I Rescued My Dog and He is Rescuing Me
How we are healing together from our different abuse experiences.
“Free! You are finally free.” I was speaking to the nine pound puddle of shaggy black hair huddled in the back of the Great Dane sized crate in my living room. He trembled furiously with his back turned to me and his new environment. When I could glimpse his eyes on his rapidly swiveling head -”what is he watching out for?”- they were filled with terror.
Dogs I have known are curious, eager to sniff everything, wanting to be touched, to play, to be fed, upon arriving in a different place.
Not this one.
“Well, Terrie’s terrified terrier, what shall I call you? I don’t like ‘Odell’ as a name, but I suppose after five years, that is the moniker you know. I like what your foster-mom called you, ‘Otis’. How about Otis O’Dell’? Let’s try it.”
I could not tell if he agreed with me, but I had included him in the plan.
Lifting his rigid trembling body onto my lap, I stroked him and talked to him about my plans for our life together. He kept his face firmly turned away; standing on my thighs, he transferred his anxiety to me. It was a palpable gift, one I knew well, as my heart began to pound and my breath quickened.
Trying to imagine his life over his first five years just past, I began to have flashbacks to my life over the past ten years.
Mom, deteriorating rapidly from Parkinson’s Disease, clamped her mouth shut when she choked on soup and never opened it again. The trepidation inside tore me up as I watched her dehydrate to death over the next eight days. It was expected, and not a new experience for this hospice nurse, but it was horrible. She was my Mom, and my best friend.
During my grieving time, I met a man. Having enjoyed my independence for thirty five years , very quickly I was drawn into romance by his charismatic adventurous spirit and a myriad of promises. At age 65 I married again.
Narcissism was not a part of my knowledge base, although it had been a huge part of my early years. I never had a name for it, but I had the experiences, the scars, and the after-effects tucked away inside me.
From very early in life, I was a people-pleaser and I learned to hide my true feelings from others and from myself. Marriage was to be desired according to my mother. I wanted to please her memory.
There was no pleasing the man I married.
This relationship did not hold intimacy in its true sense, nor honesty, nor sharing and caring. It started out as a fairy tale, and that is just what it was, in the sense of containing mostly unexpected hurtful, frightening, and dehumanizing events.
I experienced the effects of being gaslighted, made to be less than, controlled, re-trained, and groomed for his needs. I was restrained by words that hurt, punished, commanded, minimized, and mocked me.
He laughed when I was in pain, shut me up when I spoke, and shut me down when I reacted. I was unacceptable and unwanted, except for the purpose of abusing me, and to be a slave on his farm. He redefined me and my history with angry, demeaning words, he assassinated my character, and he called me names that stung.
The NarcEx worked hard at deconstructing my faith in God, and Jesus, my Savior. He used our daily devotions in the Bible — performed together first thing each day at his command — for punishments, and with memorized verses of Scripture he would cut chunks off my spirit, causing me to cringe and shrivel in my spirit. “He wants to kill my inner being.”
He lorded his spiritual superiority as a weapon.
When I was sprung from the “cage” he had me in, how did my family see me as they took me in and provided nurture for me, mind, body, soul, and spirit. What did my friends who flocked around with great joy that I was finally back, observe?
I see Otis O’Dell, and I feel his terror. It is my terror.
From it, I am once again experiencing angina frequently. The last time this set of symptoms came on me, I needed an angiogram, and had a 10th stent implanted in one of my coronary arteries. It was brought on by the stress of life with a narcissist. We had been married two years. I left him. I came back to promises, tears and begging. The promises were never fulfilled. The abuse escalated.
I want to escape from an invisible harness with leash attached 24/7. I have one just like Otis wears. I dread hearing words and tones that plant fear in my heart. Is that what Otis expects when he pins his ears back and tucks his tail? I still fear the blow that never came, but was imminently expected at all times.
Is that why his head swivels rapidly when we go for a walk? As Otis watches my every move, tail tucked, marching rigidly — does he live in fear of what may come? I tuck my tongue into silence, and bow my head, shoulders hunched, also fearing what may land momentarily on my ear drums, my brain, my heart, perhaps my body. This is conditioning, no one is around to cause me or Otis harm.
Some friends, and strangers, have had questions. My answers are often incomprehensible to them. Trauma-bonding, cognitive dissonance, planning how to escape — unimaginable, even with what I think are clear explanations. They have never experienced such, but they accept me and what I tell them, they provide regular contact and attention.
They give me opportunity to tell my stories.
Family — they are different. They ask little, because they were there in the beginning. They experienced his swift and nasty distancing techniques. They learned to stay away. I have been apologized to by those who believe they should have known and should have rescued me sooner.
I tell them, “Don’t ‘Should’ on yourself!” I am an adult, I perhaps “should” have done a whole lot of things differently. But I didn’t — until I did. I decided not to die in captivity. I was 73 when I escaped with their help.
I have started from scratch. Yes. It has not been easy. But I have had the love and attention of those who accepted my fear, retrained me to a normal way of living, and gave me shelter and sustenance and everything I needed to start really living once again.
Now I have a dog. Otis is a Scottish-Yorkshire terrier mix, a “shag-muffin”. He is very slowly learning to come to me, but mostly hides under the bed. I see his terrors and do not know what sets them off.
Except, really, I do. Memories, triggers, experiences — they all spring up in the way of flashbacks.
I am teaching him to “Shake It Off!”, as I have to do with myself. I provide him with ‘special’ treats because he would not accept any treats at all when he arrived. Today the bits will sit by him for long minutes, sometimes hours, but eventually he eats them, greedily and suspiciously sometimes. His skinny nine pounds has very slowly expanded to ten and a half; his once sharp ribs feel soft now when I massage him.
His standoffishness in his fear is becoming snuggles in bed, self initiated! He jumps on my lap and lies on the foot of the recliner to be brushed and scratched and to nap. The dog “shrink” I hired gave me a lot of ideas to work with, in my quest to “humanize” my new partner to life beyond the cage. It is working, we are now companions.
This is not what happened when I tried to give every iota of everything good I had in me to get the narcissist to relax, enjoy and just be loving companions in this life. Otis did not find joy in his tiny cage amongst the fifty other dogs in the hoarders house.
We are healing, providing each other with peace, purpose and togetherness.
I am grateful to have the opportunity to mentally, emotionally, and physically take hold of the embodiment of my own damaged psyche, and love him into submission and new life.
My hope is Otis and I will learn next to play together — it will be a new found experience for both of us. Therein, there will be laughter and joy, a tail curled high and bouncing steps.
