Reactive Human Rehabilitation Week 3: Sabotage Every Goal Set in Week 2. (And, yes, this will also apply to your dogs.)

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Ok so here my dogs and I are. We've started our (re) training. I am working on being a less reactive human. My dogs are working on being less psychotic. We've got our books and our YouTube videos. We're feeling hyped about our collective self-improvement even though our accomplishments thus far are:

• 1 week of thinking

• 1 week of attempted training while on break from work

The dogs and I are peacocking, though. We're feeling successful because we've managed 15 ft of loose leash walking. We're thinking we've got something going on here.

Then my husband and I had to go back to our actual real life (not vacation) and our dog training progress fell apart faster than every Ikea dresser I put together during college.

The Reactive Human (me) was supposed to be working on not being big mad at her bosses, and instead immediately crashed out on an assistant superintendent who took away over 50% of the adult only bathrooms in our school and didn't see what the problem was., AND Reactive Human was NOT EVEN SORRY that she had been reactive.

Even though I had been feverishly rereading, highlighting and dog-earing the book Crucial Conversations, nodding along with the points and logically understanding that NOTHING would get done if I alienated the person I needed to solve the problem, I still broke that rule the minute I popped my little head back into work.

One of the many books Reactive Human is using to work on her reactivity.

On top of my biting (biting remarks ha...ha...ha), there were still the dogs to worry about and trying to layer in the training we were doing on a vacation on top of our standard routine was ...idiotic. We quickly reverted to our old routines and habits because that was how we had managed to take care of 4 dogs thus far. We also didn't/don't know what we are doing with training, so we made some basic training mistakes, as well.

Here are some of the mistakes and workarounds from our early attempts at (re) training the reactive family members. Let us know your solutions in the comments below!!!!!!

Mistake # 1: Being in a High Distraction Environment While Trying to Train a New Skill

I am struggling with this one as much as my dogs. My reactivity goal was/is to learn how to communicate with the adults in my building and county without popping off, and in dog training, trainers talk about how you should not try and teach the dogs a new skill while they are in an environment with other things vying for their attention because this is not going to create the type of environment that will help them learn a new skill.

I am struggling because I am trying to learn a new skill WHILE dealing with the normal stressors of being a teacher: always having someone who needs something-usually all at once-usually while I am in the middle of something else. I use every ounce of energy I have trying to have good interactions with my students while under intense attention pressure.

This means I do not have enough mental bandwidth to re-train my brain not to pop off at the adults that I work with when I am really fucking angry. To start practicing a new communication skill, especially one that is hard because I have a big problem with our current leadership and how they treat teachers, is not easy when in this environment.

The exact same is true for the dogs. I followed the advice of trainer Molly Arvin of Pete's Adventure Pack and I started their leash training the middle of a boring parking lot with slip leads or martingale collars. This went a long way in helping the dogs to understand what I wanted them to do, but when we went back to work and back to our normal routine, my husband and I threw on the harnesses, jumped back into our walks in the woods or around our deer and fox riddled suburban neighborhood, and then got upset when the dogs wouldn't do anything we had just started teaching them.

This made the whole excursion so hard because we had to stop every 1 second when they got plucky and started pulling or acting gaga and then their brains were so fizzed up they couldn't process or enact the commands I had just taught them in the parking lot.

Everyone would end the walk crabby and drained and, worse, no learning had taken place (or we went backwards.)

To combat this, we made the walk less distracting: We did not go in the woods for a bit. We did shorter walks around the neighborhood, in the middle of the road, if possible. (We live in a quiet area so this is usually possible at 5:30 am in the morning when we walk them, but not in the afternoons.) As they calmed down, we inched closer to the sidewalks. This is where we are currently. Cheeze and Porter are doing well and are going to be ready to try going back into the woods soon.

For obedience training, I also cleared out a space in the house where I could train each dog individually. This one probably seems obvious, but I had been trying to train the dogs together all of once to save time, but really I was not saving time at all since no one was really learning. It was better to work with each one for 5-10 minutes in the obedience room than to try and do everyone all together in the middle of the living room with the cats running around. (with nothing getting done)

As for how to combat this in humans, I'm not even sure. If I followed the line of thinking that I used for the dogs, I would need to put myself into a less triggering environment, but this is a lot harder for me than it is for the dogs. For the dogs, I just moved them from the sidewalks to a less distracting location until they learned the necessary skill.

But for me, a less triggering environment would probably have to be a new school or a new county. I could:

• a. Stay in my current school and county. Accept that my progress will be very slow.

• b. Try a new, smaller school in the same district. This may give me less people to deal with and more space to work on my interactions. I can also figure out if the main problem is the school or the county. If this doesn't work, try the next options.

• c. Try a new school in a new county and see if it's a good organization. If the district is a good organization, I will have less to pop off about and more space to practice my skills when the need arises. If it's a bad organization, I'd be back where I started but with less money.

  
  

• d. Go to a new organization all together with only adults. Take a break from teaching

  
  

• e. Hide in a closest forever and not come out.

I don't really know, though. Change is hard and comes with financial implications.

If you have ever tried any of the above scenarios and have any insights, please let us know in the comments section. Reactive human does not have any wisdom on the best path forward at the current moment, as she is very scared of being broke. But she is also scared of continuing to be the person she is.

Mistake # 2: Trying to do formal training before the dogs had gotten their wiggles out.

Last week I had decided that the dogs were never ever going to pull ever again! But similar to my mistake above, this just led to frustration on everyone's part. The dogs were not focused or ready to train and I was annoyed that they were not focused and ready to train.

We finally realized that we would could not be the "the dogs will NEVER EVER PULL" people and decided to teach the dogs that they could pull if they were wearing harnesses and they had to loose leash walk if they had just their collars on. This way, we all just went nuts in the morning sniffing or running and pulling and getting the wiggles out, and THEN we were all in the mood to do some training after I got home from work.

This was closer to our normal routine so we just went back to it; we realized they needed that time in the morning to drain pent up energy.

Unfortunately, this trick worked for me even though I am a die-hard non-morning person. If I could find the willpower to somehow wake up at the ungodly and should-be-illegal hour of 4:00 am to drive to the big box gym and workout before work, I was WAY more able to cope with challenges. But I am not a morning person, so getting up even earlier than my 5:15 am normal time was super depressing and not a commitment I could keep even if I did feel awesome on the days I accomplished it. The best compromise-since I really do like working out before work but also have a commitment to help with the dogs before work-was to wake up atf 5:15, walk the dogs wearing a RUCK sack and then do a 45-minute small group weight lifting class at the small gym 6 minutes from my house from 6:00-6:45.

Helpful for getting in a workout while walking the dogs.

This definitely made it so that I was skittering into work late but it was better than showing up In My Mood. And I didn't have to wake up at 4 am. I don't really like waking up at 5:15 either, but I chose to have these rescue dogs so one of my responsibilities is to get up and take care of them even when I don't want to. My husband is a natural morning person so he is up helping with them no matter what.

Mistake # 3: Not Having Dogs "Lock In" Before Attempting Training

When it did finally come to training time, I would just kind of jump right in with out getting the dogs focused on me and then I couldn't figure out why everything was going wrong. It was almost exactly the same mistake I made as a new teacher: just starting the lesson while the kids were still talking straight over and hoping they'd focus as some point.

But in his book Lucky Dog Lessons, Brandon McMillan is adamant about creating a training situation where the dogs are focused first. He usually uses just a leash and a quiet area, but if the dog is unruly, he will use what he calls the "Double Leash Lockoff," which you can check out here.

The book that started my training curiosity.

Molly Arvin will do long line work or "back and here" until the dog is focused on the human and then the training can begin.

I just needed to not skip this step-not skip the threshold requirements, not skip the "back and here" work for the first 5-10 minutes. I wanted to skip straight to the loose leash walking (the fun part), but the dogs usually could not nail that without doing the brain work to get focused first. Ugh. First vegetables then dessert kind of situation.

Mistake # 4: Not Giving Ourselves Enough Time to Be Consistent

One huge mistake we made was not leaving ourselves enough time to actually do the training. If we woke up late and were in a rush to get to work, it was guaranteed that the dogs would be having one of those days where they were pulling every two steps and we would need to stop and wait.

Or, we would just let them run straight out the door without working on calming down at the threshold.

But, of course, since we had no time to wait, we would revert back to old habits and let the dogs pull, effectively erasing some of our traning work from the week before.

Ultimately, we had to temporarily shorten our morning walks to accommodate time for training so that we wouldn't feel pressured to rush.

The other solution as I mentioned above, was just to agree that harnesses were for pulling and we could have a free-for-all in the morning. Then in the afternoon, we'd be able to do some formal training.

I also had to remind myself that all of this would get better with time and we would not feel as frustrated in the future...hopefully.

Mistake # 5: Not Doing Individual Training

Although we did see a decrease right off the bat in the kind of "pull mom off her feet" pulling once we implemented the "stop walking when pulling" technique, it was hard to fine tune the loose leach walking in a pack and while they were wearing their harnesses. I knew that I would not be able to hang on to three dogs if there were wearing flat collars or Martingales because the dogs, with their combined weightage, could really get a leg up on me if they wanted to.

They couldn't right now because the harnesses were doing the work, but since I want to eventually hike off-leash with them, I needed them to pay attention to me without the harnesses and the harnesses do not provide a ton of feedback to the dog.

I want the dog to not forget out me when we are Doing Fun Things so I had to start training each dog individually to loose leash walk. I ended up using slightly different tools and techniques for each dog, which I will describe in another post. Suffice it to say, it was worth the individual training in the reward I got in the pack walks, but it does require a lot of time if you have 4 dogs like we do.

This allowed me to tell them exactly when they were pulling (pressure from collar) and when they were doing well (no pressure on collar). The leash drills I started with (long lining and "back and here") were from Molly Arvin's online dog training modules (Pete's Adventure Pack).

Even just doing 10 minutes of individual training with each dog made the pack walks a ton calmer even though they are far, far, FAR away from being off-leash in a pack.

Mistake # 6: Not Temporarily Pausing Old (BUT FUN) Routines

I like to walk with my dogs and my husband after work so that I can tell my husband every single infuritating detail about my day and he can tell me about three of his. I'm sure he loves this routine too, which is why it was a bummer when I had to tell him that we needed to put this routine on hold for awhile so that we could train dogs individually instead.... He did not seem sad when I told him this, but I am sure he was just putting on his brave face for the sake of the dogs and I.

So there you have it! So many mistakes!! So little time!!!!! I'm sure I'll make many more, though, so subscribe above if you'd like to come along for the ride or let us know in the comments below about your early problems and solutions.

Learning new shit sucks. I'm hoping there are some fun group adventures on the other side of this for my husband's sake; I know how much he hates all the peace and quiet this training is resulting in.