Your Animals Doesn't Need You To Be Calm. They Need You To Be Honest.

The fastest way to send an animal to the back of the cage is to walk up to it pretending you're fine when you're not.

Not being scared. Not being sad. Pretending.

What animals hate most is incongruency. That's the mismatch between what you're feeling and what you're broadcasting, and they read it instantly. It's static in the field. You're standing there with your soft voice on, saying it's okay, it's okay, good boy, while your whole system is going please don't lunge at me, and the animal picks up the second thing, not the first.

They don't speak English. They speak emotion.

The bit that trips everybody up

We've been taught that the goal is to be calm around animals. Stay calm, don't let them see you nervous, project confidence.

So we perform calm. And performing calm is the exact thing that makes them uneasy, because now the human in front of them is wearing a mask and they can tell.

One of my members is getting ready to go and sit with dogs at her local shelter. She's nervous about it. She lost her own dog not long ago and she knows some of those dogs are going to look like him, and she's worried she'll get emotional in there.

Here's what I told her. Get emotional in there.

Stand in front of the kennel and say it out loud. I'm nervous right now, because you're barking and it's making me nervous. I'm also nervous about connecting with you, because you look like my dog and that's going to bring things up for me. I'm going to be sad and that's alright.

And the dog goes, okay. Here's a human who isn't pretending. I can work with this one.

That's congruency. Not calm. Congruent.

The dog who backed off

Another member told me about walking into a friend's house where the dog had never met her. He came at her, reactive in his own home, which apparently is his thing.

She didn't do the voice. She stood still and said, out loud, you don't like me being in your house because I'm a stranger, but I promise you I'm a friend. I'll respect you.

He backed right off. His person said he'd never done that before.

Nothing mystical happened there. She was the lighthouse. She was authentic and she was congruent, and the dog read her in about a second and a half and concluded she wasn't a threat. She wasn't even trying to be his friend, which is the other thing dogs find suspicious about strangers.

Congruent is not the same as nice

Nice is a performance. Congruent is just accurate.

You can be scared and congruent. You can be sad and congruent. You can be completely wobbly and still be the safest human in the room, as long as what's coming out of you matches what's going on inside you.

The wobble isn't the problem. The gap is the problem.

Stop apologizing to your animal

This is the one I catch people on constantly, and it's such a small shift.

Somebody in the group is working on getting a look inside her dog's mouth. Slowly, a bit at a time, and it's going beautifully. But listen to how she was framing it out loud to the dog: I really don't want to do this, but I need to.

Feel the difference between that and this: I know you're not thrilled about having your teeth looked at, and I totally get it. I'm going to make this as short as I can, and here's why I need to.

The first one hands the dog your discomfort. You've just told her this is a bad thing that you also don't want to be doing, and now there are two anxious animals in the room.

The second one is still honest. You haven't pretended to love it. You've just stopped making her carry your feelings about it.

Don't apologize for having emotions. Say the true thing without the guilt attached. I'm a little worried about this because I don't want to hurt you, and we still need to do it, and I promise we're only doing as much as we need to.

Assume competence

This is the piece I've been saying since I started running the group, and it's the whole foundation.

Assume they understand. Talk to them like a person you respect. Tell them what's happening, tell them why it's happening, tell them how long it's going to take and what you're feeling about it.

People find this embarrassing. They think they'll sound ridiculous narrating their life to a cat.

Do it anyway. And notice what it does to you while you're doing it, because that's half the point. You can't rush and narrate at the same time. The talking slows you down, and the slowing down is what the animal is actually responding to.

One of my members says she's never talked so much to an animal in her life, and her dog is unrecognizable from a year ago. Not because of the talking. Because of what the talking did to her nervous system.

The rush is the thing they're reading

Here's the other half of it.

If you want an animal to come towards you, your energy has to be attractive, not repellant.

Rushed is repellant. We have to get this done right now because I'm late is repellant. Coming at a cat on top of a cupboard with a giant pair of gloves on, looking like the child catcher, is extremely repellant. That's not cooperative energy, and nobody is moving towards it.

You want to be interesting enough that they come and check you out.

Anyone who has been around horses already knows this in their body. It's the same principle, just at a smaller scale and usually in your kitchen.

What this actually looks like on a Tuesday

The strategies my group is having the most success with all run on the same engine. Slow, congruent, no big deal.

Leave the tool out. My nail grinder lives on the coffee table in a box. I walk past and move it. Pick it up, put it back, do nothing with it. My husband does the same. He never braces for it, because it never means anything. I learned that trick with a vacuum cleaner years ago.

Do it as part of something you're already doing. A member put the grooming glove on while she was already stroking her cat, instead of announcing a Grooming Session. He'd been "sensitive" to that glove for months. Turned out he wasn't sensitive to the glove. He was sensitive to the announcement.

One paw at a time, and stop there. Somebody did one foot of nails and left the other three. Somebody else got a look at the front teeth and stopped. That's a win, and then you walk away from it. The stopping is the part that builds the trust, because next time they know it'll be short.

Wait for them to tell you it's enough, then believe them. When she gives you the okay, that's enough signal, take it. Once she trusts that you're not going to push past that line, she'll give you longer next time.

Notice whose smell is on the thing. If the grooming glove smells like the other cat, that's information the cat is getting and you aren't. Same with handing down a bed from a previous dog. It isn't his bed. It smells like somebody else.

Nobody is in an emergency. We're not at the vet. It's just you and them in the living room, and there is no reason the whole mouth has to happen today.

Why this is hard for us specifically

Women our age were taught to be efficient. Get it done. Get it off the plate, because there are a million other things on the plate. That's the water we swim in.

And it's the exact wrong gear for this work.

The slowing down isn't a nice extra. It's the intervention. It changes your physiology, and your animal is reading your physiology, so it changes theirs. Everything else is downstream of that.

Try it this week

Pick one thing you've been dreading doing to your animal. Nails, teeth, ears, medication, the carrier.

Then do three things. Tell them out loud what's happening and why. Tell them honestly how you feel about it, without apologizing for it. And do about a fifth of what you were planning to do, then stop while it's still going well.

That's it. That's the whole method, and it works on almost everything.

You'll know it landed when they don't leave the room.

If this landed, When Stress Hits Home goes deeper — how chronic stress moves through your animal, and what they're reflecting back. Click here to read more