There are days when life feels hopeless. But the feeling of hopelessness and factual hopelessness are not necessarily the same thing.

My dog Beau’s separation anxiety is a fact: A clinical medical condition. It took a few years of desensitization training and medication for him to feel calm staying home solo.

There were many days when his condition felt hopeless. In the beginning, he couldn’t tolerate three seconds alone without a full-blown panic attack: barking, hyperventilating, and self-destructive behaviors. A behavioral trainer told me there was hope: I could change Beau’s mindset and behavior. I could leave home freely.

There wasn’t a definite timeframe for this change, but it could be weeks or months. Over weeks and months, Beau progressed to a few minutes solo and then regressed. We had to begin the desensitization training over. This pattern repeated.

The trainer explained that regressions were a normal part of the process, but when we lost what we worked hard to gain, over and over, I began to feel hopeless. When months of training turned into a year, then two, my feeling of hopelessness grew.

The Dark Days of Hopelessness Don’t Last

Why did I keep going? I asked myself this every time Beau regressed. What was stronger than my hopelessness was a hope-laden bedrock that told me not to give up. When a vet told me Beau would never be a dog who could stay home for four hours, I felt defiant. How did she know? And yet she was the expert, so perhaps I was in denial. Perhaps I should have accepted the truth as the vet presented it.

But there were factors other than Beau’s medical condition; he was attacked at his daycare and then on the street. We lived in a part of the city where police sirens circled our neighborhood dozens of times a day, and where stepping outside into the bombardment of scooters, skateboarders, and gang violence scared Beau. I told myself these factors, and not the facts of his condition, were what caused problems for his progress.

As a human being with complex PTSD, I understood how difficult changing a habit rooted in survival panic could be. At the same time, I debated whether I was a good dog parent. Maybe Beau would’ve lived a happier life with somebody else. Maybe he wouldn’t be so anxious. I spun a story that I was the problem.

Change the Story

The stories we tell ourselves can cause more harm than good. Many times, such stories are filled with assumptions, biases, and the past. For me, the story was rooted in what I’d gleaned as a child growing up in an abusive home: I didn’t deserve love. I didn’t deserve a dog. And if I dared to defy this decree, I’d be punished. The fact was, I’d ended up with a special dog, one who had special needs.

Four years later, Beau stayed home for four hours, relaxing. The vet’s prognosis for Beau hadn’t been a fact, only a hopeless opinion.

Setbacks Aren’t Endings

Recently, we moved. Within three weeks, we made our way to a one-hour solo time, something that previously took years to attain. And then, suddenly, Beau was unable to tolerate five minutes alone. He rushed the door, then barked when I left, and escalated to hyperventilation. It had been two years since his last regression.

I’d thought he was cured. Now, I thought my hopefulness had been hubris.

I wracked my brain for a reason for the regression: Was it the landlady’s intrusions with workmen that caused his anxiety to resurge? Or the smoke alarms malfunctioning?

I was housebound again and devastated. Instead of thinking of the setback as temporary, I assumed it was forever.

A cognitive bias is an error in thinking that affects how we perceive situations. We might think of a bias as the “story” we tell ourselves about an interaction, an event, or a person; we rely upon our “story” as “fact,” which can lead us down a path of unnecessary suffering.

Finding myself a prisoner to Beau’s separation anxiety again, I assessed my new situation based on a past scenario: I’d been wrong to think I could cure Beau of his separation anxiety. I drew upon an old childhood belief: if I tried to leave that terrible home, bad things would happen. Leaving, like staying, was hopeless.

Last night, I wept over my dinner plate. Unable to eat, I told myself to face the fact: my fate was to be trapped with this terrible anxiety. How dare I think differently? The fact was, I felt hopeless. But feelings aren’t permanent. And making an assumption about the future based upon a feeling or a bias doesn’t change the future, or the present, or the past—it only creates suffering.

I didn’t know how Beau would do the next day or after. I had a choice: to assume he would do poorly or to believe in other possibilities. The fact was, nothing about the future was yet a fact.

Choose to Think Differently

When you find yourself trapped in a hopeless loop, there are practical things you can do to cultivate relief: breathwork, cognitive reframing, and pleasure-seeking activities.

I knew today that I wasn’t going anywhere by myself, so I put Beau in the car and drove us to his favorite place, a peninsula with rolling hills and the Massachusetts Bay. We hadn’t gone there in more than eight months; back in the day of Beau’s severest separation anxiety, we used to go weekly, and then, perhaps a coincidence or perhaps as a result, his anxiety eased. Today, when we were a few blocks from our destination, Beau stuck his head out the window and squealed. For the next hour, we forgot about everything. We immersed ourselves in this beautiful place, where joy prevailed.

The next time hopelessness prevails, call upon doggedness to be your beacon.