Welcome to the Mindful Dog Parent, the podcast for overwhelmed and anxious dog owners who are doing their best but still feel like they're getting it all wrong.

I'm Sian, a trauma informed coach and ethical dog trainer.

I created this podcast because dog parenting isn't always cute reels and perfect walks.

Sometimes it's tears after training, guilt in the quiet moments, or just feeling like you're the only one struggling.

If you've ever said, I love my dog, but this is really hard, you're in the right place.

Each week I'll bring you calm, compassionate guidance to help you build confidence, regulate your emotions, and reconnect with your dog, even when things feel messy because you're not failing, you're just overwhelmed and you don't have to figure this out on your own.

I want to start with something I see so, so much when I talk to dog parents, and I absolutely resonate with it myself.

So see how this makes you feel.

You're doing a huge amount of thinking.

You're noticing your dog's behavior, you're watching your own reactions.

You're trying to stay calm and patient and thoughtful.

And very often you're doing all of that on your own.

How does that make you feel?

Is that something that you can relate to as well?

Because I can absolutely relate to it from my time as a dog mum and not as a dog mom and trainer who now has all of the knowledge that I have.

I have literally come up, come at this from a place of when I was a dog mum, before, I knew all of the things that I know now what was going on for me and how was I feeling.

And these are the things that are coming up because I hear it from other dog parents too.

And I talk to dog parents all of the time, whether they're clients that I'm working closely with, one to one, or whether they are inquiries coming in asking about the services that I offer.

Because I talk through rather than just saying, well, here's, here's what I do buy.

I like to talk through what, like, how is their puppy settling in?

I want to find out the things that they actually want to work on and what are the things going on for them with their dog.

Because I want to understand how they feel about the things that are happening in that moment, whether it's something that they are responding to or something that they want to work on ahead of time, like with the puppy training.

So you're doing all that on your own.

You're holding those questions in your head.

You're replaying all those moments afterwards and you're trying to work out whether you responded well, whether you missed something or should have done it differently.

When there is nowhere to put any of those thoughts down, they aren't just going to disappear.

They're going to stay with you and come back over and over and over again in your mind and they're going to sit in your body as well.

So I want to talk about what happens when dog training become something that you carry mostly inside yourself and why doing that can slowly wear you down even when you are caring so deeply and you're doing your best.

So if those things that I've mentioned already are kind of resonating and you're thinking, yeah, I am doing this on my own, or you know, yeah, I did do that on my own, this is going to be what you want to listen to.

If you're anything like the dog parents that I work with or if you are a dog parent that I work with, you'll know, or at least I want you to know, that you're not struggling because you're disengaged.

If you are going through a moment that you're struggling with at the moment, it's not because you're disengaged, it's the actual opposite.

It's because you're invested.

The questions that you're holding that I've mentioned already, did I respond well to that?

So you're kind of reflecting on your own responses to these situations, like the things that your dog did or didn't do.

Did I respond well to it?

Was that too much for them?

Am I helping doing what I'm doing or am I making this harder?

When you don't have a place to talk through those questions, your nervous system is going to hold on to them instead because you've got nowhere to put it.

It's.

It's got to go somewhere and it's going to stay inside your body.

So it's going to potentially show up as feeling tense when situations might be relatively calm or second guessing yourself later on in the day.

So you're kind of ruminating.

So reflection is good.

And I'm definitely a reflector and I always think about things after situations have happened in my life generally, like whatever they are.

I always reflect on the day or reflect on the week and reflect on the month and the year and all that kind of stuff.

And, and reflection is good because you can take lessons forward and say, well, I could do this differently and that differently.

But it's when you're ruminating And I've ruminated on plenty of things through my life as well.

And it's when you're kind of asking that question of, you know, have I done enough here and did I respond to that well, and I could have done it differently.

And it's all coming from a place of tenseness and feeling like you're on your own because you've got nowhere to.

You've got no sounding board.

You might also find that you're feeling tired sooner than you expect in the day.

And I've definitely fallen asleep on the sofa in the evenings when I've had not a day of lots of physical stuff going on.

So I'm out and about doing lots of walking and stuff with clients.

But actually it's when I've done a lot of brain stuff and I've been holding a lot of stuff inside and I just fall asleep really early on in the evenings.

So that's how it can show up when you haven't got a place to talk these things through and your nervous system's holding on to them and there isn't anything that's gone wrong, but it's because you're carrying that responsibility without anywhere for it to land, so there isn't anywhere for it to go.

Like I say, it stays internal.

I have definitely 100% felt this with so many different situations.

I always refer back to Bonnie with things more often than not, because.

And she's laid behind me now, just there.

And Oliver's over on the other side of the sofa.

If you're watching on YouTube, you can see them just being the typical lazy lurchers that live up to their name.

I talk about Bonnie, poor Bonnie, a lot because she's been the dog that I've had for the longest amount of time in my life.

So as a child, I grew up with a dog from 5 to about 15, but she was.

She was my dog, but not.

Because I was only so young, I couldn't, like, do all the things with her.

So she's.

Bonnie is the longest dog that I've had as an adult and I've had her about 10 years.

So I always bring it back to Bonnie because there's so many things that I can relate to.

And she's.

She's been part of that crossover from when I was a dog mum in a corporate job, not knowing all the things that I know now.

And she's also seeing the crossover of then me becoming the trainer and doing all the qualifications and doing, like, getting all the knowledge and the experience that I'VE got now.

So I've experienced the life before with her as well as the dog mom.

So I felt it with her because there were times where her behavior was not, definitely not the hardest part of the day, you know, when, like, you're holding onto the plan, you know, holding on to the emotional regulation of your family and your dog and the interpretation of what's happening all at the same time.

So all of the things are being held by you, even with experience and knowledge, that can still feel like a lot.

So that crossover that I mentioned, even as a dog trainer, with all the stuff that I know, there are times where that still happens.

And what helped me in those situations wasn't more information or another strategy.

It was having space to slow things down.

And I've got a beautiful network of people in the business world who aren't anything to do with dog training.

But I've heard so much of how they've started their year in the same way as me, where we've slowed things down because we needed to have that space to slow things down in our lives, generally for various different reasons.

So.

So rather than having I need a strategy for the new year or I need to get more information and do more learning because I don't want to struggle with this anymore, I slowed things down and gave myself space to do it.

And so many of my business friends did that as well.

It was also to be able to say things out loud.

So having a sounding board, like I say, to be able to share this with and you aren't doing it all on your own and to not have to be the only place where everything lives.

And this isn't just with your dog, this is life.

So those are the things that have helped me to be able to take these things out of my body and out of my nervous system and out of my head and just give myself that space to be able to slow down and do things differently.

So from a nervous system point of view, what you're experiencing makes complete sense.

And the things that I've mentioned that I experienced, when you're holding on to that responsibility without support, your system often stays slightly activated.

So it's not again, in this big obvious way, but more like a background hum.

So it's just there all of the time, a little bit like, I don't know it when that background hum, like when I thought about that, it's that I don't know if you've heard of it.

I'm going completely off on.

Off on a tangent here, but the actual, the hum that people seem to hear all around the world.

And I. I hear it as well sometimes and I never quite know what it is.

It doesn't bother me too much, but it's just that background noise that you kind of start to just get used to.

It's there in the background, but you don't know what it is or why it's there.

And it's living there, but it's making you feel like a little bit flat after situations that maybe used to feel manageable or losing motivation even though you still care.

So just because you leave the motivation doesn't mean you don't care or are lazy about something.

And I've talked about motivation in a previous episode as well.

I will link to relevant episodes in the show notes, so do go check them out.

But there's definitely an episode that I talk a lot about motivation.

Or it might be that you're finding it harder to access that patience or perspective that you thought that maybe that you started to get or that you want to get.

So you find it harder to get to those things.

That is what's happening when regulation doesn't have anywhere to settle those things.

Those are just three things.

There's so many other situations that I could come up with, but it can be when I say, like, finding it harder to get access patience, it's like having a snappy reaction.

And I've talked about some of these in previous episodes as well.

These reactions that might be happening.

It's like an automatic response to something.

Like when you're hangry, you know, you're hungry and you have like shorter, sharper responses because that hunger is taking over.

So it's not got anywhere to go.

So it's going to respond from that nervous system place of it just being sat in there and not having anywhere to go.

Humans are going to regulate best when there's some form of shared load, even if it's gentle and quiet.

So this isn't about, like, this isn't about blame.

It's not about saying, well, I'm doing this on my own and it's your fault because you should be in it with me.

There's.

There's an element there where we need to tell someone what we need.

Put the emotion last I heard this on a podcast recently and it kind of works quite well because if you talk about, like what I've just said with the anger, and anger is the emotion that comes to the front, put that to the back and start to say what you need to happen.

I'm struggling in These situations, whatever they are with, with your dog and I need some help, I need some support with it.

And it can be as small or big as you need it to be.

And everybody's going to have a different approach to that about what kind of support that looks like.

But that's co regulation.

You are sharing that with someone else and you are going through that together and you're putting that there's somewhere for that to go.

And you got you starting to kind of get it out of your body and your system's not the one holding it.

That support isn't going to just help you feel better emotionally.

It changes how learning settles in your body.

Because as we already know, anybody who's listened to previous episodes, our learning part of the brain cannot be switched on at the same time as our survival part of our brain.

So they are mutually exclusive.

They can't be together at the same time.

When you supported, you have more capacity, your thinking is going to start to become clearer, your responses are going to naturally slow down because you've given yourself space to be able to do it and your dog's going to feel that shift.

So if you are trying to do, say, a relaxation exercise with your dog and you're the only one that can do it, and you only have X amount of time to do it in a day because you've got all these other things that you need to do, but you're kind of doing it as a tick box.

You're gonna do it from a place of feeling rushed and you're gonna try and get through it quickly to say that you've done it, but your dog's not gonna actually relax through that either because you're not relaxed.

You're not coming at it from a calm place.

So if you start to be able to do that and offer that more, your dog's gonna feel that shift as well and start to be able to relax into it a lot easier.

And this isn't because you're doing anything new.

You're doing the same exercise, but you're doing it from a different perspective and you're not holding everything all at once.

That is when very often the training starts to feel less brittle, less sharp, less intense, and more flexible and fluid without you trying to force anything.

There's a strong, strong, strong message in dog training that starts to kind of suggest that you should be able to work things out on your own.

Even if you just try hard enough so you get through this, you'll be able to do this.

You've just got to try harder.

But learning under stress doesn't really work like that.

Like I've said, we can't have both our learning brain and survival brain switched on at the same time because they just aren't compatible.

Most people are going to function better when there's somewhere to reflect, somewhere to recalibrate, somewhere to feel steadier.

That's not about constant guidance or being told what to do or like becoming codependent on somebody for various reasons or like whatever it is, it's not about that constant.

I have to go to this person because they need to help me and tell me what I should do.

It means having a place where you don't have to hold everything internally.

So just like I say, having a sounding board, having somewhere that you can share these things and just, just start to carry it with someone else.

A problem shared is a problem halved.

That's what I'm getting at.

It's so true.

If we are trying to give somebody a bit of what we're going through, it will lighten the load.

That's why alongside the podcast, I also create spaces where dog parents can be supported in a more contained way.

And it's not about being monitored.

It's not about to be like being corrected or being told what to do, but.

But it's about having that somewhere steady to land while things start to integrate.

So my one to one support is all about that, like creating the empowerment to be able to carry things, to create the capacity to share the load, like all that stuff.

So if you ever notice yourself thinking, I wish I'd got somewhere to talk this through, that is often your nervous system recognizing what would help it stay regulated.

You don't need to act on the thought necessarily, but just noticing it for now is enough of what, like, that's all you need to do for now.

It's about reflecting and kind of thinking on the episode, what could I, like, what could I do to make this, like share this load and help to give myself the space and the capacity to be able to do the things that I need to do without being the one carrying all the emotional regulation, carrying all the things like say I've felt that myself and it's not sustainable doing it on your own.

So if this episode, if listening to this episode felt familiar or it's like bought a sense of relief, let that be the takeaway from today.

You don't need to decide anything.

You don't have to do more.

Sometimes simply holding, like not holding onto everything, holding less onto all the things on your own is that shift that you need.

So I'll always remind you you're not failing and I will speak to you next time on the Mindful Dog Parent.

Thanks so much for tuning in to the Mindful Dog Parent.

If this episode gave you something to think about or it just made you feel a little less alone, I would love it if you followed the show and shared it with another dog parent who needs it.

You'll find all the links and resources mentioned in the show notes@lavendergardenanimalservices.co.uk podcast and I would love to stay in touch, so head there if you want to explore more ways to work with me or get support.