Nurturing A Deep Bond With Your Dog

Daisy
Jul 28, 2022
4 min read

A few years ago I started my own personal healing journey. understanding myself, unlearning toxic habits, becoming trauma informed, developing a sense of self and learning how to love and nurture myself. Out of all of this self work, I have THE most gratitude for how this has deepened my understanding of canine behaviour and my bond with Ralph.

So my first bit of advice is to work on yourself, understand your values, your sense of self and how you operate. We are all work in progress, no one is perfect, nor should they pretend to be, but learning and understanding yourself on a core level is extremely rewarding for you and all of those around you. Secondly, Understanding your dog and their needs and wants. Really look at them as the sentient beings they are. What is their emotional state telling you? journal about it, look at the wider picture around their reactions or behavious. start building an understanding of THEIR sense of self. This is why I say, work on you first, as you will find it much easier to understand how to unpick things and see things from a different perspective once you've done it for yourself.

Once you have spent some time with this, the foundations are being laid for the bond to be built upon.

Next, there's a few things which I'd like you to explore:

1) Consent. Notice, and journal if you can, about what yours and your dog's relationship of consent is like.

I'm talking here about what you make your dog do, which they don't consent to, and when you understand and take their 'No' for an answer. Consent is a large subject and I will probably do another blog topic just about this, but ultimately, its about understanding when your dog behaves in certain ways and what they are trying to communicate with you. So with consent its understanding when they don't want to do something- and how you react.

This is a huge area to build trust. becuase if you dog is clearly saying nope- i'm not getting into the Bath, and you drag them there, they ultimately wont trust you and the pre-bath environment, to be a 'safe place" to be.. they will start hiding when they hear the bath running, or shake with anxiety when they see the shampoo bottle.

Its not about the actual bathing or shampooing- its the fact they know you don't understand them when they say no, so they are anxious because they are being misunderstood espechially in a situation which is based on our needs for them to be clean.

2) Advocate. Its a big buzz word lately and I'm glad. Your dog doesn't like being petted?- Tell people no, she doesn't like attention. A dog bothering you both in the park? communicate appropriately to the owner to take responsibility. Don't let your dog deal with stuff you know they don't like, because you don't like confrontation or don't want to cause a fuss. That 'fuss' you cause can help your anxiety as well as protecting your dog from unnessecary stress. You have an aplty name of Guardian and Owner of your dog. so Guard their wellbeing, take Ownership. You are both a unit together!

3) encourage their unique personality. I don't know if you have ever had someone shut you down when you are in a state of joyus expression? Its not nice- at all. Energetically it is deflating, soul crushing and I don't know about you, but I internalised this as something must be wrong with me, and reverted to I better not do that again. I do believe that dogs feel emotions, albeit not in the same type of structure that ours are arranged- they still have emotions to understand and process.

When we spend time with our dogs- in the present- as in, being with them and our attention focused on them for a long period of time, we can understand their emotional processes. And if we can understand them, we can see how we can nurture and support them. Being present and seeing their core personlity is such a gift. its probably why they came to us in the first place, that cheeky nibble of the shoelace, or that look they gave you when you were trying to get the slipper out of their mouth. Understandably, we do things to keep them safe from harm, but yet we continue that discipline into training, sometimes riggorous obedience. for what? so they can sit by our feet at a coffee table to look good? we need to understand to what detriment the training is being done. Yes for dogs to have a job and purpouse- to express what they are bred for. Yes to keep them safe and to understand our modern world. but i'd like you to think about nurturing their core essence, and this takes a deep understanding of their wants and needs, a comitment to learning their happy place, their favourite thing to do. Test these things, offer variations, let them explore thier needs. Ralph loves tracking... a great way to explore this is to do it on different terrains and different situations, we watch how he works, we encourage him and meet his needs by working as a team with him.

Our dogs are equal to us, they are our pack's.

If you nurture yourself, you nurture your pack.