“This might be about as fun as watching grass grow,” I cautioned my friend, laughing.
We were sitting in her living room–the two of us, plus her husband and son and their beautiful dog.
I was there because all was not well with the pack. Her dog, whom I’ll call Light (not his real name) had recently bitten her husband. This was not the first bite and everyone was getting frustrated.
I’ll be honest. When I first started training dogs, I thought dog bites were serious offenses. If you had a dog who had bitten someone more than once, it was a crisis situation. You had a hard case.
I still take dog bites very seriously, but I don’t see them the same way. When a dog bites a human, it’s simply communication–and if the dog has gone all the way to using his teeth, it’s a good bet much prior communication from the dog has been ignored or misunderstood.
When I show up in someone’s home for a psychic dog training session, the first thing I do is start tuning in to the dog. Why are they showing that behavior? What lies beneath?
Even experienced dog owners can misidentify and mislabel their dog’s energy. Is that behavior anxiety? Excitement? Fear? And what is causing it?
As I sat in my friend’s beautiful home, I listened, I watched, and I tuned in. I slowly started to tease apart the threads of the behaviors that were causing such disharmony.
Light is a complex dog. Very smart, reasonably active, insecure, somewhat fearful, and bored. Light is very much an under-employed dog. Given all that intelligence, boredom, and fear, Light needed a whole handful of changes from his humans. He needed more structure, more leadership, clearer boundaries, and greater empathy. (Empathy is not the same thing as pity, by the way. More about that in a future post.)
You might be reading this and thinking, “Not rocket science, Alix.”
Yes and no. Given Light’s bite history, I might have shown up in that living room and found a dog with much more serious aggression issues. I might have found a dog who was truly terrified. Light is not terrified, by the way. He’s just insecure and sensitive, which is very different.
I spent that afternoon, and the afternoons that followed, using my behavior-shaping tools. We went for walks, we practiced obedience skills, and Light learned to trust me–to touch me and eventually to let me touch him.
In between more ordinary training sessions, I sat on the couch, closed my eyes, and used my psychic skills to understand what was happening and to see what to do next.
Along the way, I explained Light’s behavior to his owners, unearthed a soul contract between Light and his human mom, and was shown the next steps his family could take to overcome the issues and the distrust that had arisen between them.
The work is not done, but it is well-started. I look forward to continuing to work with this pack.
