A week or so ago I wrote about how my dogs are kind of bad dogs, and I mentioned how there aren’t really bad dogs but bad owners. The thing is, I just came back from a quick weekend vacation at San Diego and I had to board my dogs. This gave me a chance to reflect on the behavior of my dogs and why they might have the behavior they have today.
Spoiler alert: it’s all because of me!
I think I talked about this at least once in my writings but I used to have a great deal of guilt for my dogs. The crushing guilt came in one specific context: leaving my dog alone at home. My dog, Billy Jr., is my first dog and I didn’t really know dogs prior to having him. The only existing experience with a pet for me was a rabbit and that turned out to be a very disastrous experience (which ultimately ended up teaching me a lot about the weight of life).
There were times when I wanted to give up on Billy Jr. because I wasn’t sure I was going to be the best dog parent for him. But once the commitment started it was equally difficult to let the dog go because the counter-worry came: “what if I let Billy Jr. go and he dies at the other person’s house, and I regret not taking better care of him?”.
So I kept him, but the most difficult part of it was that everyone had to go to work. My parents had to commute to Seoul and I had to commute to Seongnam and stay for practically the entire day, and some days I wanted to hang out with my girlfriend (now wife) so I’d want to be even less home. That means Billy Jr. had to be home alone the entire day. As you can probably see, I didn’t put a lot of forethought into having a dog and this is why I think getting a dog should be a lot harder.
My parents came up with a brilliant plan to commute to Seoul with Billy Jr., because it was my dad’s business anyway. There was no CEO who would be angry at my dad for bringing a dog, especially because the CEO was my mom. So on most days Billy Jr. spent his days with my parents and when they couldn’t bring him to work, I made sure to come home as soon as possible to cover.
Our entire life revolved around not having the dog be alone for a prolonged amount of time because we all collectively felt so bad for that possibility. In such a big home, this itty bitty dog would be alone with no one to play with. He was such an adorable little doggo and that made it harder for us to leave him alone too, he brought separation anxiety onto us.
And this is precisely the point where Billy Jr.’s behaviors become the very thing we warp our behavior around. We were supposed to be the caretakers of Billy Jr., but instead we got this inverted relationship of our dog becoming the owner of our feelings.
When Billy Jr. wimped and cried (which he still does a lot to this day), we all knelt before him and provided him with chew and toys. When Billy Jr. decided he must pee on the carpet, we all rushed to get the cleaning supplies to clean it up instead of thinking about walking him because he didn’t want to walk in the Korean winter.
Basically we never taught Billy Jr. how to deal with various situations of life because we were too afraid of our guilt. Now Billy Jr. only knows how to live in a certain kind of an environment.
When I got married and we came to America the guilt compounded now because I couldn’t rely on my parents anymore. So whenever my wife and I would go out on a date, I would just constantly think about going back home because I felt so horrible about leaving the dogs home alone. I had pretty bad IBS (which I’ll have to talk about at some time because I learned a lot about my gut recently) and coupled with my separation anxiety it meant I was going to have a bad time whenever I went out with my wife.
This guilt is exactly what made my dogs have more separation anxiety; we never gave them the chance to be safely separated! Because we felt like leaving them home alone is so bad, we never allowed for them to explore what it’s like to be alone AND safe.
It extends to beyond separation anxiety; we didn’t want our dogs to feel super excited and agitated, so we never properly socialized them since they got super excited as puppies. So even to this day they bark and try to lunge at other dogs, all because we never gave them the chance to explore and learn that on their own.
Because of something we thought was “bad”, we tried our best to avoid it; but because of that avoidance, our dogs never had the chance to be introduced and be with the “bad”. This wouldn’t have been a problem if our dogs lived around 8 years or so, but now they’re 13 and still in great health. We are looking at life changes and we are finding that our dogs might not be very well equipped for them.
This is how insidiously karma works. It copies over the parents’ idea of good and bad and starts warping the life of next generations. Take for example my relationship with fatigue and over-exertion. Being so tired and beat up by the immigrant life was so engrained in my parents’ lives, they couldn’t stand to see me suffer in America. My individual suffering as a human being, to my parents, was a reason for my parents to feel guilt; so they did everything in their power to remove that suffering, only to prevent my own learning of how to deal with hardships.
As a parent or a caretaker of the young, it is important for us to work with our guilt. If you have a problem with your life, you must take action to address that problem instead of feeling guilt and being powerless over it. Luckily for me I was able to overcome my guilt for my dogs with two specific events.
First, my dog had a genetic defect called liver shunts. His liver had an extra vein that kept on letting unfiltered blood circulate through his systems, which causes a variety of complications across different dogs. For Billy Jr., it meant kidney stones and he could not pee.
Turns out this is a common defect for small dogs in Korea because the regulations around breeding is very lax and many Maltese suffer this ailment and it gets discovered too late or they can’t get treated because of the lack of quality veterinary care.
Billy Jr. went to UC Davis to get this corrected with a surgery. This surgery was no small surgery, both in terms of expertise required and cost. I was fortunate to have lived in the bay area at the time and to be able to afford this surgery. I knew at that moment that if Billy had met a different human to take care of him, he would not have lived past 5. My existence was of use to my little guy.
Secondly, as I started volunteering at the animal shelter I realized how good my dogs had it. The dogs at the shelter are often in poor health, have to live with other dogs in one kennel, have to live with their poop and pee as they eat and drink water, is constantly surrounded by other barking dogs, people walking by, and I could go on and on and on. Even the worst condition I could provide for my dog was already infinitely better than what I saw in the shelters.
But the thing is, LA Animal Services are pretty great; I know that there are much worse shelters, especially in Korea where I got him. So the more animal work I did, the less reason I found to feel guilty about me not providing enough of a quality life for him. At this point if I were to give him more I’d have to feed him with my hand while fanning him with giant leaves like Greek gods or something.
Your guilt may exactly be creating the next generation of the exact same kind of suffering. The dharma showed me that there is a better way than guilt. Give me an email at billy@julylifecoach.com when you’re ready to think differently about your guilt and make meaningful changes to your life.