09/24/2024
I’m always amazed that this incredibly obvious aspect of the human/dog relationship dynamic is so often overlooked, or at the very least, underestimated.
You’ve spent all this time showing your dog precisely who you are, what you’ll accept, and what you’ll do when behavior is problematic. They know how far they can push, they know how firm, or not you can be. They know how uncertain you’ve been. They know how heart-first you’ve been. They know how soft you truly are.
Like any dysfunctional human relationship, where one party has allowed themselves to be trod upon, and then, after much work, learns how to stand up for themselves—how to have and articulate boundaries, and how to share consequences for trespasses against said boundaries—but finds that these new skills and this new awareness is met with pushback and disbelief...your dog will do the same. Because that’s what you taught them about you, because that’s who they know you as.
You wouldn’t be surprised if your human counterpart needed many repetitions, reminders, and considerable “convincing” that the new you is in fact a real, permanent, required-to-be-taken-seriously you—and that denial and pushback of this new you will not only be futile, but will also have consequences. If one were wise and experienced in the arena of relationship renegotiation, one would, or should expect this friction and effort. And so we should also expect that when we show up and “announce” to our dogs that “it’s a new day”, and we are in fact “new” people insofar as how this whole human/dog thing is going to go down—that we are here to take charge, to set rules and standards, and that we WILL be respected, and that we WILL enforce all we are demanding—that it might also take a considerable bit of repetition and “convincing” to prove that this “new” you is in fact one to be taken seriously and responded to accordingly.
The upshot? Don’t be surprised after having spent a great deal of time presenting a prior version of you—with all the mistakes, dysfunction, perceptions, and associations that were baked-in to that presentation and relationship dynamic—that your dog requires a bit more than your optimistic pronouncements, and newly acquired, but strangely alien, likely shaky, and most definitely unearned swagger...to be convinced.
