Most dog training focuses entirely on the dog. This conversation with Bianca Low Kum takes a different approach and looks at the relationship between the dog’s nervous system and the human’s nervous system.
One of the biggest takeaways is that dogs are not just reacting to the environment. They are constantly reading the person handling them. They don’t need to understand your thoughts to know something is off. They are reading tension, posture, breathing, and movement. If you are tight, bracing, or mentally somewhere else, your dog will pick up on that and start scanning for what might be wrong.
This is where a lot of reactivity loops begin. The dog becomes more vigilant because the human feels tense, and the human becomes more tense because the dog is reacting. Over time, that loop can become the pattern.
We also talked about what regulation actually means, because it’s often misunderstood. Being regulated does not mean being perfectly calm or flat all the time. A healthy nervous system moves in and out of activation. It responds to stress and then comes back down. The problem is not that a dog reacts or that a person feels stress. The problem is when the system stays “on” for too long without recovery.
That’s why so much of the work is not about what you do in the peak of the reaction. It’s about what happens before and after. Supporting the system before it escalates, and helping it come back down afterwards, is what actually builds resilience over time.
Another important piece is the difference between co-regulation and codependency. Co-regulation means you can stay present and grounded while your dog is struggling. You are not shutting down, and you are not getting pulled into their state. Codependency is when you lose that boundary and feel like you are not okay unless your dog is okay. That’s where people start to feel stuck, overwhelmed, and responsible for everything.
And the reality is, a lot of people are not coming to dog training to work on their own nervous system. So part of this work is finding simple, practical entry points. Movement, patterning, and small wins can help both the dog and the human start to shift without needing to label it as something deeper right away.
At the end of the day, the relationship matters. When the human becomes more aware, more present, and more flexible in their own nervous system, the dog often follows.