Family Connections
The sobering statistics are what make Epstein’s contribution to the study critical to defense leaders. Military families will come to his center for assessments before and after a six-week dog training session, and continue the visits for a year to see how long the canine effect lasts.
Each visit, they’ll be filmed doing activities with their children and discussing sources of discord with partners. The videos will be turned over to teams of “coders”—undergrads who Epstein trains to spot every subtle and not-so-subtle sign of positive or negative attitudes and communication.
“With couples, they’ll be looking for, for example, validation and invalidation behavior, verbal and nonverbal,” he says. “One person says something and the other responds, ‘Oh, that’s silly.’ Nonverbal would be rolling of the eyes or looking up at the ceiling when the partner is talking.”
Epstein’s doctoral students, Jennifer Young M.S. ’14 and Shawn Kim M.S. ’15, are responsible for interacting with families and carrying out many of the procedures. He’s been honing the basic protocol for years; his methods to objectively measure domestic dynamics have made him a worldwide leader in couple and family therapy.
The current-events component of the research makes it a bit unusual, Young says, but there’s something else too.
“I want to play with puppies,” she admits.
That’s part of the appeal for Epstein, a dog lover himself. Although the low-key professor’s boisterous Chihuahua and terrier duo bear little resemblance to the large, calm retrievers frequently used as service dogs, he was drawn to the research by curiosity about how canines affect the human psyche.
“When I’m with my dogs, it’s a good feeling, it’s calming, and there’s a strong feeling of connection,” he says.
Clinical studies back up the power of the human-dog connection. A 2015 report by researchers at Azabu University in Japan, for instance, shows that—like new mothers and babies—dogs and humans experience a release of oxytocin, known as the “bonding hormone,” when they gaze into each other’s eyes.
How does bonding with a dog actually help military families experiencing PTSD?
The key to the new study is that the service members won’t just be hanging out with dogs, but actively training them as service dogs, says Dr. Paul Pasquina, a retired Army colonel and the primary investigator for the Big Dog study.
“In the process of learning how to train a dog, they’re engaged in tasks that require concentration, attention, communication skills, picking up on the sensitivities and the difficulty of training a dog,” says Pasquina, chair of the Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at the federal Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda.
Those same skills may also heal families, Epstein says.
“When you have a person who’s startled easily, who’s easily irritated and becomes angry and lashes out frequently—it’s stressful to be around them,” he says. “But working to train a dog, they have to develop empathy and understanding of the dog’s frame of reference. And we think that might generalize to developing empathy and understanding for their children and spouse.”
It had dramatic results for retired Coast Guard Lt. Thomas Faulkenberry, a special operations member who arrived at Walter Reed in 2013 with a battered body and bottled-up emotions after 15 years in the service.
He’d returned from post-Hurricane Katrina rescue operations in New Orleans wracked with anxiety, says his wife, Mary Faulkenberry.
“He was always the life of the party, someone who could make friends with anyone,” she says. “But he came back with a dark cloud over him—cynical, hypervigilant, just changed.”
He began drinking heavily and relying on pain pills for injuries and other physical ailments. His relationship with his wife and four sons was tattered, and suicide was on his mind.
Service dog training was part of his rehabilitation at Walter Reed. When he carried home the methods of positive reinforcement he was instructed to use training dogs, his distant, heavy-handed manner toward his family changed.
“It was almost immediate, and it was a positive impact,” Faulkenberry says. “The training is focused on positive reinforcement… it was ‘fake it until you become it.’ Until you can actually feel that enthusiasm and happiness, that’s how you act.”