Dog Trainer On Guilt-Fear

Set boundaries, I tell them, but Chihuahua owners, more than all other dog owners, find boundary-setting impossible. They come back to me week after week with confessions of failure. You don't know the faces she gives me. She's depressed. She won't eat. Well of course your dog is sulking, I tell them. She's been demoted and her ego will now have to match her body size.

The truth is, I love (and sometimes hate) Chihuahua owners for this reason: they are honest about the paralyzing power of guilt. Guilt is short-hand for veiled fear, for the conflicted feeling we get when our needs compete with someone else's. What we want most in the world is to be approved of and loved, and to get that we will very quickly put our needs second. Put simply, we're afraid other people (or our dogs) won't like us if we stand up for ourselves. We're afraid they'll find out we're horrible inside, that we don't deserve anyone's love, except maybe the runt of the metaphoric dog litter, and no, not really, we don't deserve even that. [Ed.: Ephasis Added]

-Leslie Blanco, The Huffington Post