On Trauma and Triggers: Changing Routes and Running with Mace

In the past two years, I’ve changed my running route four times. Each time was to avoid a memory, and my border collie and I collect those like burrs.

One route took us by an RV lot. A muscly guard dog, about Kylo’s size but heavier, would run along the fence as we passed, huffing and growling, barking and lathering. My little collie would hardly react to the aggression except to occasionally stop and poop on the rocks by the fence, as if to send a message I’d promptly clean up. The ‘roid-raged barker on the other side was not happy about our proximity or the shit and let us know.

But Kylo had confidence in the fence. I did too. Then one day the gate was open and the dog was out.

On trauma

People at the dog park we go to say that to break up a dog fight, you should grab the dogs by the hind legs and pull them off each other. I didn’t do that; ever the pacifist, Kylo wasn’t fighting back and I wasn’t thinking clearly. I threw myself on the attacker, bodily wrestling him to the ground and finding a grip on his collar to wrench him off my yelping canine Gandhi.

I lucked out that the dog didn’t turn his head to catch my face with his teeth. He was more focused on the insolent poop fiend. The owners came running with apologies. They’d let him out to pee and had forgotten the open gate. No hard feelings. Kylo was bruised but unmaimed. No blood except where I’d scraped my knee in the scuffle. After that day, he’d stiffen his legs before agreeing to approach that neck of the route. I didn’t want to pass the RV lot again either. We adjusted.

Other scenes of trauma were less violent, but no less memorable—a territorial chihuahua chased us from an open garage. Kylo would jump into the street when we passed that house after that. We adjusted again.

We avoid an entire cul-de-sac now because a barking German shepherd pawed open a screen door and ran for us.

A woman with a Doberman crosses the street when she sees us because her dog lunged for mine once. If she hadn’t let go of the leash, she would’ve eaten asphalt. I side-stepped, caught the Doberman by the harness, and felt bionic the rest of the way home.

There are more ways to lose your voice than illness, more ways to find it again than a self-defense class, but for me it was a start.

On triggers

These incidents ended without harm, but Kylo remains hypercautious of every dog we pass, or maybe he’s reading me, reacting to my cues. Maybe we’re reading each other. When a potential threat surfaces now, he puts himself behind me even while I direct him there by the leash.

Recently we encountered a big brown breed I couldn’t identify, possibly a mastiff mix and the largest dog we’ve seen yet. He was leashless on his front lawn. I saw him before I saw his owner. We stopped running and assumed our positions. I warned him off with a few firm Nos as he came near, though he wasn’t showing signs of aggression. No snarling, barking, or lunging but I couldn’t tell if he was growling because my earphones were blasting the Into the Spider-verse soundtrack. I plucked them out and finally heard what his owner was saying as she approached from the patio.

“He’s friendly.”

He was her service dog, vestless for the moment. The two good boys sniffed each other. I laughed in relief, explained Kylo’s history and my caution and we went on our way.

I realize that with our track record, we’re on the verge of pushing our luck. Kylo trusts that I will protect him but if that massive dog hadn’t been friendly, I can’t say I would have been able to protect either of us. Yet experience has taught my dog that I will pounce on a pit for him, shout down a shepherd, dodge a Doberman; and experience has taught me that if I respect Kylo’s trauma, stay vigilant, and keep running, both of us will be better for it. But it’s probably time to invest in some dual-purpose mace.

Plan of defense

I’ve modified my route to avoid dogs, but not enough to thwart a person who’s hypothetically become too familiar with my habits, the paths I take, the open fields I pass. I rehearse dangerous scenarios as I run, involving dogs, involving people.

My self-defense teacher in college gave us extra credit if we swore at our stand-in attacker. He was trying to get us to shed our probably-Mormon vernacular and raise our voices. He wanted us to defend ourselves with fierceness brimming on anger, to hear us shout “Fuck off!” at the top of our lungs. And it was hard to do; not the anger part, that was already there and the reason I took the class, but when I yelled there was a sock in my throat, when I swore it was like for the first time all over again. My shout was unintelligible; I didn’t get the extra credit.

There are more ways to a lose your voice than illness, more ways to find it again than a self-defense class, but for me it was a start. My teacher brought in someone from a woman’s shelter to talk to us about abuse, the forms it takes, the cycles it follows. Coupled with long-overdue therapy, I finally began to find the words for my own run-ins with trauma.

Changing routes

I ended a marriage that was the superlative of fine; so not-miserable was my marriage that our area bishop (the leader of our local Mormon congregation) came to the door and asked why I wanted a divorce. He wanted to know if my then-spouse had a temper, if he hit me; simply not wanting to be married anymore and thinking both of us could be happier was not a good enough reason for him, a man who’d barely learned my name.

Bishop Nosy was operating on a number of faulty premises, one of them being that when it comes to the longevity of a relationship, drastic action must be precipitated by drastic cause. After my divorce, I refused to end something that needed ending long before it finally self-destructed. Why? Because I’d failed to learn the lesson my marriage should have taught me: that I didn’t need to have bruises on my body to point to when I asked myself why I wasn’t demanding something more from my life, as much as my imagination allowed.

Abusive relationships aren’t carbon copies of each other and their lasting effects will vary from person to person. I’ve never been accosted in an alley like I’ve never been struck by a lover. But I’ve been yelled at with such venom that my chest felt like it would implode with the effort to shrink me down to nothing, to disappear. Verbal abuse. I’ve been chipped away at in the subtlest of ways, diminished, my feelings scoffed at and ignored, my intelligence and sanity called into question. Gaslighting. Emotional abuse.

Learning these words has changed my life for the better, as well as acknowledging and respecting my triggers—avoiding where possible, coping where necessary.

There are places in Utah I don’t like seeing on return visits, memories I stifle. Leaving the place I’d lived for twenty-three years was the ultimate route change, every mile behind me like the shedding of another weight.

***

Statistically, Kylo and I would both be safer if we just stayed inside, but it’s still never occurred to me to stop running even with my flat feet and sandpaper knee joints. It’s my goal to run with Kylo every weekday morning for the rest of his life. For the rest of mine, I want the things that end to be the things that should—relationships that turn toward toxicity, dead end jobs, destructive habits, paradigms, and now, I suppose, running without protection.