Dog Crazy by Meg Donohue Read Free Book Online Page B

impossible for her to ask me to help her, but she’d done it, and I’d said no. Perhaps more than any other patient I’d ever seen, Anya needed me, and I’d turned her away. My anxiety wasn’t just affecting my own life now, it was affecting my patients’ lives, too. I couldn’t bear the person I was becoming. What I needed was a plan, a course of attack. I’d crawled into bed with my laptop and a pile of books and manuals from my graduate school days, and now, hours later, I’m still researching treatment options.
    I know that exposure therapy, or desensitization, is the recommended course of treatment for panic disorders, but until I came across the Alternative Therapy article, I’d never studied the use of dogs for this type of therapy. I do a few more Internet searches, and what I find—article after article about dogs that help peoplewith mental health issues—fascinates me. The twenty-three-year-old soldier returning from Iraq with post-traumatic stress disorder who stopped self-medicating with alcohol thanks to the companionship of a terrier mutt named Abe. The yellow Labrador who helped the teenage girl reestablish a sense of security and overcome the debilitating anxiety she experienced after her uncle sexually abused her. The trained and untrained dogs of all shapes and sizes that have helped agoraphobics leave their homes for the first time in months, years, sometimes decades. The articles are heartwarming and beautiful and inspiring, and every so often something gets caught in my eye and I have to stop reading.
    I wonder if my mother knows about the positive benefits of dogs for people dealing with agoraphobia. She has always encouraged my love of dogs, and I remember her often talking about how good dogs were for children, how they instilled a sense of responsibility and routine and provided love and companionship. I’m an only child and I always thought she considered a dog an easy substitute for a sibling, but now I wonder if there was more to it than that.
    Because, as far as I know, my mother has not left home without the aid of heavy-duty antianxiety medication in twenty-five years. Even with an artillery of pills, she rarely ventures outside. I don’t know when her panic attacks began, but I suspect some of her more compulsive behaviors—her extreme concern with cleanliness, for one, and her connected fear of germs—were around long before the panic swelled to the point where she couldn’t bring herself to leave home. She hardly talks about her childhood, but when she does her stories have an edge of darkness; the onlything she ever told me about my maternal grandmother, who died before I was born, is that she had cheap taste in liquor and men.
    If my mother’s biggest fear was stepping outside, her second biggest fear seemed to be that she would pass her fears on to me. I remember from a young age the feeling of my mother watching me, searching for signs that I’d inherited her anxiety. Even so, most days she was a lot of fun to be around. At home, where she was comfortable, she was full of life, smart and funny, a quick-witted observation about the FedEx man or the Chinese-food delivery guy or her therapist—“the Holy Trinity,” as she called these frequent visitors—always on the tip of her tongue. I loved listening to her, and I became quite good at it, unconsciously learning how to interpret conversational pauses, fleeting facial expressions, and even body language, and how to use this knowledge to encourage her to continue (in graduate school, I would learn that I’d been engaged in an intuitive version of “active listening” for most of my life).
    Somewhere along the way, my mom seemed to decide that creating a nonstop schedule for me was the best way to ward off any inclination I might have had to spend too much time at home, to ensure that I never sensed the shadows that she saw beyond our door,