laceflower
New member
@tobialagbe Ooo I should try more white noise stuff. And I did hear some about the diffusers and collars so I might try something that I could spray on her bedding
I’m at my wits end
- Thread starter laceflower
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@laceflower That frustration you feel is what she feels. You’re not an asshole, you’re stressed.
laceflower
New member
@laceflower That's been known to happen. I have to watch my stress level with my boy.
@laceflower You are not an asshole. You are having emotions and you can't control those either!
I am a trainer, and I also have had a good deal of psychotherapy for myself. You don't want to be ACTING mad at her but you can feel mad at her. So it's just about noticing when to take a break or switch to something that's more fun. You are sacrificing a lot of normal stuff that people with normal dogs take for granted. You don't have to feel happy about that all the time. It can be healthy to you let yourself feel the grief of not getting to have those freedoms that others your age do have--even if you have chosen to make that sacrifice to make the best of your situation.
Make sure you spend a little time enjoying your favorite things about your dog every day. If you have ever done mindfulness work, make a mindful appreciation of your dog, even just for a few seconds, a part of your daily life.
And some days, it's enough to just get through the day to the next day.
As far as trainery things, you have some great advice already, and because of the severity of your problem and the slow progress, my first suggestion would be to get her on some meds. With dogs who are so stuck in panic mode, it not only helps their brain calm down enough to actually learn something. If you can get their brain out of fight or flight, they can enjoy life more and be physically healthier. Obviously you are willing to put the training time in and your girl is extremely lucky. With a better-functioning brain you will see so much more progress.
I believe a leaving ritual can really help differentiate the training absences from the unavoidable absences that are basically a guaranteed failure training wise. The ritual can become a promise/predictor of a "tolerable absence." This is probably a little advanced for your pup so far but you can use it once you are ready. You can predict about how long of an absence she can tolerate before losing her cool. So for training sessions and any absence you can be confident you will return before she panics, you turn the lights off, turn on some music like Through a Dog's Ear, maybe put on a Thundershirt (if you have charged it up with pleasant experiences first). Once you get to 15+ minutes you can add a goodbye Kong or something. You very gradually stretch the duration while avoiding failure and taking a couple steps back if she has a setback. For absences where you are pretty sure she will freak out, don't do the ritual. Differentiating the two experiences can help keep the unavoidable fails from wiping out all your training progress.
The other thing I like especially for the early stages of SA is using a remote treat robot like the Treat & Train (introduce this slowly from across the room so the noise becomes an awesome sound and not a scary one, it's loud) and having it deliver the treat into the crate or floor. You can treat from right outside the room or across the room with your back turned. It lets you break down the early steps farther so that first time out of sight or out the house door doesn't also require all the time to get back to the dog before you treat. Especially for food motivated pups it can speed things up a bit. I got a few on eBay and loan them out to clients but they are not that spendy and I use them for lots of stuff for my anxious boys. I even ran one in the back of my car on a road trip to help Disaster Dog learn to cope with unusual sights.
Keep at it. You are doing a kind and generous thing that is incredibly difficult. Be nice to yourself!
I am a trainer, and I also have had a good deal of psychotherapy for myself. You don't want to be ACTING mad at her but you can feel mad at her. So it's just about noticing when to take a break or switch to something that's more fun. You are sacrificing a lot of normal stuff that people with normal dogs take for granted. You don't have to feel happy about that all the time. It can be healthy to you let yourself feel the grief of not getting to have those freedoms that others your age do have--even if you have chosen to make that sacrifice to make the best of your situation.
Make sure you spend a little time enjoying your favorite things about your dog every day. If you have ever done mindfulness work, make a mindful appreciation of your dog, even just for a few seconds, a part of your daily life.
And some days, it's enough to just get through the day to the next day.
As far as trainery things, you have some great advice already, and because of the severity of your problem and the slow progress, my first suggestion would be to get her on some meds. With dogs who are so stuck in panic mode, it not only helps their brain calm down enough to actually learn something. If you can get their brain out of fight or flight, they can enjoy life more and be physically healthier. Obviously you are willing to put the training time in and your girl is extremely lucky. With a better-functioning brain you will see so much more progress.
I believe a leaving ritual can really help differentiate the training absences from the unavoidable absences that are basically a guaranteed failure training wise. The ritual can become a promise/predictor of a "tolerable absence." This is probably a little advanced for your pup so far but you can use it once you are ready. You can predict about how long of an absence she can tolerate before losing her cool. So for training sessions and any absence you can be confident you will return before she panics, you turn the lights off, turn on some music like Through a Dog's Ear, maybe put on a Thundershirt (if you have charged it up with pleasant experiences first). Once you get to 15+ minutes you can add a goodbye Kong or something. You very gradually stretch the duration while avoiding failure and taking a couple steps back if she has a setback. For absences where you are pretty sure she will freak out, don't do the ritual. Differentiating the two experiences can help keep the unavoidable fails from wiping out all your training progress.
The other thing I like especially for the early stages of SA is using a remote treat robot like the Treat & Train (introduce this slowly from across the room so the noise becomes an awesome sound and not a scary one, it's loud) and having it deliver the treat into the crate or floor. You can treat from right outside the room or across the room with your back turned. It lets you break down the early steps farther so that first time out of sight or out the house door doesn't also require all the time to get back to the dog before you treat. Especially for food motivated pups it can speed things up a bit. I got a few on eBay and loan them out to clients but they are not that spendy and I use them for lots of stuff for my anxious boys. I even ran one in the back of my car on a road trip to help Disaster Dog learn to cope with unusual sights.
Keep at it. You are doing a kind and generous thing that is incredibly difficult. Be nice to yourself!
laceflower
New member
@kittyc I needed these words so badly! Thank you. I will need to practice mindfulness.
As for leaving rituals, is this what you mean? —I’ve practiced putting her on place and walking to door, returning, rewarding, then opening door, rewarding for not moving, then leaving, returning, rewarding for not moving, increasing time from seconds to minutes. I have no problem with movement from place, I just don’t reward it when I return. The problem is I haven’t done this in a while because I thought we had advanced to me being able to leave for a few hours on weekdays. I just put her on place, and then hand a treat and leave. She sleeps near door and whines a bit until I’m back. Until today. She lost her shit when I left. I wonder if it’s helping her that I’m acknowledging her and requiring something of her when I leave versus if I were to ignore her (the problem is I can’t really leave this way unless I shut the door on her face). I think I’ll try your kong idea. What do you mean by situations that are unavoidable fails? Is it like if I know I’m going for longer and she’ll definitely get anxious? Or urgent outings? Thank you for these suggestions. You are amazing
As for leaving rituals, is this what you mean? —I’ve practiced putting her on place and walking to door, returning, rewarding, then opening door, rewarding for not moving, then leaving, returning, rewarding for not moving, increasing time from seconds to minutes. I have no problem with movement from place, I just don’t reward it when I return. The problem is I haven’t done this in a while because I thought we had advanced to me being able to leave for a few hours on weekdays. I just put her on place, and then hand a treat and leave. She sleeps near door and whines a bit until I’m back. Until today. She lost her shit when I left. I wonder if it’s helping her that I’m acknowledging her and requiring something of her when I leave versus if I were to ignore her (the problem is I can’t really leave this way unless I shut the door on her face). I think I’ll try your kong idea. What do you mean by situations that are unavoidable fails? Is it like if I know I’m going for longer and she’ll definitely get anxious? Or urgent outings? Thank you for these suggestions. You are amazing
@laceflower First, I have a concern that you are teaching her a stay-ish behavior while you are away, in that you are rewarding stay and not rewarding breaking the stay on her place cue. I worry that a sensitive pup could feel stressed knowing that you want her to stay in her place the whole time and having to decide to break the stay for water or to relax comfortably. Instead, I would suggest you go outside the door, say the release word and toss a treat away from the place, and shut the door. With my clients, we always combine SA work with crate training because it avoids destruction, but if you don't want to use a crate the place and release should work. You can also teach a dog to back up on cue and that could be an alternative for the door rushing. You don't want to train the dog to wait eagerly and intensely for you to come back. You want to train the dog to relax until you come back, hopefully not thinking about you much while you are gone.
So my ritual is to cue the dog to chill out because you'll be back before she can worry. You should not need to do a slow ramp up of time away every time you go. The ritual is to set up a relaxing environment. I use the crate, the music, the lighting, the chew or Kong, etc like a little spa setup. You can do whatever, you just have to do the same steps (preferably in the same order) before you go. You want the things you choose to be mostly a de-escalation of excitement levels. So you aren't making a fuss or doing a bunch of behaviors for high value rewards. But knowing that you turn on her favorite calm music or whatever you choose as your ritual every time you leave on an absence that isn't long enough to be scary will help her predict what will happen. Dogs find routines really reassuring to help them know what's going on and what to expect.
Unavoidable fails are when you have to be gone longer than she can cope with. I assumed you were confining her for those in some way so she didn't wreck your place and/or escape. If she's not that determined, a doggy play pen around the door to create a dog-free vestibule might do it. I advise teaching dogs to keep back from the door in general, but I don't know if that would hold with a SA dog if she's feeling desperate and isn't confined. Do you practice door manners when you enter or when you open doors for her to go through?
The other thing I would note is that both whining and refusal to eat are symptoms of stress and anxiety. So if I got that in a training absence session, that would be a failure and require backing up a few steps in duration difficulty. You want the dog to not have worried feelings to properly desensitize and countercondition alone time. So I suspect you are increasing the difficulty level instead of as the dog feels calm/content at 80-90% success rate, but more as the dog feels stressed and worried but not panicked. So you may be teaching her to barely tolerate your absence instead of be fine with it. So it will be hard to stretch that time any longer because basically it's already being practiced for too long, and any other stressors could easily push her over threshold, including routine disruptions. That sounds to me also like when you would see regression like you are seeing. I would not expect a dog who is calm and comfortable during sessions to regress after going a few days without. For effective counterconditioning you need the dog to start to actually like the thing because it becomes a predictor of something pleasant.
That's another advantage to combining SA work with crate work. With a crate, once you get past going into the crate and then shutting the door, you get a lot of very easy steps of separation while the person is still in sight. The dog should be used to relaxing in the crate and getting to work on a Kong before you are making it as far as the door. You are still separated because the dog can't get to you, but it feels less drastic because you are still in the same room. A stationing behavior doesn't feel as much like separation because there is no barrier at all, so you being outside the closed door is a much bigger step, and the human doesn't get as much practice responding to the dog's stress signals before they lose sight of the dog.
It could be helpful to get her to the point she can work on a chew or Kong while you open the door and shut the door repeatedly, maybe stand in the doorway so she can see you but you are outside, etc, and use her willingness to continue to work on the Kong as your indicator that she is enough under threshold to increase criteria. The longer you can make the Kong last the more practice you can do; you could turn it into a daily meal as part of your routine with some extra tasty bonus goodies to make it special. No additional reinforcers necessary!
So my ritual is to cue the dog to chill out because you'll be back before she can worry. You should not need to do a slow ramp up of time away every time you go. The ritual is to set up a relaxing environment. I use the crate, the music, the lighting, the chew or Kong, etc like a little spa setup. You can do whatever, you just have to do the same steps (preferably in the same order) before you go. You want the things you choose to be mostly a de-escalation of excitement levels. So you aren't making a fuss or doing a bunch of behaviors for high value rewards. But knowing that you turn on her favorite calm music or whatever you choose as your ritual every time you leave on an absence that isn't long enough to be scary will help her predict what will happen. Dogs find routines really reassuring to help them know what's going on and what to expect.
Unavoidable fails are when you have to be gone longer than she can cope with. I assumed you were confining her for those in some way so she didn't wreck your place and/or escape. If she's not that determined, a doggy play pen around the door to create a dog-free vestibule might do it. I advise teaching dogs to keep back from the door in general, but I don't know if that would hold with a SA dog if she's feeling desperate and isn't confined. Do you practice door manners when you enter or when you open doors for her to go through?
The other thing I would note is that both whining and refusal to eat are symptoms of stress and anxiety. So if I got that in a training absence session, that would be a failure and require backing up a few steps in duration difficulty. You want the dog to not have worried feelings to properly desensitize and countercondition alone time. So I suspect you are increasing the difficulty level instead of as the dog feels calm/content at 80-90% success rate, but more as the dog feels stressed and worried but not panicked. So you may be teaching her to barely tolerate your absence instead of be fine with it. So it will be hard to stretch that time any longer because basically it's already being practiced for too long, and any other stressors could easily push her over threshold, including routine disruptions. That sounds to me also like when you would see regression like you are seeing. I would not expect a dog who is calm and comfortable during sessions to regress after going a few days without. For effective counterconditioning you need the dog to start to actually like the thing because it becomes a predictor of something pleasant.
That's another advantage to combining SA work with crate work. With a crate, once you get past going into the crate and then shutting the door, you get a lot of very easy steps of separation while the person is still in sight. The dog should be used to relaxing in the crate and getting to work on a Kong before you are making it as far as the door. You are still separated because the dog can't get to you, but it feels less drastic because you are still in the same room. A stationing behavior doesn't feel as much like separation because there is no barrier at all, so you being outside the closed door is a much bigger step, and the human doesn't get as much practice responding to the dog's stress signals before they lose sight of the dog.
It could be helpful to get her to the point she can work on a chew or Kong while you open the door and shut the door repeatedly, maybe stand in the doorway so she can see you but you are outside, etc, and use her willingness to continue to work on the Kong as your indicator that she is enough under threshold to increase criteria. The longer you can make the Kong last the more practice you can do; you could turn it into a daily meal as part of your routine with some extra tasty bonus goodies to make it special. No additional reinforcers necessary!
laceflower
New member
@kittyc You have a very valid point about stay that I didn’t think too much about before. My main concern is that if I didn’t reward her for staying she’d be squishing her toes by the door or scratching it the moment I was gone. I should try throwing the treat and releasing as I shut the door. Good idea. What if I scatter treats around the living room to keep her busy sniffing? I worry she’ll be too distracted by me leaving to bother with anything but whining by the door but perhaps if I crate her while I hide the treats and she watches and then release I can leave while she’s hunting. I want to build up to crate training when I leave but her anxiety seems heightened in the crate when I leave. She tries to break free. She never stops howling. Do you have any suggestions for that? Should I be letting her watch me leave? Or crate her in a room away from front door?
@laceflower You will need to work the crate time in the same way as the alone time so that it's always less time than it takes for her to feel upset. If she's scratching at the door, whining, howling, trying to get out of the crate, etc she's over threshold and you should be practicing at a duration she can not just barely tolerate but be fine with at a 90+ % success rate. If she gets distracted from food (scent games are fine too, go with whatever is most relaxing for her) by you leaving, you need to be working on walking to the door or opening the door until she is still interested in food while you go through it.
It should not make any difference in the long run whether the house door is in sight or not if she's not regularly going over threshold, because either way she will be used to you coming right back, because you've done enough reps returning immediately in her experience that it's no longer concerning but simply boring. You aren't trying to trick or distract her from knowing that you are leaving, just teach her that it's actually not scary when you do and actually kinda fun because she gets a special Kong.
I like to put crates in a back room if the dogs have stranger danger issues.
It should not make any difference in the long run whether the house door is in sight or not if she's not regularly going over threshold, because either way she will be used to you coming right back, because you've done enough reps returning immediately in her experience that it's no longer concerning but simply boring. You aren't trying to trick or distract her from knowing that you are leaving, just teach her that it's actually not scary when you do and actually kinda fun because she gets a special Kong.
I like to put crates in a back room if the dogs have stranger danger issues.
laceflower
New member
@laceflower Wonderful! I am sending you positive thoughts 
laceflower
New member
@kittyc Oh ignore my last comment! I’m responding to your words as I’m reading them and you’ve given me just the advice I sought! I’ll keep opening/shutting the door and standing within sight. Her crate doesn’t have direct line of sight to the outside of the house but it does to the area near the door. Ok I’ll try all this, thank u. So much.
laceflower
New member
laceflower
New member
@kittyc Ok so for the unavoidable fails, right now it feels like anything would be one. I can leave for a moment or two before the panic sets in, but I fear she’s just heightened anxiety the moment she hears my keys or the door knob. And desperately tries to leave with me or jump on me or be near the door. Which is why I do the place command. Doesn’t always work.
laceflower
New member
@kittyc I hear you, you’re so right. I think I’m pushing her beyond her comfort too fast. Hence regression. I should perhaps try a high value treat she only gets when I leave her alone? As for the crate, she will eat in it but not play with toys or anything. She just sees it as a place to shut her brain off and sleep. She manages just fine in there when I’m at home, i crate her a bunch to get her used to enjoying her space, but the moment I head for the door it’s sheer panic. Maybe a stuffed kong would help since she’s food motivated. But what if she finishes the konn and then starts freaking out? Or is too distracted to even try the kong? Are there steps between her chilling in the crate while I’m in sight (or in my room) and heading to the door that I’m missing?
@laceflower I already commented elsewhere but damn I just want to say I really relate to you. I literally say the same things to myself. What others are saying is right -- we are humans, just doing our best. We will learn from our mistakes and get better over time!
laceflower
New member
@laceflower Ah I know this feeling all too well. We got our rescue who was over 1 so we figured she'd be passed her puppy stage and be a more manageable dog for first time owners. I was crying from frustration by day 2. She was also reactive and had separation anxiety. I felt all the same things you've described. It took a little over a year before I saw the type of results I was expecting to see in months. We didn't try medication as I really wanted to try without and I've managed to get her anxiety down by figuring out what her comforts are. I leave the radio on 24/7 to fill the silence so if we are away she's comforted by a familiar sound with voices. She didn't care much for the calming dog music. Also I bought a pack of blankets and sleep with them and rotate them in her bed so she always has my scent with her. I've also set aside time daily (an hour long walk but I don't think an hour is necessary) dedicated to training. We also trained her to sleep in her bed in the living room so she experiences time away from us without us actually being gone. I think really she just needed time to understand that she's with us now for life and now that its been over two years she can be left alone without much fuss. She's still reactive but giving her a consistent atmosphere in the home without it necessarily revolving around time has been really helpful. I hope you get the help you need and that your situation improves soon!! You got this!! Also kisses and treats do wonders for anger apologies!! You aren't perfect and shouldn't be expected to be so show yourself some compassion! You are learning just as much as your pup!
laceflower
New member
@laceflower Also have a look at the Toby project on Instagram, really helped me and my dog.