18/09/2025
When you're working with dogs; you aren't working with dogs. You're working with the humans' experience of them.
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When I graduated university with a Psychology BSc degree, I still thought I wanted to help people. I moved away from that goal though when I fell into working with dogs in rescue instead. But I was naive to think it is one or the other.
It's both. It's always both.
One of the things I pride myself on is how much I can apply myself to both YOUR experience of your dog and your DOGS experience of you too. Attachment is one of the areas in my psychology degree that I enjoyed studying the most. My dissertation was on the caregiver experience of people with a diagnosed personality disorder. It involved interviewing caregivers and doing a qualitative analysis of their experiences. I've always wanted to understand not just the experience of the one struggling, but the others around them too.
A lot of my work is having some really tough conversations with people. It's a side of my work that doesn't get showcased here because it's delving into peoples deepest struggles. Struggles that aren't appropriate to share. But working with dogs isn't just looking at the surface behaviours and trying to change them. It's supporting all parties in understanding each other and bettering the attachment. Or, recognising when the love is there but that isn't always enough for co-habitation.
Ultimately there is a lot of give & take required in any relationship. Even if you are caring for a soul with emotional difficulties, finding reciprocity is important to avoid caregiver burnout. Leaning into what our dogs can and do give is sometimes a choice we have to actively make. That can be finding fun in an empty field to reconnect after a tough time of relapse (as ALL emotional difficulties, human or canine, have better times and harder times). Shared fun is an excellent way of feeling that give & take. It's why days off from behaviour modification to just decompress is so important. Decompression doesn't mean just passively exist in each others space. It can be an active search for fun and joy that involves no assessment or judgement on performance or compliance.
Attachment is complicated. Caregiver dynamics even more so. The depths of pain and desperation you can hit as a caregiver is a threat to your own mental health. But our dogs can boost our mental health as well as put a strain on it. Co-habitation is a dance of needs from both sides. There is no getting away from that.
Sometimes a happy ending looks nothing like we hoped it would. But it takes time to figure that out. Anything attachment-based takes time. And is rarely, if ever, a smooth ride up to betterment.
It's hard being a caregiver. It's even harder being a caregiver of someone with an emotional difficulty. Even harder still being a caregiver of someone with an emotional difficulty when you don't speak the same first language.
But our connection with our dogs can run far deeper than any human-human connection. That's our reward for taking the time to truly understand their experience of us, as well as our experience of them 🐾💜
