ABOUT
If you found this page, you're probably trying to decide whether to trust me with something quiet and important.
So here is who I am, what I built, and why — not a résumé, not a story for its own sake. Just enough to know whether the person behind the Desmo Method understands what your life actually looks like at 2 a.m.
NINE YEARS
I've built this through Wilson
Wilson came to me in 2014. He had been rescued from rural streets in terrible condition — we never knew much about his life before. I had tried to adopt before and somehow it had never worked. With him, I knew immediately. He stays. Forever.
By 2015 I knew he was afraid of thunderstorms. I knew his nails had grown into themselves before I got to him. I knew he would bite anyone who came too close. None of this changed the plan. That year we moved to Croatia for a year-long volunteer programme. We didn't believe in impossible.
Then came the diagnoses.
2015
Epilepsy.
2019
Autoimmune disease.
2020
Rheumatoid arthritis.
2021
Episcleritis.
2022
Splenic tumor.
For nine years, I built my life around him. Not as a sacrifice. As love.
Somewhere along the way, though, I realised how easily caring can consume the relationship itself.
There were stretches when I knew Wilson's symptoms better than I knew Wilson. I was managing constantly, worrying constantly, and crying almost every day.
Through those nine years I learned what no vet, no behaviourist, no trainer ever taught me: a dog's chronic illness happens far beyond the clinic. It happens in kitchens, calendars, relationships, bank accounts, workdays, sleepless nights — and inside the person doing the caring.
I asked myself, more than once, whether I was the cause. Whether Wilson would have bitten less, or stayed healthier, with a different person. Whether he was, in some way, absorbing the pain I could not carry myself.
I never fully answered those questions. But asking them led me to a body of work I had already spent twenty years preparing to do.
"Wilson was not a dog I owned. Wilson was a piece of me that walked beside me for nine years."
A FOUNDATION BEFORE WILSON
I came to this work from more than one direction.
My background is in research, writing and building practical systems around complicated human problems.
Long before Wilson became ill, I was interested in how people make sense of difficult situations, how information changes behaviour, and how relationships shape the way we cope.
Caring for Wilson gave those questions a very specific context. Since then, my work has increasingly focused on chronic canine illness, caregiver burden, decision-making, anticipatory grief and the everyday realities surrounding long-term care.
9
y
Caring for Wilson
2014 – 2023
80
+
Long-form guides
Researched and written
for real-life dog care
10
+
Core Workbooks
Turning difficult situations
into something workable
I am not a veterinarian, psychologist or therapist, and I don't present myself as one. My role is to research carefully, make complicated information usable, and build tools for the parts of care that often happen outside professional appointments.
WHAT YOU CAN COUNT ON
A few things I will hold to, for as long as this work exists
No medical advice. Ever.
I genuinely believe that the right practitioner — one who can actually see your dog, examine her, follow them over time — is essential. This is also why I am building a database of holistic canine practitioners: so that every guardian can find the most skilled, most suitable companion for the road they are walking with their dog.
No manufactured urgency.
No countdowns, no scarcity timers, no pressure. The decision to join this work is yours, and there is no right time except your own.
No spiritual framing of pain.
I will not ask you to find a lesson in your dog's illness, or to see her suffering as something that is teaching you. What is hard is allowed to simply be hard. The work I do is not about reframing your pain into something prettier. It is about helping you carry it without breaking under it.
Evidence before certainty.
I distinguish between what research supports, what is still uncertain, and what is experience or interpretation. I don't turn a plausible idea into a fact because it makes a cleaner story.
Useful matters more than impressive.
The goal is not to make complicated subjects sound complicated. It is to leave you with a clearer question, a better decision, or something practical you can actually use.
THE DESMO METHOD
Some of this work became
a method of its own.
Caring for a chronically ill dog changes more than a care schedule. The Desmo Method is where I explore that human side more deeply — caregiver strain, attention, attachment, regulation, grief, and how to make long-term care more sustainable without asking someone to care less.
AT A GLANCE
The essentials
FOUNDER
Fruzsina Moricz · Budapest (Hungary)
BUILT FOR
People living with a chronically ill dog
BUILT THROUGH
Nine years of caring for Wilson, a rescue dog with progressive chronic illness (2014 – 2023)
BUILT ON
Twenty years of body philosophy · fifteen years of natural medicine (TCM, Ayurveda, German healing tradition, herbalism) · background in community arts
SCIENTIFIC FRAMEWORK
Polyvagal theory · attachment research · caregiver burden · decision fatigue · co-regulation · ACT · CBT
FIVE PILLARS
Co-regulation · Attachment · Interoception · Ritual and meaning · Window of tolerance
WHAT IT IS NOT
Veterinary care · medical advice · psychotherapy · training · crisis support
"The immeasurable love that this kind of bond holds
does not have to come with immeasurable pain."
— Fruzsina, Founder of The Desmo Method