Blog — Holistic Healing

  Everything for me in the world of canine somatics is boiling down to one thing: Emotional Capacity. Reactivity is a lack of capacity to deal with outside stressors. Instead of trying to fix, correct, punish, or suppress the symptoms of reactivity, we can go straight to the heart of the issue which is capacity. Increasing emotional capacity goes hand in hand with autonomic flexibility and higher thresholds. Difficulty in learning or retaining information is: A lack of capacity. We can think of your dog's emotional and cognitive bandwidth being cluttered and confused with too much noise/stress. It leaves little...

The Sleep/Stress Cycle The often overlooked issue of getting enough quality sleep could be the missing key to regulating your dog's nervous system. As many of us have experienced at some point in our lives, it's difficult to get the proper quality and quantity of sleep when we are chronically stressed. And so we sometimes get "trapped" in a cycle where stress keeps us from sleeping, and then lack of sleep keeps us in a state of stress. This is why it is so important to focus on our dog's and our own healthy sleep habits.  Getting into a state...

  When the Student is Ready, the Teacher Appears Does your dog push your buttons? Do you ever feel an exaggerated reaction to your dog's behavior? Downright triggered? Your most uncomfortable emotions can be activated and mirrored by your dog. Your shadow self might be unconsciously projected into your dog. Your unhealed inner child. Your refusal to accept the truth or the reality of your current situation. One of the simplest practices (not necessarily easy, but straightforward) is to write your dog a letter of gratitude. This can help you process the emotions coming up around your dog's behavior. This...

Expressing Sympathetic Arousal with Resistance Feeding and Tug-of-War “In the intensity of sympathetic mobilization your clients are looking for an organized way to use and safely discharge their energy. “    --Deb Dana, Polyvagal Exercises for Safety and Connection   Resistance Feeding:   Allows the dog to express the “surge” of energy resulting from sympathetic arousal Dog pushes into the handler to discharge sympathetic energy of fight/flight/hunt Constructive way to channel fear, reactivity, fight drive, and even hunting instincts       Tug-of-War:   Uses the dog’s natural instinct to bite in a playful way that regulates the dog and...

  The only way to truly re-wire your dog's brain involves activating old memories and then re-configuring them. This means that if you shelter your dog in a bubble of "safety" and always DISTRACT them from triggers, you may be successful at keeping them under threshold... but the underlying emotions and reactivity programs in your dogs brain are not changing.   Of course, it does help to initially interrupt the rehearsal of reactive and aggressive behaviors. But eventually, you must TRIGGER the dog and then re-pattern their behavior with careful titration and training. When old memories are activated, you have...