Self-Help

Are your emotions affecting your dogs?

If you want to explore how your emotions and feelings might be affecting your dogs you can try out the approach below.

  • Try to notice more of what your dog is doing.  
  • Get into the habit of observing yourself as you notice your dog. What are you doing, thinking and feeling?
  • If your dog is doing something that makes you feel vulnerable (irritated, angry, guilty, embarrassed, ashamed etc), pay attention to what is going on for you at that moment.
  • If the experience is making you feel really bad you might find difficulty acknowledging it to yourself. When this happens to me I can find myself trying to push the discomfort away, coming 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 (I write about an example of this from my own experience in Why Does Your Dog Hump You). You may find this too.
  • Try to stay curious with how you are reacting, is there any useful information for you?
  • Notice any physical sensations in you body. Do you have butterflies in your stomach? A lump in your 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. You might have to reflect on what happened at a later time.
  • Any thoughts that come up, memories, ideas, judgements, anything at all to get a better sense of what was going on in are helpful to notice.
  • I have found journalling these events, recording as much as possible about the experience can be helpful.
  • And be kind to yourself.

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!