I Have an Unhealthy Attachment to My Dog + I Am Ready to Admit It

I am fully aware that I have an unhealthy attachment to my dog, Piper. The truth of that attachment has started to cost me in ways I can no longer ignore.

She is the only living creature that has seen all versions of me — every unraveling, every breakdown, every relocation, each rebuild — for the past nearly seven years. And there has been a lot to see.

Piper is the only living creature that has actually seen me, all of me, for exactly who I am.

Ten months after I took her in as a foster fail and quickly thereafter adopted her, the world shut down due to Covid-19. I pivoted to working from home, and then eventually left the corporate workforce entirely. For nearly seven years, I have been by her side for almost every moment of every day. Not occasionally. Not most days. Almost every single one.

We became each other’s whole world. And for a long time, that was more than enough. She became safety for me while the external world became increasingly unsafe.

Piper was there for the 40,000 miles — between the Midwest and West, on repeat. She moved from her first home with me in a condo in downtown Chicago, to a cabin on a ravine in Michigan, to a townhome in Taos — before returning to Chicago. And now, Denver.

She apprehensively takes each step with me as I pack our bags, her bed and food, from the endless Airbnb’s where I’d unload and reload the trunk of the car while she hyperventilates in the backseat, anxious, loyal, always watching me.

She patiently waited for me, alone on the side of a 4 lane highway while I came to consciousness in the passenger seat of my own car, after being in a car accident that totaled my first car. She licked the salt off my cheeks when I cried alone in yet another unfamiliar place with no one else to help me problem-solve the myriad of moving pieces of a life that felt like it was constantly slipping through my fingers.

She snuggled in extra tight when she somehow knew — the way dogs just know — that I was barely holding on. She showed up for me in the most primal, uncomplicated way. No conditions. No agenda. Simply an unjudging presence.

Piper was the first living creature to ever really show me what unconditional love felt like. Not love that was transactional — or required me to shrink or perform — or earn it back every few weeks. Just love. Steady and warm and right there. Always right there.

So I poured into her everything I had been pouring into people who couldn’t receive it fairly. All of the tending, the pleasing, the endless accommodating — when I finally learned to stop giving that to people who took it without reciprocating, I redirected all I had to offer into my sweet, 35 pound dog. She became the safe place I never quite had. The one I had been endlessly searching for. My security blanket. My safety net. My soul dog.

But here’s what I’m only now beginning to reckon with: somewhere in all of that love, I stopped tending to myself.

The guilt I carry about Piper is not normal dog-owner guilt. It is deep, physiological, all-consuming. Every day is organized around her walk schedule. Travel no longer happens because I can’t imagine leaving her with a stranger. My Oura ring tracks a stress spike the moment I start getting her ready for a walk, or really make any movement at all, because she goes on to high alert. Her eyes follow my every move. Every. Single. Move. Her ears attune to any shift I make. Even a change in breath.

This sense of constantly being watched is taxing. Like I have lost my own freedom, in my own home.

And leaving the house without her? The guilt of that is almost unbearable. Not for hours. For a minute. Taking the trash to the bin and back, less than sixty seconds, and I feel the tension in my chest. This sense of guilt that I’ve abandoned her, bubbling within. Like I owe her my constant presence in exchange for everything she’s given me.

This is my own trauma response dressed up as love.

What I’m slowly starting to understand is that Piper has been a mirror this whole time.

She showed me I was capable of being loved without conditions. I clung to that so tightly that I forgot to turn it inward. I learned what unconditional love looked like, but I didn’t learn to give it to myself. Instead, I transferred all of my old patterns — the over-giving, self-abandonment, need to feel needed — into the one relationship where I finally felt safe doing it.

I created a dog who thinks she is a human. But maybe I created a dynamic that kept me from having to be fully human myself. Because being her whole world meant I didn’t have to face how much I had retreated from my own.

Now she is slowing down. Less playful. Clingier. And I feel it too — those small flickers of exhaustion. Of something that almost feels like resentment, and then the guilt that crashes in immediately after, because how could I ever feel that toward her? She has given me everything. But the exhaustion is real and it is allowed to be real. Feeling it doesn’t make me a bad person. It makes me human.

I am a living person who needs to re-integrate into the world.

Not abandon her. Not love her less.

But remember that I am also here. That I am alive, right now, in this moment, and that also am a human whose needs deserve to be placed on the same list as hers.

I am allowed to leave the house, even when she is sad and giving me her dopey eyed look. I am allowed to travel again, to rebuild a life that exists beyond these four walls, as long as she is cared for by someone kind. I am allowed to want more — more connection, more presence in the world, more of a life I actually recognize.

Piper will always be my soul dog. She cracked something open in me that I didn’t know was sealed off. She loved me when I didn’t know I deserved to receive love.

But part of honoring what she taught me is finally learning to extend some of that love to myself.

That’s my work now. Not leaving her behind. Just finally, gently, bringing myself along and letting myself slowly come back to life again.