I know now that getting the dog I want has almost nothing to do with training, as important as I believe that is. It has to do with knowing myself, my needs, moods, emotions, anger, and patience. The more I have come to understand about myself, the more I get the dog I want.

For more than 20 years, I’ve been studying attachment theory and people and their dogs. That is the study of why people get the dogs they get, and why it is so difficult for humans to understand the emotions and desires they bring to the relationship.

For me, being a steward is all about understanding myself and what I am responsible for. It is the ancient mission of dogs, from the very first time they encountered humans, to be what we need them to be.

This whole area of study is delicate for people, painful, confusing, threatening, even offensive.

There is nothing I’ve written about that has been harder or explain, or that meets more resistance – from people who rescue dogs to people who buy them to people who unknowingly lead them into behaviors they say they dislike but unknowingly need and promote.

For all of the controversies that sometimes surround him in the purist dog world, Cesar Milan’s primary theory – that it is our emotions and wishes and behavior that shapes our dogs – is profound. We get the dogs we want and need.

We are all eager to put our stories onto our dogs; they are jealous, rebellious, abused, difficult.  They are spoiled or unappreciative. They are willful and obtuse. We want them to change, but we balk at transforming ourselves.

We like to talk about them, but we hate to talk about us even though we are most often the driving force that shapes the dogs we live with.

Our conversations with dogs are almost universally one-way; they are neither aware of them or able to understand them.

To understand a dog is to understand yourself, and if you don’t understand yourself, you can never understand your dog.

That is my belief and the belief of the attachment theorists and biologists that I read and respect. I accept that it is the belief of very few dog owners and lovers.

Authenticity is everything when talking to our dogs; there is nothing they smell quicker than a fraud; their lives depend on it.

I was talking to a well-known trainer last year-  she read the blog and messaged me to ask me about a tough training issue involving border collies –  about life from a trainer’s perspective.

“The hardest thing to convince people about,” she said, is that “behavioral problems are almost always the problems of the people, not the dog.”

She added that “people are always bringing their “bad” dogs to me, but what I usually find out is that they need to see their dogs as bad or troubled, they enable these behaviors, and it’s a lot easier than doing the hard work of looking at themselves.”

I am not a perfect dog owner or trainer by any means; my dog history is littered with mistakes and troubles.

In our conversation, the trainer echoed something Maria has told me several times. The good dogs come from what is inside of me, not what is out there or from obedience training.

But I have often puzzled at how eager people are to tell me about the destructive, out of control, and disturbing behavior of their dogs, as if they are helpless and had nothing to do with it.

Very few have offered to tell me how their emotional psyche contributed to their dog’s unwanted behavior or keeps it going. Or how understanding themselves helps their dogs.

Dogs need help navigating our complex world; if we don’t understand our own feelings, it is almost impossible to help them.

And they suffer for it, getting yelled at, abandoned, sometimes mistreated,  returned, confined, or feared their whole lives, or sometimes, even getting killed.

I had several complicated and disconnected dogs, but once I went into therapy and learned more about myself, that changed. Julius and Stanley opened my eyes to the possibilities of getting a beautiful dog if I only did the work on myself.

And I did.

I’ve had a run of good dogs, I see now,  because I understood precisely what it was I wanted and needed from them, and because it is the nature of dogs to do what is wanted and needed.  This involves accepting some hard truths about me.

This journey began with wolves showing up to protect people who slept in caves and help them hunt for food. That is what people needed.

They have been doing it ever since. That is how they have survived and prospered when raccoons and most animals have not.

The trainer asked me, as Maria did this morning, why I had a dog like Rose or Red or Zinnia.  It’s such a complicated question.

Rose became the dog I needed to survive my first years on a farm. Lenore became the dog I needed to love me when I was alone and loveless. Izzy was the dog I needed to begin my hospice work and come to terms with my mortality.

Red continued and broadened this work and opened the doors for me that I needed open – notably the work of the Army Of Good. Red helped me to make these problematic years meaningful and more than bearable.

And here comes Zinnia, my shadow, the dog I needed to continue my therapy work, to sit with me while I write this, to shadow me wherever I go,  and to jump into my lap several times a day and shower me with kisses.

How did I get her to sit with me in my study? I did the same thing I did with the others. I wanted it. I needed it. All she had to do was look at me and smell me and hear me know. That is at the heart of what dogs do, given a chance.

It’s fun to teach Zinnia to sit and stay, and pretty simple.

But she is studying me as I am training her, reading me as I am “teaching” her.

Through my bumbling movements and ramblings, she figures out what it is I need and begins to give it to me.

We call this a wonderful dog. It is wonderful. But it happens because I let her be what I need her to be, I don’t throw balls at her all day or wrestle.

She does what dogs do and what dogs have done for thousands of years. They serve, love, and protect humans.

I understand that dogs like Red and Zinnia don’t come out of the ether.

It takes a lot of work to find the right dog. Getting a dog is not just about feeling noble and rescuing one.  It is so much easier if you know what you need, rather than do what other people tell you is what you should do.

I understand that my good fortune with dogs has nothing to do with my training skills, which are good but not great by any means. I don’t have the focus or attention span or agility or patience to be an exceptional trainer, and that is not false humility, that is the plain truth.

Dogs and people communicate in the most amazing and misunderstood ways.

Every dog I have had since becoming a writer has come into my study and sits beside me quietly while I worked. And I never trained a single one of them to do that, from Julius to Red to Zinnia. I just wanted it. Writing can be a lonely business.

I trust my dogs to see me, and I believe they will become what I need them to be, given my complicated emotional history. Perspective is important.

Emotionalizing stops communication dead; real communication must be open and two-sided. Anthropomorphizing dogs guarantees one cannot have a profound relationship with them because it is a distortion, it makes the dog a human, not a dog, and nobody can train a dog that way.

Casting a dog as brilliant or abused is also a block to communicating, as is creating the narrative of a dog as a “bad” or “troubling” dog, the bad child.

I have several friends who are proud to tell me how their Labs chewed up their sofas, socks, and clothes for years, or their border collies are just plain crazy and untrainable. It does not occur to them that this is the kind of dog they seek out and want and need, for reasons that vary from human to human.

When I met Frieda’s dog Maria, a wild and sometimes fearful creature who hated men, I realized that Maria had gotten the exact dog that the needed; someone to protect her, to support her and give her a sense of security.

She needed a dog that was on her side.

Once she needed something else, Frieda became a sweetheart.

Maria agrees now that she got the dog she needed.

But like the trainers (and attachment theorists) say, the problem is almost always the human, not the dog. They reflect us; they don’t lead us or shape us.

My dogs became what I wished for because I had nearly 30 years of therapy plus my year studying attachment theory and dogs. Through this work, I gave them the data they needed.

And I learned through that intensely introspective process to learn what it was I wanted and need from a dog given my troubled past: companionship, love, support.

I knew I couldn’t bear to have a dog that frightened or harmed people. Or that chased cars, attacked other dogs, chewed up the house, or run away.

I didn’t want a dog with separation anxiety, depression, or who might grieve obsessively over the loss of other dogs.

And so it is, I’ve never had a dog who ran away, chewed up the house, had separation anxiety, grieved for other dogs, harmed people (except for Orson), or didn’t sit by my side quietly why I wrote.

It is because I’m an undiscovered Cesar Milan? No, we all know better than that.

There is a lot of hubris and ego about dog training, but like nostalgia, that can be a trap. A dog that sits or stays might or might not be the right dog for someone; it depends on what it is the person needs.

How lonely are they? How needy? Can they listen? Can they change? Do they understand their fears, strengths, and weaknesses? Are they patient? If you can’t read your own emotions, I can assure you that your dog can, and he or she can be what you want and need him or her to be, not what you tell them or scold them or demand that they be.

Dogs sense what we need, they’ve had thousands of years of practice,  and, given a chance, are eager to provide it. That is their nature, their history, their success. No other animal does that; no other animal is as loved and well treated as our dogs.

The thing I tell myself the most often about living with my dogs is this: give them a chance to be what I need because most often it is also what they need. And I will return the favor.