Your experience is NOT my experience!

Apologies for an entry that is rather more abstract and much less dog filled than usual. I shall endeavour to do better next time. Here's a puppy picture to up the canine quota a little!

How can he be 14 now?!

I'm a little quiet at the moment on new article ideas. I've been spending a lot of time writing in a completely unrelated sector and it's been taking up most of my attention. I have been fortunate enough to have had one of my articles accepted and published as a guest essay on the Dogs Today site. I was taking a look at the comments underneath (I know, always read the comments with care!) and one thing stood out to me from a couple of them.

The particular post selected was the emotional toll of reactivity article that I wrote and originally published here in October of last year (and the catalyst behind the creation of Fight or Fright? as well). I'm not going to pick out individual comments, as that would be unfair. Instead, I want to think about the attitude behind those particular kinds of comments.

The style of comments that really stood out to me went along the lines of  'You think that's tough, try what I do!' and 'Well I never did THAT in the same situation!'

One thing I have definitely learned on my travels with a reactive dog is that, while the difficulties and obstacles faced by many reactive dog guardians are the same, no two people (or two dogs) are going to have the same experience. We are all individuals, as are our dogs, and we will all experience the same things differently. In my case, events that happened concerning my reactive dog caused me to end up in tears. I make no judgement on others, whether they have cried over their dogs or not.

I don't like the mentality that makes some people have to point out that they somehow have it worse or more difficult. Just using myself as an example (because I am the ONLY person that I can speak about with total knowledge and understanding) I have found life with my dog difficult at times. He reacts to a lot of things. Not as many now as he did, due to a lot of very hard work, but the 'biggies' of people and dogs are still there. Does that mean someone whose dog is 'only' reactive to other dogs has a less difficult time? Or the person whose dog only reacts to specific breeds? No, because they are not me and I am not them.

We also have to remember that the stress that affects reactive dogs affects us as well and trigger stacking can definitely happen to humans (see the analogy in this post HERE). For these reasons, along with a whole bunch of others, the process of trying to rank experiences and emotional responses of different people - or indeed dogs - is in truth an exercise in futility.

Being judgemental in comparing my experiences to anyone else's helps nobody. It wouldn't help the people that need to know that whatever feelings they are experiencing are absolutely okay and valid. It wouldn't help me in any constructive way at all - seeking to elevate myself at the cost of belittling others doesn't make me better than those people. Instead, it reduces me to a level far below the person I should be trying to be.

Empathy is a powerful thing. Through empathy we can seek to understand ourselves and others, and survive this oftentimes cruel world we live in. Sadly - and particularly online - empathy can be a rare thing to see. Reductivism and sometimes outright cruelty seem to be more the order of the day. Empathy makes us better people, and also better dog guardians. Empathy is, simply speaking, how we should be, taking into account the feelings of others and not ranking them in a system designed to make ourselves feel better.