't established.

A Microcosm of Helplessness

 Two weeks ago our dog was hit by a car. Here she is now, so we were lucky, she is alive and all things considered, okay:

Photo timing by my partner.

I was responsible for this predicament, I had the most agency. My partner participates in Danza Azteca two to three times a week. On the evenings she has Danza, I often run so we are both getting our exercize. Recently, we had started a new tradition as often even with a 10 or 12km run I was finished before her Danza, I would walk our dog out to meet her when she arrived at the train station home. It gives our dog an extra outing and best of all, it blows her mind to run into her most adored owner out there in the world, like a second coming of Jesus or something.

She sprints up to my partner and jumps at her legs, before getting overloaded and running back to me as if to say 'tohm! tohm! are you seeing this?! I FOUND HER she's right...' and then sprints back to my partner, and this process repeats itself several times.

Anyway, when we first discovered she reacts this way, we were quite close to the train platform, which gave us a bit of a scare when she went 'locobananas' fortunately she really just sprints between the two of us, and I got her on a leash in pretty quick order. But it's safe provided there are no roads or footpaths between us.

The thing is, that dogs pick up on patterns, and Usma started to expect to be taken out to meet my partner in the evenings she had Danza. She suspected I had some secret way of divining when my partner would come home (instant messaging) and she began to get excited in anticipation of my partners arrival.

Linea 1, is much more reliable than Melbourne's northern train lines like Upfeild, which is to say - not very reliable. So it was hard to time our walk to meet my partner to ensure we ran into eachother in the park, or the long uninterrupted sidewalk between the park and the station.

Anyway, on the ill-fated evening, I had completely misjudged my partners arrival time, so Usma and I sat under a large tree watching the train platform two lanes of high volume traffic away where our partner would arrive and between trains where she failed to materialize we sat and watched the bats.

I didn't want Usma to get blinkered and dash out into those two lanes of traffic in a solitary mission to find her dearest love, so I had her on the leash.

The failure is mine, a catastrophic failure in risk management, I want to make no bones about it. Part of retelling the events isn't to excuse or justify myself, but to help me understand and appreciate how my judgement can get overwhelmed.

My partner arrived, where I made the first mistake, I trailed along with Usma in my arms trying to get her attention. We got it, then revving up our dog, my partner waved to us from the platform, getting Usma's attention.

At that point, Usma wanted nothing else in the world but to go to her. I recognized that the situation was dangerous, and there was no way I was letting Usma off the leash. The first piece of bad judgement though, was that I wanted her to still be able to run to my partner, so I instead walked her in the opposite direction, to circle back around the block so we could meet my partner on the pavement.

My face gets hot with embarassment recounting it, because I do pride myself on my affinity with dogs. It was very distressing to Usma to be dragged away in the opposite direction, and she didn't calm down. I walked back a block, and then up to get to the street that runs perpendicular to the station exit, where my partner would be heading. Usma remained distressed and on edge, pulling against the leash. 

Then in my failure of judgement, without eyes on my partner, to know where our dog would run to, I caved under her distressed and judged enough time to have passed and enough distance to be covered that my partner would have crossed the street. I let Usma off the leash to run to her.

She was off like a rocket, to which it suddenly dawned if something went wrong I couldn't get to her and I thought - Oh shit - and sprinted after her. I turned the corner after her and could see down the block, and could see that my partner was not on the other side of our dog. Oh fuck I thought, and called out for her. 

What had happened was that while understanding well enough our dogs motivations and likely course of action, I had made a terrible assumption that my partner would telepathically intuit my plan to backtrack. So she had gone to where we were when she spotted us, taking herself out of our dog's line of sight when I took her back around the block.

Usma glanced back at me once confused, and I called out to her to come to me. I don't know if my panic that had me running towards her triggered her to move away rather than towards me, but she then bolted across the two lanes towards the train platform exit. 

I could only hope that we lucked out and she would cross safely due to an absence of traffic. Then I watched the car hit her, heard the bang and watched her disappear underneath it. I screamed 'Oh fuck!' very much in the emotional range of despair. for half to one second I lived with 'I've killed our dog.'

Then as I closed the gap I spotted her body, and heard her familiar distress sound, though unfamiliarly continuous. I cannot recall whether I checked for traffic so I did not also get cleaned up. I assume I did, but this is the kind of state of activation where I make rapid fire decisions outside of my awareness. This happened once before in Melbourne when I was riding my bike down a back lane and saw white smoke escape from a parked car window - thinking I had to pull someone attempting suicide out of a car (it was most likely in hindsight a case of insurance fraud) I made a set of decisions without thinking them.

I found our dog on her back and heard her distress as she writhed around in pain. I picked her up as my partner found us and arrived on scene. I can't recall if I started apologizing there. I can recall Usma biting into my arm, and more consciously than the relief of hearing her squealing, I thought 'Good' in response to the pain. 'She's alive'.

I ran with my partner, Usma in my arms as spectators looked on. One with best of intentions, told me to calm down. The vet was like 3 doors down from where the accident happened. It wasn't a 24 hour emergency center, but fortunately the owners were on site because they were renovating. They let us in, gave Usma drugs and checked her injuries. We were lucky, her pupils contracted in response to the light, the ultrasound revealed no internal bleeding/trauma.

Usma was stablized, as I began to process my shame, guilt, self-recrimination. My partner helped a lot, we were both in do-whatever-Usma-needs mode, and I did not have to endure blame, recrimination or anger from her. I have since said to her, it is easy to imagine a world in which she would vent such emotions at me, to no constructive effect beyond the venting itself, which I appreciate.

And on that front, there was not much benefit to my own shame, guilt, self-recrimination. It would arise in the quite unoccupied moments as Usma was stabilized and diagnosed, and I voiced them as my bite wounds were scrubbed out and filled with anti-bacterial ointment. A process I would be repeating 3-4 times a day for the next week, enough holes in me to render my left arm (my good arm) inert smeared in yellow goop.

When Usma was left for observations, and we finally got to bed at 2am, I was treated to my mind replaying those seconds of Usma bolting across the street and going under the car, again and again and again.

My understanding taken from the video below of the physiological experience of failure, a catastrophic failure is that my system would have been flooded with a cocktail of adrenalin and cortisol, my stomach would have been drained of blood, and my hippocampus and amygdala would have been stimulated to ensure I remembered that failure forever... a resounding instruction to never allow this to happen again.

(this video should be queud up to 29 minute mark, where the relevant section on fear of failure is, but sometimes these links just don't work, so that's where it told through the experience of a losing boxer after a short cliff climbing intro.)

Now with the usual caveats that I am not qualified to diagnose myself with psychological trauma or PTSD, nor have a run this by anyone qualified to make a diagnosis, so I merely speculate that this event could be a candidate for psychological trauma:

In psychiatric terms, a trauma is defined, indirectly, as direct personal exposure to an event that involves a real or potential threat of death, serious harm or other threats to personal physical integrity, witnessing an event that involves death, harm or threat to the physical integrity of another person, learning of the unexpected or violent death, serious harm, threat of death or harm experienced by a family member or other close relationship (criterion A 1). The person's response to the event must involve intense fear, a sense of inability to exercise control, or horror ( Post-traumatic stress disorder in DSM-IV). ~ taken from Wikipedia.

Entertaining the notion, without accepting it, I approached it with my lay understanding, a heuristic if you will obtained from author Gordon Livingston - confrontation over time, makes things better. Avoidance makes things worse.

A process I had already begun by naming my feelings of shame and guilt and voicing them to the Vet, my partner, her partner. They were reassuring, but this was the first confrontation. While they moved to reassure me, this wasn't a 'Poor me' fishing expedition for sympathy. I was very committed as I always am to taking exactly as much responsibility as I can without usurping it from someone else.

In my worldview, responsibility is good, and why I abhor demerit cultures. I make every effort to not invoke blame, excuses, deflections or denial. The guilt, shame, embarassment and whatever other negative affect I was experiencing was a direct product of my own actions. Cause and effect.

The trauma candidate comes from the helplessness, the seconds where I called Usma's name and she ran away from me and under a car. I am grateful for this lesson in the constraints of reality, the humility to recognize failure exists, irreperable damage is possible. That microcosm of helplessness was presented to me as a consequence, downstream of where I had relinquished my control of the situation. I was not relieving it because there was something I could have done, I was reliving it, I think, because my hippocampus and amygdala where screaming - do not get into this situation.

So the second confrontation was more time consuming, it was inventoring the thoughts and actions I had taken in the lead-up to Usma's collision. The curiosity of making a decision because I understood the risks, and then making another decision as if I didn't. I found two main bad assumptions that I had made and that I could learn from - the first was just not having eyes on my partner before I took Usma off the leash capitulating to her distress that I knew was unwarrented, my partner was not going to cease to exist as Usma perhaps feared.

The second bad assumption was that my partner would follow the normal routine of heading home along the street I was leading Usma too, instead of heading to where she had last scene us. That she would read my mind, when there were other plausible assumptions to be made, like I would simply wait where I was and keep Usma on the leash until she had crossed the street.

Most embarassing for me was contravening my own primary heuristic - the golden rule of risk taking: don't risk something important to gain something unimportant. Appropriated from Warren Buffet. In other words, don't risk a dollar to gain five cents. In this case, while the joy and excitement of a dog experiencing their emotional bond with a person is one of the things that makes life worth living. This excitement is not hard to manufacture, it is never an emergency. It is not a once in a lifetime opportunity. Risking all opportunities to experience Usma greeting my partner in this way, to gain one immediate occassion of it, was dumb risk taking. And I got lucky, she isn't dead. She'll recover and no doubt do this again, albeit only ever in completely safe environments from now on.

That confrontation was internal, leaning on Benjamin Franklin's 'that which hurts, instructs.' principle, not that he put cigarettes out on children to teach them algebra. I interpret the spirit of his words as pain conveys information (with few exceptions like chronic pain from nerve damage, which conveys no useful information and must be a horrible condition to live with, yet people heroically do and can enjoy quality lives.)

The next confrontation was informing people what happened, without putting it in a passive tense like 'Usma was hit by a car' or 'Usma had an accident.' but telling people what happened, including my bad judgement and consequent actions.

I did this more in the spirit of feelings have to be felt, including embarrassment, Groundskeeper Willie's 'chewing gum has to be chewed out.' I was mostly confronting it to get it out of the way, so I didn't add to my shame and embarassment, anxiety over being discovered as responsible for this situation. 

My partner was doing the same, she too has family she communicates with. For me it was hard, but doable, like taking a cold shower, or perhaps more like jumping into a cold pool. An unintended consequence of talking about what happened was that I, and we, received support, context, rather than absolution.

Something that was profoundly impacted upon me in Takehiko Inoue's long running and sporadic comic Real, about wheelchair basketball. Where one of my takeaways was how beneficial survivors are towards rehabilitation. Whether it is Tora or Yama for Togawa, Togawa for Nomiya, or Hanasaki and Shiratori for Takahashi.

We perhaps inadvertantly tapped into a resource of people who had been through a dog's recovery from a fractured hip. We got advice, equipment and most importantly reassurance that lowered the anxiety and stress levels.

In terms of potential trauma, I had two salient fears - the first was a fear that Usma wouldn't like me anymore. A dog committing a post-hoc-ergo-proctor-hoc where the fear and pain was forever associated with my leash decisions that precipitated her accident. My dad, being a farm boy, from a more sanguine age of dog ownership restored my faith in Dog as a survival machine that can manage their own recuperation and rehabilitation quite well. 'I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself' ~ D.H. Lawrence; While simultaneously allaying this fear - that the bite into my arm was not an accusatory reprisal, an act of revenge but an instinctive pain response; something akin to 'I am in so much pain something is trying to kill me, but not if I kill it first.' 

And furthermore, here is a case where I am fortunate to be dealing with dogs, not people, who do not ruminate and as far as I understand, don't have ego defences like resorting to blame etc. We are also fortunate to share our apartment with another dog, Doki who allowed me to approach my second fear - which was my self-doubt over my manner and judgement with dogs. I took a 'get back on that horse' approach, because I understood what I specifically did wrong in regard to specific risks that resulted in that moment of helplessness that precipitated Usma's injury.

Doki helps, because he doesn't care. The animals of our household all did change noticably in their mannerisms when Usma came home, somewhat aware that Usma was injured or ill. Routine's changed. But what Doki specifically doesn't care about is my reputation as a dog handler, he cares about his walks.

I was afraid, the first day I took him out, he was on the leash the whole time. It was good to walk a dog, albeit missing Usma's particular presence and charisma. Doki doesn't care, he's too preoccupied sniffing and peeing on stuff, but our walk felt lonely without Usma. The second day, in some of the quiet back streets, I mustered my courage and let Doki off the leash. 

Just for context, in Australia, I was a dog owner that walked my dog off the leash. I had a well trained and well behaved Labrador, and mostly council workers gave me a warning to put her on the leash if they spotted her, but we had a 15 year incident free practice of daily leashless walks. Mexico, at least in the cities I've been in, with the exception of Chihuahua, have dogs roaming the streets everywhere. Both owned and strays, many owners rather than walking their dogs simply turn them out in the morning and let them back in at night. Some dogs sit on the stoop of their house taking the sun. Others you see popping up all over the place as they take themselves on walks.

We live in a neighborhood that's probably like an 8x8 block grid, where the streets are quiet, one directional, have the occasional speed bump and drivers look for and expect dogs on the streets. Even so, both Doki and Usma generally know not to cross streets without our permission, there was the unique circumstance of Usma needing to locate my partner that lead to her breaking her usual pattern of behavior.

So it was scary, but I let Doki off the leash, yes, I would be done if something happened to him; if a few days after Usma went under a car, I got my housemate's dog injured or killed. But the fear was irrational that a Chinese Rocket might fall from the sky and take out Doki, or that he would suddenly break character and bolt out onto the road where a truck was hurtling through the normally quiet backstreets. What was important was recovering from a life lived in fear - of losing permanently my positive relationship with dogs.

After a few days of getting back into the practice of dogwalking, my anxieties dissappated, as did the tendency to relive the microcosm of helplessness unbidden. My hippocampus and amygdala have done their job, that memory is fused in there. But I find I have to recall it, as I did to recall it for this post.

I also found it helpful to practice gratitude in the face of my helplessness. Once I had lost the ability to prevent Usma bolting out onto the road and getting hit by a car, its important I feel to acknowledge how much worse it could have gone. She could have gone under the wheel and been done instead of bouncing and rolling off the plastic bumper. She could have cracked her skull and done neurological damage, losing her personality. She could have lost a leg, broken her spine, bled internally. We could have had to make the decision to put her down, then and there in the vet clinic.

I'm tremendously grateful she is alive, but had she died, I still would have had to deal with the situation. As we carry her palanquin style from house to vet and back again, I see posters for lost and missing dogs taped to streetlight poles, I'm grateful to have Usma. I wish it hadn't happened, I was grateful to have a healthy fully mobile dog in the apartment. 

But it did happen, and there's a lot of good in it. I enjoy working with my partner to take care of her, it's rewarding to watch her recovery, to be genuinely excited about her peeing and shitting, and then standing to pee and shit, and then to walk and run (though that's also nervewrecking, given she started doing it after only 10 days). Caring for her slowed us down and brought us focus. It gave us an opportunity to observe how we work as a team and as carers. 

The goodness is a bi-product of a bad situation, but it is good nevertheless. 

If this post has any point, it's that a confrontation approach to a potentially traumatic event worked for me, in this instance. I experienced helplessness and despair for a few brief but potent moments. My mind latched onto it, much as Usma's jaw latched onto my arm as I picked her up off the road. Yeah I caught some fortune from Fortuna, much as I could have had a close shave where Usma didn't get hit at all. I still would have learned my lesson.

Had she died, much as I don't like imagining it, it would have been much much harder. It would have necessitated grief, I don't know what impact it would have had on my relationship with my partner. Whether it could have survived losing her in this particular way. I cannot argue the counterfactual.

I just see a potential here for this event to qualify as trauma and exert a debilitating effect on my life. Probably not in an all encompassing way as say being assaulted by a stranger might. Certainly being inculcated with a lifelong distrust of strangers is far more debilitating than a dog lover losing the confidence to walk his dog.

However, much as I would make an effort not to trivialize more serious forms of psychological trauma through a comparison to a dog being hit by a car, I would thank others not to completely dismiss the notion of dogs as members of a family. Certainly, few would likely spend $10,000 or $100,000 on medical treatment for a dog over euthanizing a suffering animal, whereas people would do this for a child and psychological disorders aside, could never euthanize a child. I freely admit, dogs are not on the same moral concern tier as humans, whether I prefer their company or not.

It is simply to say by listening to the consensus of qualified clinical professionals as to how to approach potential stress, trauma or anxiety. Mine dissipated, with time, proportional to the distress of the event. Benefits include feeling better, feeling 'normal' which here I would describe as returning to my pre-accident mindset/confidence levels. Feeling secure that I can prevent and avoid a future event through my own agency. Ceasing to ruminate aimlessly. Being clear of unbidden flashbacks to the feeling of helplessness.

I offer this in contrast to attitudes and appropriation of 'trauma' by activists which I would characterize as an avoidance approach. This appears to be a basic diminished capacity, where agency is foisted onto spectators who are implored not to do or say anything that might activate that trauma. In my situation it would be to accept living with what I labelled as 'trauma' until such a time that my demand was met that people stopped driving cars.

I'm agnostic but unpersuaded by lay usage and attitudes towards 'trauma', I am not inspired to adopt the example of many who invoke the term. British author and historian Tom Holland (not to be confused with the actor currently playing Spider-man nor the director of horror film 'Child's Play') who is one of the latest thinkers to adopt the annoying 'Everything is Christian even if you don't know it' line of apologetics:

Familiarity with the biblical narrative of the crucifixion has dulled our sense of just how completely novel a deity Christ was ... [Christianity] is the principal reason why, by and large, most of us who live in post-Christian societies still take for granted that it is nobler to suffer than to inflict suffering. It is why we generally assume that every human life is of equal value. In my morals and ethics, I have learned to accept that I am not Greek or Roman at all, but thoroughly and proudly Christian.

Though I will extend the benefit-of-the-doubt that he is a more rigorous historian than I would ever be, this short paragraph does not for example tackle how the crucifixion is a massive innovation over Greek Tragic figures whom nobly suffered the wrath of the Gods like: Prometheus, Sisyphus, Heracles, Jason, Achilles, Hector, Psyche, Medea, Pandora... and I cannot exclude a notion that Tom Holland is motivated by his relationship with his mother. Maybe simply because as Matt Dillahunty summarizes it 'God couldn't just forgive humans as a fallen species, blood was required so he personifies himself as human to sacrifice himself to himself as a loophole to rules he made up.' or thereabouts, the innovation upon the Greek tragedies is that a petty and capricious god sacrifices himself instead of an innocent demi-god hero, or a particularly beautiful female civilian.

Anyway, in Tom Holland's interview by Andrew Doyle on podcast culture-wars, he ascribes credit to Christianity for the contemporary phenomena of 'strength through weakness' or 'victim who conquers' where the execution of Jesus becomes the basis of the world's largest religion, wealthiest religious institutions and wealthiest nations. 

That is probably what is lost from an avoidance approach to a potentially traumatic event by choosing instead to confront it. I imagine it is far more debilitating for the traumatized person, but the ability to respond is foisted onto others through compelled actions - restricted activities, special consideration, restricted speech and compelled speech. 

I have no interest in exerting power over others, even Usma, given that she is alive - I don't actually want a level of control over her where in those circumstances I wouldn't feel helpless, because I don't want to kill or suppress the emotion she feels towards my partner.

As per always, if you've experienced a serious trauma, or some other negative experience you find yourself endlessly ruminating on, consult qualified help. I share my experience because I feel it has promise, I don't have the faith/courage of my convictions of an activist.