What happens when neither speaker understands the other's language? What if the languages didn't have words?
If it sounds like a recipe for confusion, that's true, but it could be even worse than that!
Here's why...
All of us mammals, dogs included, have three brains, and each brain has its own language.
- The most advanced brain is the Neocortex, the "newest" or most recently developed. The language of this thinking brain is words, and its job is to learn, reason, decide, and solve problems.
- The Limbic, or mammalian brain, is older by far, and its language is feelings. Its job is to express emotion, attachment, and relationships. A mother nurturing a child is an emotional attachment.
- The Reptilian brain is ancient and is located in the brainstem. Its language is sensations. This brain's job is survival. It senses safety and danger through sensory awareness and instantly reacts by mobilizing the physical body to escape. The survival mechanism overrides thinking and feeling. The mission of the reptilian brain is not to die!
The fight/flight response of the reptilian brain doesn't understand the languages of the emotional brain or the rational brain. It doesn't process words or feelings.
Practically speaking, a dog in a survival fight/flight response does not have the capacity to think or feel. He doesn't have the capacity to process words or emotions.
This is the puzzle piece missing from dog training methods that mix up the languages of the three brains. Anxious, sensitive, or traumatized dogs who are in a chronic state of fight/flight do not have the capacity to understand the rational language of words or the emotional language of feelings.
Their capacity can be restored by showing these dogs how to process their fears without being overwhelmed by them. This process takes time, patience, and understanding.
This can only be achieved by a bottom-up method that helps them process the sensations they experience when they're triggered. Training methods that try to control external behaviors with a top-down method never address the root cause of behavior. These methods achieve compliance without consent.
The language of sensations is intuitive, and anyone can easily empathize with how sensations affect the dog's nervous system because sensations are always affecting the human nervous system. Sensations include temperature, pressure, vibration, sounds, closed-in sensation, openness, and space. The physical body is aware of sensations through the process of neuroception, and we describe sensations in phrases like: butterflies, a lump in the throat, a gut punch, heartbroken, brain fog, tension in the pit of the stomach.
Think of a time when you felt any of those sensations. Would reasoning with words or appealing with emotions bring you relief?
It won't work for dogs either.
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