Our Pets – Ourselves
By: Alexandra DeWoskin, LCSW
If you’ve ever owned a pet, you already know how much fun and affection they can bring. It’s well known that pets come with some pretty powerful mental and physical health benefits. Dogs and cats in particular can reduce stress, anxiety, depression, ease loneliness, encourage exercise and playfulness, lower blood pressure, and even improve your cardiovascular health by lowering triglyceride and cholesterol levels (indicators of heart disease).
It’s even been shown heart attack victims with pets survive longer than those without and pet owners over age 65 make 30 percent fewer visits to their doctors than those without pets. In this article, we will talk about why and how our pets bring us so much joy and how people have innate ability to accept an animal in the same why they might accept a child, family member or friend.
A pet can add real joy and unconditional love to your life. Thus, lessening the feelings of loneliness and isolation. When you come in the door, your pet doesn’t judge you or care how you’re dressed. They’re just happy to see you. You are greeted with the same enthusiasm each and every time you walk in that door. It is consistent, and you can count on it.
A pet is handing out pure love, sparing no expense, and asking absolutely nothing in return. When we play or interact with a dog or cat, it stimulated our levels of serotonin and dopamine, neurotransmitters that calm and relax us, boost your mood and ease depression, encourage laughter, and exercise, which can help boost your immune system and increase your energy. We can learn a lot from our animals. Animals have the ability to live in the present moment, a useful tool we could all learn.
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Dogs don’t regret or ruminate the past or worry about the future. If we can learn to appreciate and focus on what’s happening in the here and now, we will experience more of a sense of control of our environment which can leave us feeling more fulfilled and empowered. Pets fulfill the basic human need for touch. They can make us be better people by teaching us responsibility, loyalty, empathy, and a sense of purpose and fulfillment.
Caring for a pet can bring pleasure and help boost your morale, optimism, sense of self-worth, and provide escape from hyperfocusing on our own stressors. The companionship of a pet can be a great stimulus for healthy exercise which strengthens the heart, improves blood circulation, and slows the loss of bone tissue.
Pets, especially dogs, are a great way for people to spark up conversations and meet new people while out and about on walks or at the dog park. I can’t tell you how many times people here on the North side of Chicago stop me to tell me how cute my dog is or ask to pet her.
There’s also likely a physiological component to why pets make us feel better during unhappy times. There has been some research showing that just stroking an animal reduces your blood pressure and heart rate.
Let’s discuss about how we are wired to accept our pet’s friendship and companionship. To share a home with a living being whose mind you can’t understand and whose actions you can’t anticipate is to live in a state of unpredictability and disconnectedness.
But when it comes to our impulse to speak to our pets, we do so because we tend to see something human in them. They are astonishingly attentive to everything we do, can probably “read” human body language better than we can, and they are incredibly fast and flexible learner. Pets have evolved to become acutely attuned to humans and our behavior and emotions.
And, because they have a keen ability to sense nonverbal cues such as body language and energy, they can often be a support to us in difficult times. Given how responsive our dogs are to us, it’s tempting to believe that they do understand us.
And here is how we contribute to this bonding experience. Anthropomorphism refers to our tendency to treat animals as if they are much like humans and have very much the same thoughts, behaviors and emotions that people do.
But diving deeper into this and coming from a human psychological perspective, we are wired to psychologically acclimate and survive situations in many ways. Projection, one of the psychological defense mechanisms describes one’s tendency to resolve anxiety and conflicted, mixed feelings and thoughts by imagining the anxiety-producing or conflicted mental content is located outside of us, often relocated in someone or something else. Individuals basically will attribute characteristics they find unacceptable in themselves to another person.
But, projection can also reduce anxiety because it helps us feel that new people, are familiar to us. There are generally three types of Projections: Neurotic, Complimentary and Complementary Projection.
Neurotic Projection is what we’ve been discussing and is the most common variety of Projection. Complementary projection occurs when individuals assume others feel the same way they do and Complimentary projection is the assumption others can do the same things as well as oneself.
These are connected forms of Projection. Since, research suggests that your interpretation of your dog’s behavior may actually be a more accurate reflection of your own personality vs an accurate description of which emotions your dog may be experiencing, maybe the phenomena of Complementary and Complimentary Projection can help to explain how people can develop such strong relationships with animals in an effort to ward off loneliness and satisfy our need for connection, touch and companionship.
With the psychology theory defined, we may not be able to pinpoint precisely what your pet is thinking at any given moment, you can get to know their personality and behaviors, which will help you interpret what he may be considering or feeling throughout the day.
Part may accurately reflect their limited emotions and part may be our projections (viewing them through our lens). While dogs, for example, are able to understand many of the words we use, they’re actually better at interpreting our tone of voice, body language, and gestures. And like any good human friend, a loyal dog will look into your eyes to gauge your emotional state and try to understand what you’re thinking and feeling.
They will often come closer and seemingly try to comfort you. Most dog owners are convinced that their pets not only lead complex emotional lives, but also know what their owners are thinking. Again, the concept of Projection, that creates familiarity and closeness.
Scientifically speaking, dogs do have the same brain structures that produce emotions in humans. They also have the same hormones and undergo the same chemical changes that humans do during emotional states.
This includes the hormone oxytocin, which in humans is involved with love and affection. While this suggests that dogs also have emotions similar to ours, the mind of a dog is roughly equivalent to that of a human who is 2 to 2½ years old.
A child that age does have emotions, but they are the basic emotions: joy, fear, anger, disgust, excitement, contentment, distress, and even love. A dog does not have, and will not develop, more complex emotions, like guilt, pride, contempt, and shame that people do as they grow towards adulthood.
Dogs also go through their developmental stages much more quickly than humans do, attaining their full emotional range by the time they are 4 to 6 months old. The dog has learned that when you appear and he’s made an accident on the floor, bad things happen to him. The “guilty look” is no more than the dog’s anticipation of some kind of punishment based on its interpretation of its surrounding and its owner’s body language.
That guilty look is actually a sign of the dog’s very acute ability to read human body language. And a dog or cat will never actually feel shame, so for our entertainment, we can continue to dress them in that outfit or costume. Or give our dogs, the stylish lion groom or poof on the end of his tail
In the minds of most people, there is actually one canine facial expression that comes close to what we project as a smile. In this expression, slightly opened jaws reveal the dog’s tongue lapping out over his front teeth, the eyes take on a teardrop shape at the same time, as if being pulled upward slightly at the outer corners.
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It is a casual expression that is usually seen when the dog is relaxed, playing, or interacting socially, especially with people. Would we experience that way if we were not projecting our own happiness onto our dogs? But what is true is the tail’s position, specifically the height at which is it held, serves as a dog’s emotional barometer of happiness, fear, or warning/domination.
Low-pitched sounds (growls) make the animal seem dangerous; they usually indicate anger and the possibility of aggression. High-pitched sounds mean the opposite, a request to be allowed to come closer or a signal from a dog saying, “It’s safe to approach.”
While people with pets often experience great health benefits, a pet doesn’t necessarily have to be a dog or a cat. Watching fish in an aquarium can help reduce muscle tension and lower pulse rate. If you don’t have the time, money, or stamina to own a pet full-time, there are still ways you can experience the health benefits of being around animals because even short periods spent with a dog or cat can benefit both you and the animal.
You can ask to walk a neighbor’s dog or volunteer at an animal shelter. Some animal shelters and rescue groups offer pet “rental” programs where the dogs and cats, that are available for adoption, can be rented out for walks or play dates. You can also foster an animal temporarily until a permanent home is found.
A variety of different organizations offer specially trained therapy dogs. During these visits, people are invited to pet and stroke the animals, which can improve mood and reduce stress and anxiety.
Having lived alongside us for thousands of years, dogs and cats have evolved and have inbuilt affection for mankind and a set of skills for becoming our best friends. And, mankind’s amazing capacity to survive and thrive, has given us the ability to project our affection, joy, intimacy, and connection onto our pets. This gives us the ability to create friendships based on happiness and joy in ways that provide unconditional love and tremendous impact to our lives – even if our pets actually have little complex understanding about how we feel about them.
