Emotional Leadership

                When working with clients that have reactive dogs, I almost always tell them up front that a reactive dog creates a reactive handler. Once someone sees a traumatic reaction from their dog, they too are traumatized by that reaction. Let’s be fair, a dog that reacts with any type of aggressive display is scary and startling the first time you see it. This emotion is magnified by the fact that the handler is now feeling responsible for their dogs behavior.

 More often than not the handler has no clue how to deal with the dogs behavior, so now a feeling of helplessness and confusion are added to every reaction moving forward. The dogs reactions get more frequent and more intense and last longer because the handlers emotions are now leading to confusion, helplessness and often borderline, if not outright, panic. The handler is responding to how they felt the first time their dog reacted. Now when they see the trigger for the dog, they begin to lead the emotional rollercoaster down the path of reactivity.

This cycle if continued only escalates the instability of the handler and the dog. However, if the handler learns to choose the emotions to lead with, the picture can and often does completely change.

Often, just like the dog, the handler is not even aware of their own emotions when they see the dogs trigger. So, it is important for them to consciously recognize when they are starting down an emotional path and interrupt that path with controlling the situation, to go towards calm and purposeful management and then training. The handler must be 100% comfortable with the situation or they can’t lead. This often means lowering the stimulus to a level the owner can manage. Once they are comfortable and able to calmly control the situation the stimulus can be increased. The result over time is a purposeful choice of emotional leadership leads to the dog following that lead and gaining more purposeful control over their own emotions, reducing and eliminating reactivity.

This is a very small view into emotional leadership for reactive dogs. I was motivated to write this due to seeing another trainer had written about the same subject and thought it important for me to share my perspective and how I apply it to reactive dogs.