By Taylor Haire
Baltimore Watchdog Staff Writer
Tess Dyka sat on the outside patio of a Panera Bread restaurant in Waldorf on a recent Thursday afternoon sipping a large iced green tea.
The 22-year-old college student smiled broadly, leaving one with the impression that she has not a care in the world.
But don’t be fooled.
Behind her infectious smile hides the anguish of a 2012 assault that was so brutal it left her with post traumatic stress syndrome and constant thoughts of the tragic event.
While the therapy she sought to cope with the memories of the attack have helped, Dyka has found the most solace in a Labrador mix puppy named Poppy who has been trained to help her with anxiety.
“I felt like, no matter who I told, no one would believe or listen to me,” Dyka said about the attack, the details of which she did not want revealed publicly. “I have anxiety and mood disorders, but Poppy helps calm me down.”
To instill a closer relationship with her service dog, Dyka decided that the best option would be to train Poppy herself with little help from a professional trainer.
A service dog can have many definitions, but Dyka defines it as a miniature pony or dog that is trained to help with a specific disability. Each service dog knows what to do to help relieve or lessen the effects of the disability in their own individual ways.
“You don’t necessarily have to be a professional in order to train dogs,” Dyka said. “I’m not professional, but I’ve been training Poppy since she was nine weeks old.”
“More people are deciding to train their service dogs because they’re more involved in the process,” said Amanda Kreig, a professional dog trainer at the “Happy Active Dog” training facility in La Plata, Maryland. “I think it benefits the owner because it creates a better connection and bond between the two.”
Dyka rescued Poppy from a facility in 2013 when the puppy was only nine weeks old. She has been training Poppy to be the perfect service dog ever since.
Kreig helped Dyka with the training process for Poppy by teaching her the basics of how to train a service dog. Kreigalso encouraged Poppy to interact with other service dogs and people so that she would be more social.
With the help of Kreig, Dyka began to realize that being a service dog trainer might be a little harder than she thought.
“The training process is hard to begin with, because she was just a normal dog,” Dyka said. “Poppy was very active and curious, so I had to start off with basic steps in order to train her.”
When Dyka first started the training process in late 2013, Poppy went through a fear stage in which she didn’t want to be around or near anyone. Dyka began to take baby steps when it came to training Poppy and started with obedience.
After the obedience stage, Dyke introduced Poppy to public access.
“You see dogs go into stores like PetSmart and act crazy because they get overly excited,” Dyka said. “Now, imagine that same excitement in an actual grocery store.”
It was important to introduce Poppy to public environments so she could get accustom to the “real world.”
Dyka began taking Poppy everywhere with her, including shopping malls, parks and grocery stores.
After becoming familiar with the world of humans, Dyka trained Poppy further to accommodate her (Dyka) with the recovery of PTSD.
Dyka has trained Poppy to do deep pressure therapy, which allows Poppy to sense when Dyka is about to have an anxiety attack and then take action to prevent it. The dog does this by climbing on Dyka’s lap and applying pressure to the body to calm her down.
“Poppy has helped her [Dyka] a lot,” said Mary Gentile, Dyka’s therapist. “He’s been a reducer for stress. He also calms and soothes her.”
“He is helping to heal her by decreasing her anxiety by interacting with her. He’s like her personal assistant,” Gentile added.
But Dyka soon began to realize that being too dependent on a service dog may not always be good.
“I use to take her [Poppy] everywhere with me,” Dyka said. “But I realized that I could go places without her and be okay. I didn’t want to be too dependent on her because anything could happen to her. And if I was dependent on her, and something did happen, what would I do without her?”
Dyka’s tragedy of being assaulted became the root of why she decided to get back into school.
Dyka attends the College of Southern Maryland where she is majoring in psychology and is scheduled to graduate with her associate’s degree in the summer of 2016.
Dyka plans to transfer to Temple University where she will obtain her bachelor’s degree in psychology to pursue her career as a social worker or therapist.
“I want my voice and [people who suffer from mental illnesses] voices to be heard and I want people to know that they’re not alone when traumatic things happen to them,” Dyka said in explaining why she wants to be a therapist.
While Dyka describes being a service dog trainer as something she wanted to do to gain a more emotional connection with her service dog, she enjoys the good and the bad sides of things.
“I found myself in a bad place after I was assaulted,” Dyka said. “I wasn’t being myself or acting myself.”
As a result, Dyka began to let people into her life that caused her harm. But since then, she has grown from every obstacle.
Dyka now realizes that she has to take action if she ever wanted to stop letting the things that she’s been through control her.
“It’s a process,” Dyka said. “But I’ve never felt freer.”