Facing our fears
- Apr 6, 2025
- 3 min read
At this day I had a special plan for Seraphina but I could only manage to do it later and since I didn’t want her to be tired for my plan I decided to only play with her for a short time.
It was a very nice workout (also for me 😂) and I was really proud of her.
The reason why the toy session was the better option for the morning is the energy management that we have to pay attention to.
On a physical workout (at this stage) she doesn’t have to use her mind so she gets tired from running but her mind can still work afterwards, whereas with food - she is forced to think more, as we are learning new moves and assignments.
So once the session was done and she was a little bit tired I could let her rest and charge her battery while I went to a meeting.
When I came back from my meeting it was time to execute my plan; facing our fears in the street.
We went outside and walked for a couple of minutes until we reached a spot in the street where she has enough space from the road and people if she needs it, but also she still has to notice what’s going on.
For this walk I took a “pate” with me so I’ll have a super high value of treat to reward her with and create a strong positive memory from the walk and the environment.
After stopping I started with the reinforce and release exercise to get her into the mood and from that point it was all about rewarding for communication with the environment. For the long term, of course my goal is that she will be indifferent about anything happening around her so nothing would be able to disturb her while we do something together but at this point I am more interested in making sure there is nothing in the world that can threaten her so that she can stay out of survival mode.
The thing is, that when the dog is going into survival mode he is experiencing a higher level of stress so it’s also affecting his physical condition after a while and more important to me than her ability to work is that she will be able to live a calm life with confidence in everything that happens around her or to her.
Once I saw that she is improving with the noises but not changing her emotion about it I understood it is time for some classical conditioning - you see something equals I reward you. This way she can learn that any distraction is first of all a positive thing and not something to be afraid of.
When she was calm enough to go and pee, I was so happy because it means she really was lowering her stress from the environment.
Of course there is still a long way to go with it, but already her progress is incredible in my opinion!
For the rest of the day we didn’t do anything else because I felt her mind was already overwhelmed with what we did earlier and as much as I enjoy training with her her needs are the most important, and she needed to rest as long as she could.