Self-Help

Are your emotions affecting your dogs?

This section is for those of you who are interested in exploring how your emotions and feelings might be affecting your dogs. I have listed the steps that I take, which might be helpful.

  • Firstly, I started to notice more of what my dogs were doing.  
  • Then I began observing myself as I noticed my dogs. What was I doing, thinking and feeling?
  • In particular, when one of my dogs was doing something that made me feel vulnerable (irritated, angry, guilty, embarrassed, ashamed etc), I paid more attention to what was going on for me at that moment.
  • At first, if the experience was making me feel really bad I would have difficulty acknowledging it to myself, trying to push the discomfort away. I would come up with reasons and excuses.
    • “I will do more training”
    • “He’s a difficult breed”
    • “It’s because she got scared by that car”
    • “Other people need to control their dogs”. 
  • Those narratives might all be true, but I began to notice that I was avoiding things in me that were trying to surface (There’s a great example of this in Why Does Your Dog Hump You).
  • Over time I got better at staying curious and recognising that there was useful information for me.
  • I started to pay more attention to physical sensations in my body. Did I have butterflies in my stomach? Was there a lump in my throat? I think some people are really in tune with what is going on in their body, but for me it didn’t come naturally at first.
  • Of course it’s not always possible to do all this in the moment, depending on what is going on. Often I will reflect on what happened at a later time.
  • I started to notice what thoughts came up, memories, ideas, judgements, anything at all to get a better sense of what was going on in me.
  • I journal the events, recording as much as possible about the experience. Writing these things down helps me to acknowledge and process what the event meant to me.

I have found it amazing to discover what our dogs are picking up from us and what we can learn from them, if we pay attention. Don’t take my word for it though, why don’t you give it a try? More specific examples from my own experience can be found in my blog, under the heading ‘Dogs Picking Up on Human Emotions’.

Happy hunting!