Have you ever noticed those times you are consumed by a problem, so focused on finding a solution, that you’re ready to tear your own hair out - that it’s often not until a break to grab food, or put the kids to bed, or run an errand, that you stumble across a solution?
How about when the conveyor belt of life has you running from one thing to the next and you feel yourself losing perspective? How do you get it back, regroup, and come back again refreshed and ready to try again?
There’s a reason it’s called getting away from it all.
I recently had the opportunity to take a similar break myself, getting away from it all at a family house in the mountains of Pennsylvania. While there I hiked, relaxed with a friend, read stories, ate junk food, and watched the dogs play in the cooling September water. All told, I accomplished very little. That was the point. When I came back, I was able to jump back into my day-to-day with better energy and clarity, because I had what I needed.
Distance.
When I talk about training, I often will tell clients distance is their best friend.
Is your dog overly excited? Distance.
Reactive? Distance.
Fearful? Distance
Aggressive? OH YES DISTANCE.
The crux of the matter here is that regardless of the form it takes, if your dog is being overwhelmed by their emotions, the answer is to give them distance. Just like we occasionally need to step back to regain our footing, our temper, our composure , our dogs need that too. They need us to build it into our training plan, to make providing distance part of the protocol when they struggle, and shrinking it part of the criteria on the journey to success.
There’s often push back when I suggest this - the idea being that it is somehow encouraging a bad reaction to give your dog space, that they’ll never learn to cope with whatever reality of life is a struggle to them if we offer them this escape. But it’s not so different from the grace we grant ourselves, and it doesn’t mean we stop challenging them, or us. But when you are overcome, overwhelmed, overstimulated - you don’t learn. Our dogs aren’t learning when they are having an intense reaction to stimuli. They aren’t learning when they are barking and lunging and generally losing their minds at the end of their leash. They need our help in that moment, help to escape and to focus on something else. Distance gives you that. From a distance, your dog can concentrate again, can focus on you and your cues and training, and you can plan on how to start closing that distance gradually and incrementally, how to avoid asking too much of them at once.
Embrace the getaway and get distance from the problem - that’s where you solve it from.
