Cat lady

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Dear Philippa
I am aware this all sounds excessive but - after you answered a dog-related question recently, here’s my own animal-related one. I think I have a co-dependent relationship with my cat. I am constantly anxious about her and sort of hypervigilant. If she goes into the garden I check through the windows that she’s not being menaced by neighbourhood cats and I stand ready with water sprays etc to see them off. If I have to give her meds, I myself feel sick. Taking her to the vet is a horror show of anticipation, guilt and misery for me, because she hates it. I got this cat a matter of weeks before my mother (for whom I did the bulk of the caring) died from a years-long and horrible illness. I have worked out so far that the vet visits equate somehow to the literal ‘horror show’ of eventually deceiving my cognitively severely impaired mother and ‘putting’ her into a care home which was at the time the only option and actually turned out to have been the correct course of action. During the period of my mother’s illness, family estrangements developed which have basically continued, though are no longer ‘active’ if that makes sense. I just have a drastically reduced contact with family. I don’t have a partner and live alone, so feel as if this dearly beloved cat is all my responsibility and as if I have to wait fearfully for the next anticipated painful thing to happen - but I am not truly sure what that is. The ACTUAL cat is a cheerful independent healthy being, and a normal cat in every respect . My imagined ‘shadow cat’ is vulnerable, fragile and on the brink of disaster at all times! This situation feels inordinately painful sometimes, it REALLY does. It stops me enjoying my lovely pet properly and I long to get some better perspectives and a better plan of dealing with the situation - I can’t be looking out of the window all day trying to avert disaster, and - when not doing that - worrying obsessively about her! I do talk to friends about it but feel the problem is too ‘minor’ for me to be really honest about how upset it can make me.

My reply

A useful phrase in your email is “shadow cat”. There is your actual cat, who sounds perfectly capable of being a cat, and there is the other cat who exists in your imagination and needs you permanently stationed at the window with a water pistol.

I think what’s happening is that after years of caring for your mother, your mind has forgotten how to come off duty. You really did have someone vulnerable to watch over, terrible things really did happen, and you had to make decisions for someone you loved that caused you pain even when they were the right decisions. Then your mother died, but the vigilance didn’t die with her.

It seems the love, responsibility and fear that had nowhere to go attached itself to the cat.

Sometimes loving someone means doing something they hate because we know it is necessary. You had to do that with your mother and now, on a much smaller scale, you do it with the cat when you take her to the vet.

I think the work is to notice when you are responding to the actual cat and when you are responding to the shadow cat. When she goes outside, you might say to yourself, “There goes the actual cat.” Then see if you can leave her to get on with the important business of sniffing things, staring at walls, catching mice and negotiating with the neighbours without turning her into “shadow cat”.

And please don’t dismiss this as too minor to talk about. You aren’t just talking about a cat. You are talking about grief, responsibility, guilt, loss and what happens to us after we have spent years waiting for the next terrible thing to happen.

And, in case you think you are the only person who has gone a bit mad over a cat, I am attaching something I wrote eight years ago about my own relationship with Kevin, my cat. At one point my husband observed that my mental health depended on knowing where the cat was. So I am writing to you as a fellow sufferer rather than from any great height of psychological superiority.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/mar/04/i-have-a-loving-husband-and-thought-i-was-secure-then-a-cat-came-into-my-life-philippa-perry

Perhaps both of us have had to learn that loving a cat also means tolerating the fact that they are separate creatures who have no intention of organising their lives around our anxiety.

Your cat’s job now isn’t to give you somebody else to keep alive. Perhaps she can teach you something about loving another creature without having to control what happens to her. You won’t be able to protect her from everything, any more than any of us can protect anyone we love from everything. The challenge may be to love her while allowing both of you a bit more freedom.

And as a P.S. to that article Kevin is alive and well 8 years later and hasn’t got into any scrapes lately. Famous last words!

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