People need emotional support at all stages of life, from infancy to old age. A caring presence makes happy times happier and sad times bearable. The more we learn about dogs, the more we understand that their emotional needs are no different from ours.
Circle of Security International promotes responsive parenting for human children. These parenting principles also apply to raising self-regulated, securely attached dogs. Dogs need the caring presence and consistent advocacy of a person they trust to keep them safe.
There's so much emphasis today on dogs providing emotional support to people. But it goes both ways. A caregiver's role is to be emotionally available so that dogs feel your compassionate presence and unconditional acceptance.
Accepting emotional needs lets you provide the comfort your dog requires so they can safely calm their stress behaviors. The Circle of Security calls this emotional availability "Being With."
"Walk beside me and be the real friend I need." Celtic Song
Your dog's overarousal can indeed trigger your anxiety. Maybe you feel guilt, shame, or embarrassment when your dog overreacts. If only the dog would calm down, you wouldn't feel so judged and alone.
Your dog feels afraid and alone, too. Overarousal is how they desperately ask for your unconditional presence to comfort them and help them feel safe again. When you heal your dog's anxiety, you also heal your own.
Misunderstanding your dog's need for relief has unfortunate ripple effects.
If a stressed dog is misjudged, punished, or dismissed, they don't blame the person who misjudges them. Instead, they feel isolated from care and comfort. They lose self-confidence and grow even more desperate to find safety.
If fight or flight are impossible, they lose hope that their needs will be acknowledged, and then dogs can fall into a state of tonic immobility and simply give up. A dangerous, yet frequent, mistake is misreading the dog's hopeless stillness as calm.
It starts by caring for your dog with love and kindness. However, for a chronically anxious dog, love alone isn't enough to restore their resilience. Caregivers must be ready to take brave action based on the right knowledge.
🌿Fluency in canine body language prevents miscommunication. Mastering the nuances and subtle details of a language without words takes time and attention.
🌿Recognizing the emotional root cause of your dog's hyperarousal changes how you respond. A common mistake is assuming that dogs can be trained to control stress behaviors when those behaviors are part of the autonomic nervous system. Fight or flight isn't a choice; it's an automatic survival response.
🌿Right actions are expressed as attunement, the mindset that governs your response to your dog's changing emotional state. Attunement is a process characterized by unattached listening and unconditional presence.
🌿Unattached listening is open-minded and independent of assumptions or beliefs. It asks questions and isn't attached to the answers.
🌿Unconditional presence is "being with" and quietly "walking beside" with compassion without directions or instructions, only acceptance.
Grow more fluent in your dog's native language:
Webinar Tutorial: Awaken Fluency in Canine Body Language
Responses