Completed Chapters:
1. Finding Your Inner Dog: changing your perspective changes everything
2. DNA Rules Us All: we are who we are as a result of our DNA
3.The Three Temperamental Types: easy, difficult and slow-to-warm-up
4. Life Is A Bell-Shaped Curve: the bell curve illustrates how a small percentage of us have blessed lives and a small percentage of us have tragic lives while the majority of us (dogs and people) have a more equal mix of good and bad in our lives (i.e.-we’re average)
5. Most of Us are Mutts (That’s a good thing due to hybrid vigor!): mutts enjoy the best of their parents genetically
6. No One Ever Really Changes: we might as well accept what we can’t change
7. The Concept of A “Good Fit”: some of us go together well and some of us just don’t
8. Handling Difficult Relationships: sometimes we can manage a difficult relationship by creating physical and/or emotional space….other times we need to walk away
9. The Search for Self-Acceptance: learning to love ourselves
10. Hurdles to Acceptance and Peace
11. The More We Resist Something, The More It Persists: in other words, ignoring our problems won’t make them go away
34. Dangerous Dogs/Dangerous People: trusting our instincts and remembering to stay a bit paranoid (this chapter is out of order but it’s so important I wanted to get it out sooner)
Chapters in Progress:
- Self-improvement in spite of our Genetic Blueprint
- Limits to Change and Self-improvement
- What People Do Has Very Little to Do with Us
- We’re More Similar to One Another Than We’re Different
- Choose to Believe That Things Turn Out as They Need to (even if we can’t understand why)
- Biology and Hormones: how they run our lives
- Reproduction: what we’re programmed to do as a species
- Then There’s Love
- Other Addictions: the inescapable need we have to escape the harshness of reality…it could be drugs and alcohol but it could compulsive working, compulsively needing to be needed (to the point we try to rescue and save others), compulsive exercising, compulsive eating, compulsive sexual activity, compulsive sleeping, compulsive cleaning, etc.
- Survival: the root of our anxiety as this includes our fervent desire to not get hurt in any way in our heart, mind, body or soul
- The Need to Always Protect Ourselves (why we naturally want to play it safe)
- Our Need to Believe in a Higher Being (how we cope with all the harshness and cruelty of the world)
- Our Fear of not Being Loved: (or at least not being loved in the way we want to be loved)
- Dealing with the Inherent Sadness of Life: how to carry on in spite of the pain
- Why Life’s a Little Bit Easier When We Think of Ourselves as Dogs!
- What Kind of Dog Am I?
- Working breeds: perfectionists and leaders
- Sporting breeds: extroverts and clowns
- Herding breeds: controllers
- Hounds: loungers
- Terriers: high-energy multitaskers
- Toy breeds: dependent and anxious
- Dangerous dogs: no dog is ever worth someone’s life
- Finding Peace and Making Peace