Loving your creative animal

BY SONJA LARSEN

Everyone knows animals are good for your mental health. But it’s not just their fuzzy faces, cute antics, and warm bodies that help us. It’s what they can teach us about embodied learning, communication, and respect. After I adopted a small rescue dog, I discovered positive reinforcement training, which uses choice and rewards instead of fear and punishments. Committing to building a relationship based on joy instead of intimidation was a powerful decision that has affected every area of my life. What I’ve learned is a kinder and more effective way to work—not only with my dog, but with my own creative animal.

The more rewarding something is, the more we like it. Simple right? The little dog loves it when I call his name because he knows it’s always worth showing up. I try to remember to do the same in my writing life—to thank myself for showing up, to set some kind of reward. Maybe it’s a walk or a cookie. Maybe it’s drinks with a friend. Maybe it’s the reward of building craft, meeting interesting people, the pleasures of always learning. I have a mental, and sometimes a literal, sticker book where I put my little gold stars.

In studies, dogs trained using corrections were slower learners, and their owners reported more frequent behaviour and aggression problems. As trainer Sue Ailsby says in “Sue Eh’s Rules of Training,” “Be aware of your own tendency to blame. Be aware of your own tendency to punish.” I’ve stopped trying to negotiate with the blaming shaming hypercritical voice in my head. Instead, I remind myself I wouldn’t talk to a dog that way.

Positive reinforcement training is part of a growing field that looks at the ways our bodies remember, react to stress, learn, and heal. Although I’d witnessed dogs “shaking it off” for years, it wasn’t until I read Resmaa Menakem’s My Grandmother’s Hands that I really began to appreciate the importance of using movement as a way of helping all bodies process difficulty or uncertainty. Walks or two-minute dance parties often help me when writing about challenging subjects.

My little dog came with some problems and issues—a phobia of crows, for example—but just because that seems dumb to me doesn’t make it any less real to him. Belittling fear doesn’t work. So I keep striving to give him the coping skills, choice, and motivation to manage more effectively. Sometimes we avoid the crows. Sometimes we watch them from a distance and eat cookies.

You can’t rush learning, or healing, but you can optimize the conditions for it. When I train my dog to do something new, I start in very small increments: five minutes here, five minutes there. I want the learning-seeking part of his brain, not the fear and fatigue part. I want the little dog to feel like he could still go a little longer instead of thinking, Thank God that’s over. When I wrote my memoir, instead of six-hour marathons, I worked in smaller chunks of time until writing and trauma didn’t feel like they automatically went together. And I gave myself extra gold stars for being brave.

As I’ve taught my dog to jump through a hoop and spin around, I’ve learned the need to break down goals into their smaller components. We step over the hoop. We raise the hoop. I sit down every Monday night to write. I give myself credit for all those little challenges—submissions, rejections, word counts—that make up a page, a story, a writing life.

I don’t mean I starve my dog, I mean I choose to work with him when he’s most interested in the rewards I have. Just before dinner is a great training time—just after dinner, not so much. When I began to get serious about writing a book, I realized I often didn’t give my work my best energy and that I’d been filling up on other projects and not staying hungry for my primary creative goal.

One of my favourite trainers, Emily Larlham, describes her style of training as “based on compassion for the learner.” Someone recently asked me, “How do you know the difference between being compassionate with yourself and slacking off?” The simple answer is I enjoy myself a lot more when I’m compassionate. When I feel like I’m spending my gold stars instead of guiltily playing hooky. Or when I’m still actively asking myself, what do I need to move forward? What’s the smallest win I can get right now? What do I need to keep making this process feel rewarding? More community connection? Guidance or mentorship? Long walks? What’s going to make the tail wag?

One of the biggest changes came for me when I asked myself the following questions: If my creativity was a dog, would I treat it poorly? Would I punish it when it made mistakes? Would I be nice to it one day and kick it the next? Would I only feed it sometimes? And the answer to all those questions was no. My creative drive has been my faithful companion my whole life, but it has often felt like a source of anxiety and disruption. Since I’ve begun to treat it like a dog, it’s been easier to remember to be loving and kind, to rest, to play, to get outside, to find all the cookies I can.

When I first saw a photo of my dog on the humane society website, he was holding a tennis ball in his mouth, and I assumed he was about thirty pounds. I didn’t know they made little tennis balls for little dogs. I didn’t know what to do with a dog that seemed so fragile and yet so independent. I didn’t know how much this dog was going to change my life. He’s not a perfect dog, and I’m not a perfect writer. I’m sure we’d both like to be bigger, tougher, and braver than we really are. But he loves it when I call his name. He can do small tricks. He’s the best dog in the world, if for no other reason than he’s the one I call my own.

Sonja Larsen’s awardwinning memoir, Red Star Tattoo: My Life as a Girl Revolutionary, was published in 2016. When she is not playing with her dog, Ralphie, she teaches writing workshops. She is working on her second book, which is about life in the computer lab of an inner-city community centre.