It’s been a dog-focused kind of month in our home, with our two geriatric canine companions showing their age in ways that are making us a bit sad. Because they’re on my mind, here I am again with a dog story. Thanks for bearing with me…and the prize, when you keep reading, is a handy little tip for more effective conflict resolution.

Luigi is our little guy in his middle teen years.

Luigi was a finicky eater from the start of his life with us. Some days, he turned his nose up at his dog food entirely, even with the premium foods we offered. He’d sniff his food and walk away. He also earned the nickname Vomitar early on, due to his penchant for the periodic little bile upchucks that we came to understand were part of Life with Lu.

Then, about five years ago, he developed partial seizures. Trips down to Tufts’ Foster Hospital for Small Animals and several shockingly pricey MRIs later, he was prescribed potassium bromide to control the unexplained events. Suddenly our lively, mountain-climbing little dog was a groggy, fattening pile of snoring fur. And while the seizures were a bit more infrequent, they were by no means gone.

After a year of drugging him into a stupor, we decided to try something drastic: We took him off the medication and began making all his food from scratch (Time out for a disclaimer: Don’t take this story as advice to take your pet of medicatons. Consult with your vet to make the best choices for your own pet’s circumstances and health). I did a lot of research beforehand to make sure I knew what not to feed him and what kinds of foods would serve his little shih tzu biology. I began to control everything he ate. Several amazing things happened:

He became our bright-eyed, energetic little dog again. He was delighted to eat his food. And his seizures went away but for one to two times a year (compared to one to two times per week). Vomitar pretty much retired as well. And the itchy skin, occasional ear infections and gooky eyes that are not uncommon to his breed also cleared up. Gone.

Our vet was was pretty interested in our experience and told us he was seeing more and more dogs with unexplained seizures. He had begun to wonder if even the high-grade commercial foods were part of the reason. He also suggested that the bile upchucks, itchy skin, ear and eye problems, along with his finicky eating, may well have been caused by the various commercial dog foods we had been giving him and which the vet himself sold. Said our vet, “The dog food probably made him feel sick. Maybe he knew it was making him sick and that’s why he didn’t like to eat his meals.”

Luigi wasn’t “finicky.” I realized that viewing Luigi through the lens of “finicky little eater” had probably blinded us to what he’d truly been experiencing. Finicky suggests he was just picky about what he liked and didn’t like. It was the wrong box to put him in. He wasn’t finicky…he was being made sick by the premium dog foods.

I told you this had something to do with conflict resolution, and this is it: When you’re in conflict with someone, it’s common to put them in a box, label the box, and then view much of what they do and say through the label you’ve applied. Maybe you’ve put someone in the Passive Aggressive Box. Or the Manipulative Box. Or the Afraid to Confront Box. Or even the Bad Anger Management Box or Poor Leadership Box. There are tons of boxes you might choose.

And darn, the minute they’re in that box, don’t they just prove that’s the box they belong in. So, you might get pretty confident you’ve used the right box and label. That’s because, in part, what you see depends on what you look for. You’re probably not really as good a mind reader as you imagine.

These boxes have limited value, because no person can be summed up by one big label. When you work from one label, you do them and you a disservice. And sometimes the label creates problems or causes you to miss the really useful opportunities, because you used the wrong one.

What box have you put someone into?

Conflict Zen® by Tammy Lenski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at ConfictZen.Lenski.com.