How Viral Dog Videos Have Helped Me Cope With Youth Pet Trauma
By: Shawn Laib
Tags: Dogs, Children, Pets, Social Media, Self

The house across from ours diagonally and to the right was the home to an interesting family of five. The mother was bedridden with migraine headaches, the dad didn’t have much control over his children in her stead, and the three kids were more than a little bratty.

They owned a little white terrier of some sort, and it had a bad temper and no training or control from the family. It obeyed no one. To an adult, this dog would be merely rat-sized. To a child, it was an angry monster.

It attacked me and chased me to my front door one morning while I was walking to school. I made it to my house and we were able to scare it away with a plastic baseball bat. I wasn’t hurt physically, but I definitely haven’t been fond of spending time with dogs ever since this moment.

Not shockingly, the terrier was put down a year or so later for actually hurting a small girl that lived down the street. I always wondered whether that child felt the same way in the aftermath of her experience as I did.

Anything that happens when a person is young is more likely to leave scarring on an emotional level, but I wouldn’t say that I still think about what happened to me that often when I come into contact with a dog in real life. The event was more of a representation of the qualities in the pet that I don’t enjoy and I wonder whether I would if not for the childhood event.

Either way, there is no way of knowing. The ability to look at dog videos and enjoy the positive qualities of these beings from the divider of a phone or computer screen is perfect for getting to know what I’m comfortable with and what I’d rather not experience again.

I believe that the uncontrollable desire of most dogs to be around people, whether it’s in an angry or an enthusiastically happy condition, is what makes me uncomfortable throughout my life. If the dog would have just minded its owners, which I understand is more their fault than the animal’s, I would have never had a negative early impression of the pets.

Photo by Alvan Nee on Unsplash

Even if a dog were to approach me in a loving and happy manner, I still wish to keep my distance and enjoy their persona in a separate fashion. That’s where the viral videos come in handy.

I live vicariously through the owner of the pet and on the screen, I am viewing, devoid of the annoyance or detractions that I have come to dislike about the dog/person relationship.

I still feel happy watching all of their great laughs, loving hugs, and games of catch that occur between pet and owner and emotions are what count the most in life, not the actions that cause those feelings.

I compare this immersive way that video technology has altered my view of dogs to the ways that a movie or a video game puts its occupant into a different world while still keeping reality at an arm’s length.

Playing Super Mario games create access to a world of extreme jumping, talking turtles, and riding on pet dinosaurs, all without the dangers of those unrealistic events if they were to actually come true in the real world.

Entertainment and media create a dissociation between the reality we want, and the reality we actually are living in. I am thankful to experience the great joys that dogs add to other people’s lives without having to worry about an actual dog impeding whatever I am doing, or reminding me of the negative event from my childhood.

Psychologist Jeremy E. Sherman says that “entertainment is great practice for learning to manage your two worlds, reality, and fiction. Fantasy is a nice place to visit but you can’t live there. Visits to entertainment teach us how to return to reality.”

Virtual reality headsets have been used for years to help people revisit their trauma from a past life event. The University of Washington pioneered the technology to help survivors of September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks retrace their memories and come to grips with their feelings.

The results are overwhelmingly positive with VR therapy, but I can’t find much in the way of concrete studies on television, movies, or social media therapeutic strategies other than the anecdotal evidence given by doctors like Sherman above.

I still think that is enough affirmation, along with the virtual reality studies and my personal story, to prove the ways that recreational technology aids in helping with negative experiences in the past, no matter the size of the subject of the trauma.

Photo by Billetto Editorial on Unsplash

Concluding takeaways