On Alter Egos, and Bottoms

People who are around me in real life would likely describe my demeanor as low-key. I'm a back-door type, which makes public blogging somewhat of an unnatural thing for me - the public part, not the writing part. It is the very nature of the venue being in writing that enables me to do it at all, that level of remove.

Some people blog because they love the attention and adulation of feedback; I blog to force myself into a place of discomfort, because this is what I do.

All my life, I've forced myself into positions of discomfort, driven myself into my fears, to see what I'm made of. I don't feel like I go through life fearful, however. I feel like I go through life, and when I find a fear, I have to explore it, and master it. It's a compulsion of mine.

The 24s have passed by, mostly smoothly, until they've added up to quite a few by now. And in those 24s, I've proven a lot of things, to myself. To the point where I don't feel the compulsion to prove things to other people very much, anymore. I actually never felt it much to prove it to other people, anyway; rather it was to myself, and perhaps to my parents. But I rarely felt the need to prove things to my peers. Not sure why. Perhaps because every peer-type benchmark I did undertake I did well enough to satisfy myself. Um, except for the one year I was on swim team. I did not excel in that very well, unfortunately. But I was in buff shape, and looking good.

When I look back, though, I see a pattern of lurid fascination with power objects, a manifestation of an alter-ego within my psyche that belies my outward demeanor. Even in grade school, I broke a neighbor's horse to ride, using such unconventional tools (of an allowance-poor kid) as a paperboy's canvas paper holder, loaded with rocks, upon the horse's back, to simulate a rider's weight. Yes, I trained the horse and rode it around the neighborhood for the following years.

Also in grade school, I bought a protection-trained Doberman that had been neglected. He was starved and full of mange. I nursed him back to health and tuned up his training to the effect that, once when we had cousin house guests and my older brother - who no longer lived in our house - came that night to pick them up and tried to enter our house, the dog did his job so well that my mother was terrified of Mr. Dobie and I had to sell him.

A British couple wanted him, and tried to offer me, a barely double-digit-aged kid, the market price for a pet Dobie. I turned on my heel in a snuff, and refused their offer, sending them home an hour's drive away. They called back the next day and doubled their offer, groveling for the dog. I knew what I had, and had the nerve to hold out for it, even at that age. They were nice folks, and I knew he would have a great home. I always wished I could have kept him, though.

I picked up the power dog interest again, later in life, after a best friend adopted a shepherd from the pound that I fell in love with. I vowed to get one, at my first opportunity. The opportunity came upon my first housing that would allow me to keep a large dog, and it wasn't but the very first weekend after I had moved in that I went looking for my first shepherd.

This launched me into the hobby of Schutzhund, a dog sport where the dogs learn protection, obedience, and tracking in a competitive sport. It's a very complex sport, to get good at, because a dog that is rip-roaring good at protection tends to be tough and hard headed and not well suited toward precision obedience, or the tedious nature of tracking, and vise-versa. So you have to get balanced dogs, and learn how to finesse their various drives, to get good performances in all three aspects. It's a lot more art than it at first would appear.

And believe me, you learn a ton about drives, and behavior, if you want to learn this sport. Both in dogs, and in humans.

Now, hanging around the folks of Schutzhund is not all that unlike hanging around the rooms. It's a colorful and opinionated set, and they are fairly reactive at times when certain dogma are discussed. I would pause here and say I digress, except I do not.

One of the methods one of the Schutzhund trainers used to use was to put a dog into a corner of a fence, on a leash line. These animals are bred for this sport and have certain drives and characteristics that tend to be more pronounced than in the average pet. They generally love the sport, are not traumatized or mis-used, and are well cared for.

But sometimes the methodology people choose to use is... well, not what I would choose.

In this case, this trainer liked to work his dogs in, set them into, high defense drive, to sharpen their performance. Mostly these dogs are working in prey drive, which is the instinct to chase prey and capture it. Defense drive is just that - a drive to protect self. Prey drive is usually a euphoric and fun state for a dog, whereas defense drive is a fear and serious state of mind. But, as you can imagine, the fear state can bring focus to a performance that is sometimes not apparent in the animal when it's in prey drive, and in a fun state. A fear state brings the NOW into focus, sharply.

Anyone relating to this?

So anyway, this guy liked to use dogs in defense drive mode, a lot. And these dogs are tough mothers, bred for nerve and a lot of them take a lot of - um - stimulus to drive them into defense mode, because they are bred to be solid in the nerves. So this guy would take a dog that didn't tend to kick into defense mode, and "teach" the dog how to kick into defense mode.

He did this by putting the dog on a leash line in the inside corner of a fence, then using the "decoy" (i.e., guy with bite suit and bite sleeve on that the dogs are trained to pursue and immobilize, and bite on the sleeve if necessary) to pressure the dog into defense mode. He'd have the decoy guy go into the dog's leash zone (i.e., into the dog's face, in a corner, as it were) until the dog had no choice to avoid and had to get offensive toward the decoy, to relieve the impingement.

Some people in the club had pet-grade dogs, that avoided like an alkie contemplating his first AA meeting. These dogs would back up into the corner until their ass was pressed against the fence and avoid, avoid, avoid, until there was simply no place left to go, and Mister Decoy was in their face, escalating the pressure menacingly. Their only escape, only relief of the pressure, was to go on the defensive, to show barking or teeth or go after the Decoy, after which he immediately gave them a bite on the sleeve, or retreated to back off on the pressure.

How like a bottom that is, that we must be backed into a corner, with no choice of circumvention or avoidance left whatsoever, and escalating pressure in our face that threatens to overtake us, until we kick in and get with a recovery program. We are forced to make that decision, for our life, to do whatever it takes, to get out of the corner. We either find that within us, or end up slumped and dead, back in that corner.

We finally make the choice, to defend our life.

I could illustrate just about everything I've learned in life that is important, using lessons I've learned in Schutzhund training. Perhaps I will write more about them, in coming entries.

For today, it's what crossed my mind, so here they are, my thoughts, my musings on recovery, through my personal filter.

Hope you enjoyed the trip.

-The Traveler