09/07/2026
Stress signals panic. It's good to teach about body language. It's a must, actually. But don't fall for the hype to be hyper vigilant. You don't need to worry your every move is making your dog stressed and that every walk is going to be a stressful occasion.
There's a practice that says a dog needs 72 hours to decompress after a stressful event. Have you heard of it ? Have you practiced it and has it helped ? Absolutely sometimes our dogs need it especially if they live on a high alert on a daily basis.
But a dog's nervous system is capable of so much more than that and we play a part in a symbiotic relationship.
Your dog feeds off of your nervous system state and we take from our dogs. Albeit we usually reap the benefits of their love and companionship once we're home whereas they absorb our worries and fears.
If you pay close attention to the video, Fly comes over and shakes off because there were people and dogs in the field and he doesn't usually like them to approach us ( hell yes I've contributed to that ). But what that shake off means is that he actually found my closeness calming. My energy fit the bill and what comes out of my mouth shows the state of my being. And that helped. Then I hear a dog owner calling their dog and I panic for a second which you can see in me scratching Fly's neck quite fast. Thankfully I calm the f down and slow down my hand and all ends well.
So what happened is that we were alert, then regrouped and calmed down for a moment, processed what was happening around us. No escalation happened and all was well in the end and we carried on with our walk.
Training reactive dogs has been all about doing or stopping and it's time to bring more processing into it. Our dogs processing their feelings, us processing our feelings. Grounding and recharging and most importantly FLOW.
Life will flow with or without us interfering and if we learn to ride the waves we will even enjoy it.
