My Dog Became My Life Coach

Healing the inner critic of an adult child of emotionally immature parents

My dog mooches. She mooches a lot. Every time I open the fridge, or even just step into to the dining room attached to the kitchen, she finds the perfect angle for eye contact and sits there, waiting to unleash her moochiest ‘give me some’ face if I make the mistake of looking her way.

It used to drive me nuts. Every time I was in the kitchen area, whether I was eating or not, I’d be hit with a wave of guilt, imagining all the sorrow of unquenched desire behind her cute puppy eyes. 

Then one day, sparked by something I can no longer remember, a thought hit me so obviously that it completely changed my life: I actually had no idea what was going on inside her little head. I could make a high probability guess (CHICKEN!), but there was no way for me to know for sure.

In that moment it struck me, just as I had been imagining her guilt-inducing, perhaps even sarcastically judgemental thoughts (another piece of cake is it sir? Must be nice.), I had an equal amount of power to assign her supportive thoughts instead.

Why couldn’t she be thinking how handsome I was? Or that I was being such a good boy (Yes you are! Yes you are!)? Who says she wasn’t watching me with deep pride in the person I was becoming? Or that those big brown eye were not actually filled with poultry-based desire, but with gratitude and love?

That’s when it hit me: why couldn’t I do this with people too?

What stops me from only hearing the goodness in their minds? Why can’t I assign them only positive and supportive thoughts? What if, every time I felt that familiar pang of people-pleasing anxiety when getting left on read, I told myself that they must really care about me to wait until they could devote their fullest attention to sending a response?

And so I did. For the first time in my life, I no longer had to worry about what other people thought of me because, in my mind at least, it was only ever good. 

And yes, sure, there’s an obvious danger in taking it too far, becoming delusional and self-centered. But as anybody who’s struggled with self-consciousness or the fear of being seen knows, delusions of the other kind, of always seeing the worst of yourself in other people’s eyes, can be equally destructive. Sometimes even more.

So why couldn’t I apply the power of my imagination toward goodness for a change? Why couldn’t I use it to bring myself closer to confidence and self-love?

When imagining what other people thought of me, why couldn’t I focus on the possibility they were only seeing my strengths instead of all my flaws?

And it’s not about self-deception or toxic positivity either, those require I ignore reality. But this is not that. This is about embracing the possibility that not everyone is as judgemental as the mind of a child of emotionally immature parents imagines. It’s about recognizing that just because they were critical and emotionally unsafe, doesn’t mean everyone else is too. 

It’s about looking at how our imagination keeps us imprisoned in unknowable things, like what our dog—or the person on the other side of the phone—is thinking, and choosing to use that same level of imagination to transcend our own self-defeating thoughts.

Ultimately, I realized, I have the power to choose the meaning I assign to things I do not know. Just as I have the power, when missing a workout or forgetting to meditate, to replace the catastrophic thoughts of YOU WILL NEVER MAKE IT AND NOBODY WILL EVER LOVE YOU, with ones that remind me that I’m doing great, killing it really, and that this is nothing but a blip in a story of conquest, a mere bump on the path to inevitable dominance, over the life that I don’t want, and the one I do.

By filtering my perceptions through optimism, even of the somewhat delusional variety, I free myself from my parents’ programming and transform my inner landscape from separation, fear, and self-doubt, to one of confidence, connection, and hope.

Because if the mind can come up with all the words above from a simple moochie look from a dog, imagine the untapped potential it holds for creating joy and self love, when fed the right prompts.

Image is from my new book As Far As I Can Tell. Download the e-book now.