#that’s my earliest dog memory. doesn’t cause me any particular stress to remember

[quillyfied]

It’s late enough at night to be making an ill-advised post, let’s do it:

Years and years ago, once read a post about how if a person had a fear of dogs, other people wouldn’t be trying to get that person to hang out with dogs or give dogs a chance or say the dogs were misunderstood (the metaphor being about sexual assault survivors who have an inherent fear and distrust of cis men being told to “get over it” and “not all men”, how people with less “serious” phobias or fears or trauma responses get cared for more than rape victims, not gonna get into that bc it’s a nuanced topic and not my actual point anyway).

And. Taking that at face value, ignoring the metaphor, speaking as a person with a dog fear and who is also friends with many, many dog people: uh. Hmm. Not quite, actually. Yes, I have good friends and they are aware of my fear, and they do take steps to try and ensure my comfort when I visit, but ultimately, I’ve had so many people throughout my life try to convince me that I just need to get over my fear and that dogs are great. My fear has been laughed at. It has been not taken seriously. It’s been pushed to its limits. I have been encouraged to just give the dogs attention, or to suck it up. And admittedly, I’m better now as an adult than I was as a child, because as a child I would start crying and freaking out if a dog got too close. I have a sort of weary tolerance for my friends’ dogs now as an adult (because I’m a grownup and I know that the dogs don’t mean any harm and are entitled to not being shut up or closed off in their own homes, but also I am so massively uncomfortable around dogs and that is probably never going away). Familiar dogs are okay. Strange dogs are much less okay. Strange big dogs will still put my brain into primeval fight flight or freeze and I possum up like crazy. And yet. I must tolerate the dogs because I love their owners. So I make an effort.

So, metaphor from like 2014 or something, your logic is flawed, and people with fears, rational or no, are absolutely always pushed and prodded to some degree to overcome their fears, no matter how justified the fear. And if aging has taught me anything, it’s that exposure therapy for certain fears does do some amount of alleviation and teaches better coping mechanisms for the fear (obviously not a universal thing). I’m not going to engage with the deeper levels of the metaphor, just going to point out that “you wouldn’t push a person with a dog phobia to hang out with dogs” is WRONG, YES THEY WILL AND IT IS YOUR JOB TO LEARN HOW TO HANDLE THAT.