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.

Today, I want to have a very honest conversation.

Now, I think all of my podcast episodes are very honest because I come at it from a place of supporting both ends of the lead.

So I'm here to support you just as much as I'm here to help you figure out what's going on with your dog and to support you with their behavior and that kind of stuff.

But I'm coming at it from an honest place today because sometimes it's about how your dog's behavior just doesn't just feel challenging, it feels like it's too much.

I've touched on feelings around when our dogs are making us feel overwhelmed and when we start to get stressed and when we start to feel the guilt and the overwhelm and potentially burnout as well.

I've touched on those things before in previous episodes, but I want this to be an episode where we're thinking about those moments where we're saying, I can't do this anymore, or I love my dog, but I just don't like how this feels.

That's a big one, because that conflict is a very genuine, real thing that we can feel.

We love our dogs, and it's a really difficult thing for us to have to try to think about and consider.

And we start to feel guilty when we start to think, have I made a mistake?

And all those questions that start to come up, that you can feel both of those things, you can still love them, but not like how it feels being a dog parent.

So if you've ever been at Breaking Point or you are right now, this episode is for you.

It's not here to give you another tip or trick, but it's here to help you understand why you feel this way and what you can do when the weight of it all starts to feel unbearable.

Now, that is a big word, but it's one that I wanted to use because that's how I summarize how a lot of puppy parents and dog parents feel when they get to this point.

It feels unbearable now.

So I want you to take a breath and know that you're not alone in this.

As always, I always share that, because you don't know as many dog parents going through these things as I've met.

And I want you to know that it is such a common thing.

So that's why I'm talking about it.

So the first thing I want to go through is what too much actually feels like.

So my dog's just come in to.

To see me, probably.

There he is.

Hello, Oliver.

How you doing?

He's just got up and he's having a little sniff around the room.

So if you're on YouTube, you will have seen that.

You won't have a clue if you're just listening to this episode, but he's just stood next to me at the chair, looking up, figuring out what I'm doing and asking me what.

What's going on?

So what too much actually feels like.

When behavior problems start to pile up, it's not just about the barking, the pulling, or the reactivity.

It's that ripple effect.

So think about when a pebble goes into the water.

It's a very little thing, that little ripple that starts it off, but the ripple just starts to expand and get bigger and bigger and bigger, and that's how it starts to feel.

So your walks start to not feel enjoyable anymore.

They feel like something you've got to gear yourself up for.

You've got to kind of prepare yourself in your mind to actually go out on this walk.

And walking is there for helping us with our mindfulness and getting some time to ourselves and to enjoy being out in.

If you're out near kind of nature and that kind of thing.

It's meant to be something that we enjoy, not have to gear ourselves up for and prep ourselves in our mind to go out and kind of go, right, I've got to do this.

And it's like a.

It feels like a chore.

It can be where you dread certain triggers, and sometimes you avoid going to places altogether.

Now, that's one that I've done in the past with my own dog.

So it becomes a place where the triggers are just too much for my dog.

And then it starts to become too much for me, and I started to avoid going to those places.

So if you've kind of started to do that, it's a very normal thing.

If it's a reactivity situation for your dog, they can have trigger point areas.

If it happens once, twice, you know, that kind of thing.

And it starts to become a more common scenario.

It can also be when you come home exhausted and you're actually questioning if you're doing anything right.

And these aren't just dog problems.

They become emotional weight.

So you're thinking about all the other stuff as well that's going on in your life.

They start to creep into your confidence.

It can start to affect your relationships and it can start to affect your identity as a dog parent.

Now, I've touched on this and talked about it in a previous episode.

How our dog's behavior can start to cross over with how we feel as a person.

So we don't start.

We start to say I'm not good enough and all those things.

Negative thought patterns start to creep in.

We say I'm not a good enough person, not just I'm not a good enough dog parent.

So it starts to affect how we feel about ourselves.

So I want to say this really, really clearly.

Feeling like it's too much does not mean that you don't love your dog.

Like I say, you can feel the love for your dog, but also this feeling of it's too much.

It just means that you're human and you're carrying too much all at once.

We're thinking about life that we're living at the minute outside of being a dog parent.

We have all these things that keep trying to take our time, but we still only have 24 hours in a day and we always will.

But all these things get added to it.

Especially at the time of recording this.

It's the very beginning of September, so all the kids are starting to go back to school.

That then starts to affect our routines and all of that kind of thing.

And I went through a whole episode last week.

So my episode 10 is all about that going back to school and the routine and all of that kind of stuff.

So it's a 10 minute episode.

Really quick go give that a listen.

If you are in the throngs of trying to get back into a routine with your, your dog and your kids going back to school.

But I do think it's something that we need to kind of think about and consider because it's a big time of change and change isn't something that us humans deal with very well.

So we start to think more about.

I need to do more, I need to do this, I need to do that, and add more and more and more and more.

That's where the cumulative stuff starts to come from.

So I'm going to talk about that now.

So I want to kind of go and touch on why breaking points actually happen.

So I've got a few reasons for it.

The first one I've just mentioned is that cumulative stress.

So it's rarely one big moment that starts to affect us in this way.

It's the drip, drip, drip of stress, the barking at the fence every day, the constant pulling, the guilt when they don't settle, when you've gone out with them and you've tried to enjoy some kind of time out at a pub or a restaurant with them, that kind of thing.

It's all of those things together, plus your other life events that are going on.

So this new routine at the beginning of the school year, that's going to have a massive impact.

The.

The things that is expected of us from life at the moment.

It's just more and more and more and more.

So that's where that cumulative stress, the buildup of the stress, that ripple effect that I've mentioned is starting to take, kind of take over a little bit, which then starts to, I think, lead to my second point, which is isolation.

So if.

If nobody gets it, because it often feels that way.

Friends with easy dogs just don't understand.

So they might have had a puppy years ago, but their dog's like 10 now, and they just forgotten what it was like having a puppy.

And you're in the.

At the opposite end of the scale where you've got a puppy now and you feel all these things.

The puppy blues have started to kind of creep in.

I'll touch on something in a second again as my third reason.

That kind of the expectation versus the reality.

So it feels like everybody else's dog's perfect because you're going on social media and you see these perfect poses, you see these dogs who have perfect recall.

You're watching the trainer videos and you can see the dogs doing xyz, whatever it is.

And I shared.

I shared something on Instagram the other day, actually, which is it was about why I leave mistakes in my videos.

So this quick example, I was doing some recording with my own dogs and we've practiced some impulse control around, like, leave it quite a lot.

They're really good at it in loads of different situations.

It's one of the skills that in a positive way, they leave something and know that it's a good thing to do.

So I practiced and on the recording Bonnie went for something that I'd asked her to leave.

I just was like, oh dear, we've, we've, we've gone for it.

You know, it's one of those things.

Dogs are dogs, humans are humans.

We make mistakes.

I say that with inverted commas sometimes.

It wasn't that.

It wasn't this big bad thing that happened.

It was just something she did once, we carried on afterwards and she smashed it again.

So out of a few repetitions, maybe, I don't know, 10 different repetitions with different things, she, she went for something once.

That's just, that's just life.

That's what happens.

And I leave things like that in my videos just to show that even with dogs who have got amazing impulse control in different situations with different things, they can still choose to do something different because that's what happens.

So that social media just making everybody's dogs look perfect is going to feed that isolation because it starts to make things feel heavier.

So that emotional weight that I mentioned, that starts to feel heavier because you think why, why is my dog not doing that?

Why can't I get to that point?

Why is my dog struggling more?

Why can't I, I figure this out, all those things.

So it leads on to the third reason, which is that expectations versus reality point.

So you thought life with your dog would look one way and when it doesn't look that way it can start to feel like failure because.

And it's such a common thing.

I have to really set everyone's expectations when they join puppy classes or one to ones because they think this thing might only take one session in a one to one, for example, or their puppy's abilities are going to be way beyond what we are kind of working the level we're working at.

And being experts in puppies, me and Charlotte, who helps me run classes, we know that those foundations are so important.

Even if the expectation of the puppy parent is they think their puppy's ability is going to be able to be this, I don't know, being able to recall at a distance when there's another dog.

For a 12 week old puppy, you might be lucky, you might get some repetitions of that happening.

But it's not something we expect that puppy to be able to do consistently in different situations.

So we have to work on some foundation steps first.

So this is where that expectation piece is a really big one.

Because even at home.

So this is kind of talking that was talking about like puppy Class scenarios and going out and about with the puppies.

But even at home, when you first bring your puppy home, especially if you've got children, their expectations of what having a puppy is like.

And I remember, I don't remember how I felt before I bought my first puppy home, Judy, because I was only about 5 at the time.

But I remember we were best mates.

She absolutely loved me and I loved her and it was awesome relationship that we had.

But I mean as a five year old, what am I gonna, I'm not gonna understand or all of those behavioral things that are going on.

But actually Judy had lots of behavioural things going on.

You know, I couldn't have friends over.

She did not like visitors to the house.

So friends coming in, having like sleepovers and stuff, it was difficult because she just didn't like visitors.

So that expectation of my parents when they brought Judy home might have been one scenario.

But in reality this is what ended up happening and I loved it.

I don't remember her ever being very bitey or anything like that.

But clients who bring puppies home and they've got children tend to struggle with their puppies jumping up at their children, kind of targeting their puppy, biting towards the children.

Because children are fun and they move and they make noise and they're all exciting and it GS the puppy up and makes them more excited.

So it tends to be that then puts the child off, which makes total sense.

They start to become a bit scared of the dog or a bit wary of the dog and want to spend more time away from them.

So the expectation of the parent in that situation and of the child, if they're old enough to kind of remember and think about that expectation that they had is way different to what the reality looks like.

So that's when you can imagine these feelings start to kind of come up of that guilt and the hopelessness that I mentioned.

Poppy Blues is real.

I think this expectation piece is a really big one.

That's why I've gone into a bit more detail about it because we have to reset our clients expectations a lot of the time when they join classes like I've mentioned.

And it's to set everybody up for success.

It's not to say your puppy's basic and they don't know what they're doing and they never will.

It's to start to set these scenarios up so that they have enough success and then they start to get it and they start to understand and it starts to kind of get a bit more ingrained in their brain and then we can start to take it out into real life situations.

So if you're thinking about going to national parks with them, taking them on holiday, we have to expect that our puppies are potentially going to struggle in those situations.

So they're loosely walking from home might be great, but in a national park it might go out the window completely because there's lots of other people there.

With dogs off lead, there's lots of movement, there's lots of scent, there's lots of stuff going on for that puppy's senses that means they're not going to be able to do the thing that we thought they might.

So that's where that gap starts to build.

So I really want you to think about what your expectations are versus the reality and see if your expectations were potentially higher than what reality is for you guys right now and think about how you can set yourselves up for success with using some management.

If your puppy is jumping at people at the door, even teenage dogs, especially jumping can be a big one there.

So jumpy greetings.

If they're greeting someone at the door, what can you do to prevent that from happening in the first place?

We can move them away, have something in, in between the dog and the door instead.

So a baby gate, or they can go behind a pen or something like that and do something that's a way more exciting in that space and more interesting.

So we don't build frustration while they learn how to do these things.

So that's kind of an example going into a bit more detail about it.

So I have gone into detail on that third point, but I think it's a biggie because it is very much perfection is expected.

And like I say, mistakes happen.

My dogs, even when they know things really well, can still make mistakes as well because they're dogs and they have choice and they have feelings and just the same as humans.

So moving on to the fourth one, it's that nervous system overload.

So when both you and your dog are dysregulated, it's like adding fuel to the fire.

Your tense their tents and the cycles keep spiraling.

So you can see how all those things that are happening beforehand, that the isolation, that cumulative stress, that expectation versus reality, when you add nervous system dysregulation and overload into that, that breaking point happens because the load just gets way too heavy.

It's not because you're weak and it's not because you're incapable.

It's just again, because you're human.

And we just maybe need to start to reset some of these thought patterns and processes and reframe things to be able to move forward.

So what I'm going to give you is something that you can do and think about and take away, and it's to stop before the snap.

So what can you do in those moments where you're standing there thinking, I can't do this anymore?

There might be tears, I've had that myself.

There might be guilt.

That's very real.

And I've also had that, too.

The biggest shift is learning to stop before you snap.

So there's a few things I want you to do.

I want you to give yourself permission to end the walk early.

If what you are struggling with is happening on your walk, I want you to say, it's okay to end this walk before we finished.

If your dog's barking, lunging, pulling, and you feel that chest tighten your chest, not your dog's chest, it's okay to turn around and go home.

It doesn't mean you failed it.

It doesn't mean that you're.

You're going to keep doing this forever.

It's just in that moment you're prioritizing.

Regulation over pushing through.

Pushing through can help in some scenarios.

If we're trying to get ourselves out of our comfort zone in situations and we need to expose ourselves to the situation that's making us a bit uncomfortable, pushing through would be great.

But if we're starting to feel we've got to that point of, I can't do this, and you start to feel tense and it's getting worse for you and your dog, going home is the best choice.

And doing something that's going to help you both to be calm again, just to start to regulate yourself and your dog again in that situation.

So pushing through can help.

Sometimes giving yourself a little pep talk can be great, but give yourself permission to end the walk early or end the situation early.

So if, for example, a different situation, if you're taking your dog out to a pub or a restaurant and you're not sure how they're going to be able to cope because you haven't done it very many times, you might have done it when they were young puppies, but they were asleep.

Now they're older and you know, it's not as easy to help them to rest and settle as it was when they were young.

Go there and have, like a quick drink.

So go and order.

Rather than ordering like a pint, order a half pint, order a small glass of wine, order something that is just a smaller drink.

Than what you were going to order in.

Like on a normal, regular kind of day, when you were going to be at the pub for an hour or more, because it gives you a way of being able to finish that drink and leave.

If your dog is struggling and it not feel like you've got a rush, what you're doing, you've got to cancel the meal that you'd ordered, like all those things.

If you just order a drink, just to test the waters and see sit around the peripheral.

So sit around the edges and just start to build up how long you're there for over time, that's really good as a starting point.

So you're just starting to think about how to set you both up for success in this situation.

If you are going to puppy classes or you've taken your teenage dog to classes and you've been working on helping them to relax and in a more distracting environment, again, do the same thing.

Just start from an easy place, sit around the edges, go to a quieter spot.

So you're not kind of going to sit where the toilets are, so you know people are passing there.

You're not sitting at the bar where loads of people are going to be coming up constantly and disturbing your dog and probably wanting to say hello.

Sit where your dog can be in their own space without much foot traffic and order a drink that's going to be quick enough for you to finish.

If they start to struggle and you can leave and then build, like, try and build something up in a different way and figure out what about that situation they struggled with and work on it in smaller steps.

So that's how it can really help.

So giving yourself permission to end the walk early, go home from the pub before you were maybe thinking that you were gonna going home from someone else's house, if you'd gone to visit with them and they were struggling maybe with the other dog in the house, so the place that you were visiting had a dog and they just weren't finding it easy to relax around each other.

They were winding each other up or they were getting a bit kind of angsty with each other.

Again, give yourself permission to say, right, I think it's best if we leave right now.

Let's work on doing this in a different way.

So if it was two dogs struggling with each other, going out and practicing in a neutral place, parallel walking over the road from one another and get closer that way before then taking it into a place of being in the house, one or the other's house.

So that kind of stuff I really want you to break it down.

Then I want you to step away for a minute.

So if you feel frustration rising, like in the house, just create some space.

Pop your dog behind a baby gate with a chew.

So giving them something that's not going to build frustration, but it's going to help them be calmer.

Step into another room, breathe, and come back from a calmer place so you can regulate yourself, you can make yourself a cup of tea.

You can, you know, leave them be for 10 minutes while you go and make a cup of tea and just start to enjoy it.

Take a breather outside, you know, that kind of stuff.

Go upstairs and have a shower or something like that.

That's just going to give you the space that you need while they're doing something, that's going to help them to relax as well.

So it's not about, here's a timeout.

I'm putting you in this pen or behind this baby gate and I'm just leaving you because it could build frustration more and they could want to try and get out.

So we're just building it up to a point where you're both relaxing away from each other.

So stepping away is a good thing if you need to.

And like I've just said, just call it a pause point rather than a punishment.

So it's not about giving up.

It's your emotional first aid.

So you're thinking of how I can help myself with my emotions here.

So it just like if you'd cut yourself, you'd go and get, you know, clean it up, you get plaster, that kind of thing.

It's the same kind of thing.

It's the first aid for your emotions.

You're telling yourself, I need to protect my calm so I can protect our connection.

So the connection with you and your dog is really important.

And it can start to get.

It can start to struggle and get more tense the more this starts to build up.

So.

So to protect that connection between you and your dog, think of it like that's that pause point for you both.

Stopping before the snap prevents you and your dog from spiraling into a place where training, trust and connection break down.

Because that's.

It's not an impossible place to come from, but it's a harder place to come from because you might start to feel some resentment towards your dog.

And again, it's a human emotion.

Resentment is something that builds up over time.

And if you are feeling that way, those things that I've mentioned are really going to help you to just start to think about things from a different place.

Trying to reframe it.

To say that my dog is struggling too might help you to think, rather than, my dog hates me and I'm feeling resentful towards my dog.

Think of it in a way of my dog struggling just as much as I am.

And we both need time to be able to reset here.

So a little reframe that I want you to hold on to.

When everything is feeling like too much, it is easy to slip into I'm failing.

But struggling doesn't mean that you're failing.

Like I've said, it means you care really deeply, actually, because you've reached your own limit.

So limits aren't weakness.

They're a signal to pause and to reset and to start again from a calmer place.

I've been there myself.

With Maisie, I've remembered coming home.

And with Bonnie, I've remembered coming home from a walk in tears, wondering if I was actually cut out for it.

And I remember thinking this way, specifically about Bonnie in the early days, I did kind of consider what, you know, what if I've made a mistake bringing Bonnie into this situation?

And, you know, she'd been with us a few weeks and things were feeling a bit fraught and she was destroying stuff and all the things were happening.

She was.

They told us she was one, but I think she was more like 7ish months old.

And she'd started to destroy stuff and it was just.

It felt like chaos, genuinely.

So I remember coming home and feeling this way after walks and coming home when we'd kind of popped out to the shop or something and she'd destroyed something else.

I.

What I needed was another.

Wasn't another how to hack in that situation.

It was permission to stop and to breathe and to remind myself that progress starts with calm, not with doing everything perfectly.

And as a recovering perfectionist, that is really hard.

I'm going to tell you now, but it's possible because I am a recovering perfectionist.

Now.

There's some positive things that come out of perfectionism.

It's not all negative, but the negative things that come out of perfectionism can set our expectations too high.

And all those things, you can see, see how it's all linked together.

So I'm going to give you a gentle challenge this week.

If you're listening right now and you're nodding along, here is what I'd love you to do this week.

Notice the moment before the snap.

So this is the stop before the snap moment, when you feel it in your chest, in your Jaws in your shoulders, like where are you feeling that feeling?

Instead of pushing through, give yourself a pause, point.

So end the walk, step away or do something that starts to feel like relief instead of pressure.

Write down one thing that did go right, no matter how small it is.

Those micro winds are brilliant.

So maybe your dog looked back up at you and you noticed they checked in.

Maybe they settled a bit quicker.

Maybe you noticed that your own, maybe you noticed your own stress sooner so you are more aware of how you're feeling.

Those micro wins matter way more than you think because it's going to help you then want to progress more and start to build that motivation.

I spoke to a one to one client a couple of weeks ago who I'd gone through this in a bit more detail with about these micro wins and writing them down or even remembering them and actually verbalizing them to each other.

And the next session I came back, they said we did that we noticed more of those wins and it actually did motivate us to do more because we were starting to see these things that were progressing.

So it made us want to keep trying because we were seeing these little tiny things that were happening after versus before.

We just weren't spotting them.

So if this episode's resonated, I, I really want you to share it with a fellow dog parent who might be struggling in silence.

Even if they haven't said anything to you, even if you aren't seeing all of the things, because as humans we do hide and mask things really well.

Just send it to them and say, I thought this episode might help.

They might have bought a new puppy home, that kind of thing.

If you are craving more support to build calm and connection when things are feeling overwhelming, don't forget to sign up to my free my free Calm Connection challenge.

Happening at the end of September.

It's a gentle four day reset designed for you and your dog to find steadier ground together.

I'll put all the details as always in the show notes.

You can sign up to the challenge in the show notes, but I think it will really help because it's going to be something that you can take away and personalize for yourself.

So it's just four days for you to work on helping you build that calm and connection with your dog.

So my little sign off for the episode, like I always like to do, is when your dog's behavior feels like it's too much, I want you to remember that you're not failing.

It's really hard to think about that and consider it and remember it.

But I really want you to think I'm not failing.

You're very human.

You're feeling very human emotions, and your dog doesn't need perfection, they need your presence.

I always say that because I really want to hammer it home, that you don't need to be perfect here.

So thanks for listening.

I shall see 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.