do not metaphor me

I used to think my mood swings just jumped into be.  As if spontaneously the neurons in my brain started “miss firing”.  Shifting my moods in a knee jerk fashion.  That is until I got and trained Harper my Psychiatric Service Dog.  Who I have trained to smell my mood swings.

Before I started training her, I thought she would be alerting me as they were happening.  I know what you’re thinking, what would be the point in that?  Well, my thought was that who I was with would know it happened and I wouldn’t have to say anything to them about it.  She would tell them for me.  However, that isn’t what has happened.

How she alerts me.  The first thing she does is become very interested in how I smell.  When I’m reclined sitting on the sofa, she will come from where she is lying down and get all up in my face smelling my breath.  When I’m standing, she circles around me sniffing my legs with a lot of enthusiasm, taking in deep breaths.  Afterwards, she will lay down on me when I’m sitting down.  Or she will touch my hand with her nose and lick my hand when I’m standing up.  These alerts she came up with herself, and I actually had to figure them out.  Especially, the smelling me part.

The reason I had to figure them out is because she kind of just started doing it.  We (my trainer and I) had just begun her scent training.  Having her smell my normal scents without an alert.  After doing that a few times we, just for giggles, had her smell a sample I took when I was depressed.  Once again smelling it without an alert.  Like I said we had just started her training. 

A couple of days later I’m sitting on the sofa, she was laying beside my legs, and she gets up and gets all up in my face smelling my breath.  No matter how much I tried to push her away, I couldn’t.  Then when she was ready, she laid back down.  About an hour and a half, two hours later I had an intrusive thought and my mood shifted down.  Immediately my thoughts went to Harper smelling my breath.  However, I thought there was no way.  But then she did it three more times, with my thoughts shifting down.  Each time about an hour and a half afterwards.  And I started believing it.

The most impressive time was when we were in a training session.  We were working on the normal stuff.  Sit, lay down, crawl, etc.  When she stopped doing anything I would tell her to do and started sniffing me.  After several seconds, she rubbed against me like a cat, then touched and licked my hand.  Following that, she laid down at my feet and refused to do anything else.  My trainer said, “I think she is alerting you.”  Afterwards, she would not leave my side.  Something very odd for her.  Then out of the blue I my mood shifted down into a depression that lasted for a week.  Her sticking to my side the entire time.  Until, one day she simply got up and went to her spot on the sofa and about an hour later the episode was over.

So, what has this taught me?

Like I said, I used to think my mood swings happened all the sudden like a gust of wind.  But that can’t be possible.  Not since she is alerting me an hour and sometimes two hours in advance.  Obviously, something chemical is changing in me long before my mood changes.  So what I thought was a fast, immediate thing is actually a very slow process.  And that knowledge has helped me understand one very important thing.  In those moments, those thoughts are not real and they are not mine.  They belong solely to my brain.  That thought alone helps me not to react to them.  Because I know they are not what I, me, really want.  They are simply what my brain is telling me I want.  They are a lie.

Since I don’t have a poem about this subject, I have decided to pull out a random one I probably won’t ever write on past this paragraph.  While this simple poem and perfectly self-explanatory, I would like to say, I firmly believe this.  People don’t change.  They just become who they are, always were.  Sometimes that is a bad thing.  But most of the time it is a good thing.  We should never stop working on improving ourselves.