A Pet Psychic, My Weird Little Maltipoo, and Myself

“Just like you and your partner were dreaming of a small white dog named Frank, he was dreaming of you,” Moore remarked early in our reading. Immediately, the cynic in me that questioned the very concept of “animal communication” quieted down a bit. If she could see that Frank was destined to be with us, then why shouldn’t I trust her?

Moore went on to say that Frank was “very intelligent” (well, yes! Every expensive trainer we’ve hired to work with him has said so!), and had “a lot to learn” from Rax and me, specifically about interacting with strangers (we like to do it, he doesn’t, ear-splitting barks often ensue).

Then, she said something that caught me a little off-guard: “Franklin feels safe, but he’s guarded.” Just a few hours earlier, my own therapist had said more or less the same thing about me: “Even though you’re in a part of your life that feels secure and stable, it’s normal to keep walls up from your past from when you needed them more.”

I promptly became verklempt at the notion of my Maltipoo and me healing our attachment issues and emotional wounds together—only to dissolve into a flood of tears when Moore asked my permission to share some of the rougher aspects of Frank’s early life. (I’ll keep those private, in the off chance that my dog wants to follow in his mother’s footsteps and write a memoir someday, but suffice it to say that he’s more than earned his trust issues.)

If I had to summarize where Frank’s story and the one that I’m still learning about myself most overlap, I would do so with one word: shame. “I want to reassure him that there’s nothing he could say right now that would endanger him, and he doesn’t need to carry shame about anything that might have gone on in his earlier life because none of it is his fault,” Moore told me as she communicated with Frank (who, weirdly, did seem to know something was going on, even over Zoom: as the two of them allegedly spoke without words, he let me pet his stomach, which he never does).

I know this is all sounding very The Body Keeps The Score: Dog Edition, but it was instantly striking to me how Moore’s comment about shame mirrored a recurring trend in my own therapy sessions. I’m good—no, great—at listening to the more difficult details of my friends’ lives, and encouraging them to show grace to themselves and the ways they’ve adapted to deal with pain. But as I’ve learned from almost 10 full years of regular therapy, I am very, very bad at sitting with anything that’s ever gone wrong in my life without blaming myself first. Seeing that pattern repeated in my silly little puppy made me feel a tenderness not only for him, but for his dog mom, too. (Yes, I now fully own a term I once quietly derided, to the point that the back of my iPhone case reads Frank’s Mom in applique beads.)