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.