Loving your creative animal BY SONJA LARSEN
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veryone 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. 1. Reward the behaviour you want 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. 2. Stop yelling 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. 3. Respect the body 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
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wordworks | 2021 Volume III September
“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. 4. Work with the animal that shows up 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. 5. Slow is fast 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. 6. Break it down 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.
