Recently I’ve been working with a dog to unravel her anxiety. She’s very well loved and is overweight. We were walking down a hill to exit the park at the end of our session. Every couple of feet she would speed up and begin to pull us down the hill with her. There are two reasons for this. The first being her weight helps her to gain momentum that pulls her down the hill. At the same time, she lacks the endurance to engage her muscles to counter this natural force. The second is her anxiety. Hoping she can rush through this experience and hopefully not deal with the emotions that come from being in an unfamiliar place with lots to take in. She has the tendency to rush through experiences where she feels a lot of emotions. What you end up with is a dog running away, with you at the end of the leash. What we are working with her on is when she feels big emotions, to slow down instead, so she can overcome and let that emotion go. Instead of picking it up and taking it with her for the rest of her life. Never letting it go because she never learned to take the space to feel it and come out safe and supported. She’s like a rubber band ball at this point. Thick with layers of multicolored rubber bands that have been wrapped over each other of varying thickness and circumference. Puppies start out as regular bouncy balls. They’re light, and fun and predictable. As their circumstances change, a rubber band gets bound onto them. It forever constricts and distorts their bounce. Maybe they experience another situation where they are forced into flight, fight or freeze in emotional isolation. Another rubber band is layered onto the last, leaving even less surface on the ball that will execute a predictable bounce. That rubber band lies over the ridges of the last and only exacerbates the bumps of the existing intersections of bands that launch the ball in unpredictable directions. As time goes on, the bouncy ball gets heavier, doesn’t bounce as well, and the bounce is unpredictable. What we’re trying to do now is one by one remove the rubber bands, lifting the weight off of her and restore her true bounce.
