Judith Herman, the great pioneer in trauma studies, maintained that healing takes place through relationships. A crucial element in healing is empathy, or being able to take someone else’s perspective. Cognitive empathy (theory of mind) is important, but far more important is emotional empathy—understanding viscerally another person’s feelings and reflecting such understanding. Our well-being generally depends on being seen, recognized, and known, connected to others in this meaningful way. All kinds of connections can be therapeutic in that they foster not only recovery, but well-being in a more general sense. Including those with our nonhuman companions, who certainly offer emotional empathy and have greater cognitive understanding of their people than they are often given credit for.
In My Beloved Monster, Caleb Carr writes of his therapeutic friendship with his cat Masha.
Carr and Masha’s special bond originates in a shared experience of trauma. As a child, Carr endured severe abuse by his father, who pushed him down flights of stairs whenever he got the chance. He believed his father wanted to kill him, and given that he had murdered a man, this wasn’t idle speculation. Masha can’t tell us what happened to her, but Carr knows that she was abandoned and locked up without food, rescued when neighbors heard her crashing against the walls. Carr guesses that people who would leave her alone to die wouldn’t have been squeamish about physical abuse, and one vet finds calcification from a wound that didn’t heal properly. Their friendship helps both recover from their pasts.
Right from the start, Masha connects with Carr, seemingly understanding that he has been a fellow sufferer and offering support. When Carr goes to a shelter looking to adopt a cat, he spots Masha in a cage near the bottom of the floor, and more importantly, he notices that she has been looking at him with intense interest, “one of the most communicative gazes I’d ever seen in a cat.” Although she has given the staff at the shelter nothing but trouble, when Carr begins to talk to her, she puts her paw on top of his hand, “as if we’d known each other quite a long time: an intimate gesture.” The staff insist, “You have to take that cat!”
Throughout their life together, moments of resonance and understanding proliferate, drawing them ever closer to one another in a relationship of friendship and mutual care. A few years into their life together, Carr experiences a sudden searing pain in his right side. He tries to behave normally, but Masha knows something is very wrong, and when he lies down on a couch, she leaps on top of him, looking at him intently. She is not a lap cat, and does this only when she senses something is wrong. She gently puts one paw on his cheek, the same “intimate gesture” she had offered at their first meeting. She lets him know that she will be there for him, offering understanding and comfort.
And Carr reciprocates. One night Masha does not come home, and Carr goes out to search for her, finding her huddled high up on the branch of a tree. Despite his severe physical limitations, he gets a ladder and brings her down, a process that might have gotten them both killed. She is clearly injured. She does not resist when he picks her up and carries her to her crate, conveying a deep sense of trust and a willingness to accept help. No one else could have done this. Carr feels a great tenderness in response: “And out of all that trust flowed the feeling that was tenderness, an emotion removed of any subtext. I could love a cat that way; and at that moment, Masha and I had established a connection that went far enough to be called, in every sense of the word, a Romance.”
Carr doesn’t mean that he has an intimate physical relationship with his cat, a common modern definition of romance. But he does mean that he has a bond with Masha that is as emotionally intimate and fulfilling as any human relationship. Romance might be an odd word choice, but it conveys Carr’s purpose: He wants the world to afford his friendship with Masha the respect and significance that many reserve exclusively for connections with other humans because it was fundamentally, in terms of love and connection, no different. He chooses a human word as a way of conveying the human status of this relationship.
While Carr writes to bear witness to an extraordinary friendship (he wrote Monster after Masha had died and when he knew that he was terminally ill), he also argues for the continuity of abilities between humans and nonhuman animals that made their friendship possible “[I]f we accept that Masha had these intellectual and emotional capabilities, we must accept that all cats have the capacity for them, to greater and lesser extents—exactly like humans.” He is right to be defensive because the scientific community has only recently, in roughly the past 50 years, begun to credit nonhuman animals with abilities formerly believed to be exclusive to humans; the late primatologist Frans de Waal called this attitude “anthropodenial.” The premise of animal-assisted therapy—that animals can help people heal—has been accepted since the 1960s, but the reasons for its efficacy long remained obscure.
Science now supports Carr’s account: He and Masha really did have a loving, therapeutic, mutual bond. Such cross-species bonds are possible; we share basic anatomy and neurology with nonhuman animals, preserved through eons of evolution. This includes the brain areas, neurochemicals, and hormones that mediate social connection, including empathy. Even though the expression of emotion differs among species, learning to interpret the language of feeling is a general capability. If you think your cat loves you, you’re right. She never doubted it for an instant.
