What doesn't kill us makes us... What? The end of this phrase depends on the specific case and many factors, both external and internal. How stress turns into trauma in humans and dogs, and what we can do for ourselves and for our pets to prevent this from happening.
The basic principles by which we experience stress or trauma are the same for all mammals, especially highly social ones such as humans and other primates, dogs, rats, dolphins, elephants. Sociality plays a twofold role here: sometimes it causes stress where a single animal would not have it (anxiety about relationships with relatives, fear of loneliness, uncertainty about one's status, pain of losing a social partner), but it also provides very effective tools to deal with stress so that it does not turn into injury.
In the everyday sense, stress is usually understood as distress, that is, negative stress that we perceive as an unpleasant experience. However, in a scientific sense, any novelty that we encounter is stressful, and its complete absence quickly leads to boredom and degradation. Canadian endocrinologist Hans Selye formulated a theory in which stress is divided according to its effect on the body into positive (eustress) and negative (distress). Distinguishing one from the other is quite simple within subjective experience: we later remember eustress as an interesting adventure, but we don’t want to remember distress at all.
It is more difficult to understand from the outside whether for someone else a certain event is eustress or distress (especially for animals or young children who cannot express their attitude to the experience in words). When someone reacts to a difficult and unpleasant event with phrases like “don’t worry, it’s nothing”, “nobody complained about this nowadays”, he unconsciously passes off wishful thinking - distress for eustress. If only it worked like this..
.The situation when eustress turns into distress (and vice versa) is individual for each living being. The main factors for reducing distress come down to two: control and predictability. In order for the situation not to test the adaptive abilities of our nervous system, it must be either predictable or controlled. Or at least we should take it seriously as such. The latter explains the attractiveness of religions and ideologies.
If, in the midst of chaos and unpredictable danger, one firmly believes that everything is in the hand of God or that it is part of an objective, good and correct historical process (for example, the movement of society towards building communism), the level of the stress hormone cortisol decreases in much the same way as if a person had a real opportunity to influence the situation.
And any eschatology is an attempt to reduce stress by believing in the predictability of the end of the world.
This beneficial effect of faith was noted by many intellectuals who survived the events of the Second World War. Viktor Frankl's psychotherapeutic system is built on it: to find some meaning in the disasters that you are undergoing.
The philosopher Jean Amery, who, like Frankl, survived imprisonment in a Nazi concentration camp, also noted this effect, only with a feeling of bitterness: it is much easier to survive in a camp for a fanatical believer (in God or in communism) than for a secular humanist who recognizes the objective unpredictability and uncontrollability of the situation. On the other hand, we are now seeing how a critical mindset allows people to quickly move on to finding solutions, that is, ways to gain at least some real, rather than imaginary elements of control and predictability - for example, to start helping those who are worse off.
For those who care about intellectual and ethical values, any effort to maintain their conscience and sobriety in the midst of everything that happens also helps to reduce stress: we gain control over our inner life at least when we filter information, when we keep from joining the aggressor and blaming the victim, from moral relativism.
Do you really need to deal with stress right now? The damage from long-term exposure affects many aspects of our health, in fact, it is the constant maintenance of the body in a state of readiness "fight or flight" to the detriment of all long-term functions: immunity, digestion, reproduction, growth (in children), rest and recovery. No animal, argues Robert Sapolsky, is designed for this: in nature, life is so harsh that maintaining a stress response when there is no immediate physical threat is a senseless waste.
Having run away from a predator or catching prey, the animal relaxes, instead of the sympathetic nervous system, the parasympathetic (responsible for rest) is activated.
People, especially adults, are not good at it. We have abstract thinking and a speech model of the world that make our brain experience events that are not happening to us at this moment: remember past troubles, fear future ones, or sympathize with people who are far away from us (empathy is developed in animals no less than in humans , but they need to be nearby for this). The reaction of the organism to these experiences is the same as to an immediate physical danger. If we follow the tragic news without interruption and try to predict the development of a situation that we have no control over, it's like running away from rhinos for weeks: the body works at its limit and does not get rest.
The brain suffers greatly, because with prolonged stress, sleep is disturbed, which is necessary for its purification from metabolic products. In addition, the process of analyzing information consumed in huge quantities requires an increased supply of sugar to the brain: this is bad for both anorexia nervosa and bulimia (stress eating, especially sweet).
Therefore, even if taking care of your health seems selfish now (keep in mind that loved ones and those you can help depend on you), maintaining the physical ability of the brain to fully function is necessary in order to preserve your ethical and intellectual values.
When distress affects the psyche more or longer than it can withstand, they talk about trauma or PTSD. This means that something happened that punched a hole in the adaptive abilities of a person or animal. But how does trauma work? Usually it is presented as simple and understandable: for example, a dog was scared by a cyclist in childhood and now she is afraid of them. Most clients who turn to a zoopsychologist with the problem of fears in an animal are trying to remember some event from his past that would logically explain these fears.
For example, a case from practice: someone threw two-month-old puppies to the fence of the shelter. The hostess stumbled upon them when she was walking with a shelter dog, and she managed to gnaw on the puppies: one was killed, the other was saved. She was treated for a long time, after which the new owner took the grown girl to her. She turned to me when the dog was already a year old, with a problem - the strongest fear and aggression ... towards people. Our patient treated other dogs quite calmly, although, it would seem, it was them that she should have been afraid of after her experience in childhood.
The fact is that the injury does not “fall” on a clean slate, but happens to an animal that at that time already has at least a species-specific behavior, as well as some kind of life experience, albeit a small one. And it depends on what part of the traumatic event it will remember, what “conclusions” it will draw. Puppies that are thrown into a shelter are most often born to mothers who live in not very close emotional contact with a person: chained, aviary, half-domestic, half-homeless. In their one and a half to two months, such puppies receive little experience in communicating with people, their world consists of a mother and siblings. The alien dog that attacked them was not the first dog in their life, but the appearance of a person with him, and most importantly, the weeks that followed this in the veterinary clinic, where there was no one from the puppy’s former life, but there were many people, consolidated their association with fear and pain.
Trauma is not about an objective understanding of the situation with all its causes and nuances (for example, how does a puppy know that people in white coats poking him with needles want good), but about fragmentary impressions that the brain picks up and interprets within the framework of its past experience .
This explains why people who have experienced the same traumatic events (for example, a war) remember and evaluate them differently.
Of great importance is the difference between the psyche of an adult and a cub, and during growing up also a specific age at which potentially traumatic events occurred. For example, a two-month-old puppy successfully survived an evacuation under fire and a long journey to a safe country. He shows no signs of increased stress or injury. This can be explained both by a naturally strong nervous system and by the correct actions of a person, but age is extremely important. A month later, the puppies begin a sensitive period, the age of fears, when everything that the cub has not had time to get used to in advance frightens him - and the reaction of a person largely determines whether this fear will be fixed for life. Therefore, the same puppy that has gone through extreme events with the same owner can grow up to be a completely different dog, depending on how many months old he was.
One of the manifestations of trauma is learned helplessness - the rollback of an adult animal into the state of a cub that does not take active steps to improve its position (for example, does not crawl out of the cage where it is shocked, although it can). This happens when no actions have helped to improve the situation for a long time, and sometimes it goes away on its own over time, and sometimes it requires correction. One of the powerful factors in the fight against learned helplessness is exploratory behavior: when we analyze information, all panic reactions of the body level out, and the horizon of perception expands (this is also the basis for the techniques for overcoming a panic attack “look around and name the objects that you see around you”, and assessment situations in martial arts - turn your head around, noting where the exit is, whether the attacker has accomplices, at what distance they are).
The fact is that we are organically unable to panic and process information at the same time. One turns off the other. Therefore, in dogs, for which the main channel of information is the sense of smell, the process of sniffing automatically reduces the level of stress. Correcting the fear of the street, cynologists and zoopsychologists try to select places for walking where there are a lot of smells interesting to the dog, not to interrupt the sniffing process, but to encourage it. For humans, the closest analogue to sniffing is reading. It is easier to panic from what you see or hear than from what you read.
Unfortunately, this effect causes people to unknowingly get themselves into the trap of doomscrolling (endless tape reading in search of terrible news).
At the moment when we read and search for information, fear is almost not felt - but then the whole array of bad news found falls on our consciousness when we try to sleep or have lunch.
The mechanisms of stress and trauma are so complex that there can be no single measure of a traumatic event: sometimes you can get out of the worst tragedy without injury, and in another case, some seemingly trifle pulls a chain of reactions that unsettles us for years. The most dangerous of these chains are called developmental traumas - when something happened in the early stages of growing up that violated its natural course. For example, the owners simply decided to keep the puppy at home for a longer time without walking, not realizing that this is tantamount to isolating the child within four walls until school. The brain did not receive the stimuli it needed, constantly updated information about the outside world, and then it turned out to be no longer able to process it - the dog is terribly afraid of everything outside the apartment, and inside it shudders from any sounds.
Another kind of such a chain reaction is when an adult's trauma leads to developmental trauma in his children. Any humanitarian catastrophes - wars, natural disasters, epidemics - produce such chains of traumatic reactions at once on an enormous scale. Parents who have experienced extreme ordeals tend to be overly protective of their child, limiting his or her attempts to master the environment, making it clear that the world is a dangerous and sad place. This anxiety is projected even onto animals - often worried owners see a dangerous fight where the dogs are just actively playing.
There are no universal ways to avoid stress or prevent it from escalating into trauma. If inwardly a person at least understands what feelings he is experiencing (although a stress reaction can disrupt contact with emotions), then little is clear about those around him whom he wants to help. You can do a lot of things wrong without knowing, for example, that a stressed dog should not be thrown a ball (this will only overload the nervous system faster), and a person should be pestered with advice to “think positively.” Therefore, if it is not possible to consult with a specialist, then with confidence you can rely only on the stress reduction mechanisms inherent in all social animals - that is, on communication. Simply being unobtrusive (unless asked to leave), caring, and paying attention to the other's cues, whether verbal or expressed in body language.
Sometimes the presence of a significant social partner turns out to be a more important factor in dealing with stress than physical security, the availability of food, medicines.
These considerations are important to take into account when making any long-term decision - for example, soberly assess the level of affection between you and your pet, deciding what is more important for him: to travel with you in rather unpredictable conditions or to stay for some time in more stable, but without you; how easy it will be for the animal to adapt in another family; whether to separate two dogs from you or from each other. Unfortunately, now people massively have to make decisions in a state of actual stress (or even already traumatized), trying to assess stress factors in the future.
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