Week 4: Reactive Humans Learns to Look for Early Reactivity Signs

Part of thwarting reactivity in humans and dogs is to look for the early warning signs that you (or they) are getting riled up.The idea is that it is way easier to shut down reactivity at the very early stages, when there's just low level concern, rather than later once that concern has swelled in to a frothing furor. If you put a few items on your credit card and then pay off that small amount-no big deal. If you put A LOT of big, unaffordable purchases on your credit card, that debt snowballs, takes on a life of its own and quickly becomes unmanageable. Same with you or your dog's reactivity: You want you catch yourself (and your dog) at the very, VERY FIRST hint that you might go berserk on something because that is one of the few opportunities you have to be productive with the anger and make good choices. After this point, you still have options, but they are more dramatic and a little harder.

Catching this moment takes careful observation of yourself and your dogs because the switch from low level concern to full blown meltdown is rapid. Your window to act and divert may be very small, as it is for me and my dog, Mabel.

After my most recent detonation at work, I felt annoyed because I was actively trying to avoid emotional mushroom clouds while at the same time typing in the nuclear codes and launching.

I had a niggling feeling that if I could recognize my early physiological symptoms, like early- early, I would have some head space to work on the communication skills I was supposed to be practicing (which were myriad at this poin Even though I was following the advice from the book Crucial Conversations about what to do when you feel that first prick of annoyance, I was still missing something because even this early step was going sideways most of the time.

The writers of Crucial Conversations advise that if something starts to bother you, you better say something because "you only have two choices: 1. Talk it out. 2. Act it out." (6).

They elaborate:"If you fail to discuss the issues you have with your boss, your life partner, you neighbor, or your peer, will those issues magically disappear? No. Instead they will become the lens you see the other person through. And how you see always shows up in how you act. Your resentment will show up in how you treat the other person...you'll snap at the person, spend less time with him or her, be quicker to accuse the person of dishonesty or selfishness or withhold information or affection. The problem will persist, and acting out your feelings instead of talking them out will add strain to an already crucial situation." (6)

Dammmmiit. When I heard this passage, I knew I was guilty of doing this. All of the time. I hated facing people, but then I would be passive aggressive. The problem did not go away; it just cooked.

Therefore, I knew where to start with my communication skills: I just needed to speak up when something bothered me and do it quickly. Eassssssy peasy... my ass. Voicing my opinion is really hard for me, so whenever I realize I need to open my mouth and say something, it usually comes out in a way that pisses the other person off.

Curriculum Supervisor # 1: "We spent a ton of money on new text books no one wants or needs!!!!!!!!!!'

Me: "This shit sucks."

And this is just me feeling a little miffed, not even the blow up....so you can see why I am having problems here.

The general order of my communication steps at the moment are:

1. State what is bothering me. There is a special way to do this (SO MANY RULES), but I knew if I tried to learn ALL of them all at the same time I would freeze and do nothing...so I'm not there yet which is why when I state what is bothering me, it usually leads to step 2:

   
   

2. Person gets mad at ME even though THEY are the annoying one. I'm the one trying to work on my communication skills, dammit.

   
   

3. I press nuclear codes.

My spidey senses were telling me that since I was in the early stages of my reactivity training and did not yet have all of my communication skills, not even the very early ones (ie: how to say what's bothering without sending the other person), I needed some other tactics to buy myself time, so I just ripped the idea of trying to identify my early physiological signs right out of every dog training book I had been reading.

Every. trainer. talks. about. this. Every trainer. Even the positive-only trainers and the balanced trainers speak on some level about keeping your dog under threshold and looking for early signs that they are feeling stressed so that you can adjust your training accordingly. The overall difference between the two training camps in this area is about how much stress to allow your dog while they are training: very little for positive trainers, more for the balanced trainers. Your job, as their owner or trainer, is to watch the dog's body language for subtle signs that could maybe, potentially lead to stress (looking at something, yawning, nose licks, ears back, sniffing, marking...) and adjust the training accordingly. For Porter, Gussie, and Cheeze, looking at something for 2 seconds or more means they are about to have feelings. For Mabel, TBD (hopefully soon). But for learning and thinking to take place your dog should be stressed, but not too stressed. If your dog is having a full, 100% dialed up meltdown, they are not going to be able to properly complete whatever task it is they are supposed to be doing.

To learn about dog body language, you just have to dive into the books and you will not be disappointed looking at all of the pictures of "dogs feeling comfortable, "dogs feeling curious," "dogs feeling playful", "dogs thinking thoughts." Dog body language books elicit more oohs and ahhs out of me than photos of my friends' new babies. (Sorry to my baby friends, which is all of them. I know you hate my 600 dogs, as well, so we're even.)

Call me wild, but my ideal Friday night (and Saturday night and Sunday night...) is to be sitting in the middle of a pile of my actual dogs while looking through a pile of dog books. The types of books can help you identify the less obvious but still important stress signals so that you can appropriately time your training.

Here are some of my current favorite dog body language books, but I have way more in my Amazon cart so I will have to update this:

Pages and pages of pictures that must have taken the author, Brenda Aloff, a very long time to take and describe.	Every word of this book is helpful to struggling reactive dog owners, but the chart of body language is especially adorable.	Grisha Stewart is big on keeping dogs "under threshold" and advises owners on what to look for.

So, anyway, these were the books I was into when I thought maybe some of these dog tips could work for me... like, literally for me, not for my dogs: An early human-tornado warning system. To figure out my early warning signs, I created a flashback reel in my head of my last few fits and tried to identify if there was a singular feeling that warned of what was to come. What was I feeling beforehand? What was going on in my body? Was there anything consistent that I could identify to help me in the future? When I go from zero to 100, it feels like I step onto an elevator and shoot directly to the top floor. WOOSH. It does not really feel like there is any time between feeling normal and feeling PISSED THE FUCK OFF, but there had to be some teeny sign that I had I stepped on to the elevator, right?

Right. But just like the dogs, they are subtle and you better be watching. From my memory reel, I had harvested ONE morsel of insight: I start to feel light pressure inside my chest, one little butterfly starts floating around my sternum. This is the canary in the coal mine. The is the earliest first physical symptom I can identify that tells me I have stepped onto the elevator and I am about to launch off. I have probably 1 second to hit the button that opens the doors back up? Maybe 3? Either way, if I can catch it, I still have time to pull myself together and make a different decision before anyone knows otherwise.

I know this awareness of early signs helps to keep my dogs out of situations they cannot handle, so let's see if it can help me. And I'd like for you to comment and let me know if it works for you.