OUT OF FEAR
Special micromanagement program for the
Fear is an unpleasant emotion that generates overstimulation that prepares the dog to flee or, if unable to do so, to attack or show helplessness. There are no good or bad emotions, but rather they are activated, exploited and deactivated in an adaptive or maladaptive way (appropriate or inappropriate). Most treatments that work on fears focus more on managing activation and neglect the deactivation phase. And it is precisely in this phase where it is necessary to be more incisive, since if the dog is not able to disconnect correctly, it runs the risk of creating an emotional footprint.
This program works entirely outside of the specific situations that activate fear in the dog. The sessions have a gamified design where the dog will have to overcome challenges as if they were video game screens. This allows, on the one hand, to avoid potentially harmful emotional peaks and, on the other, to offer a much more effective and enjoyable therapeutic process for the tutor and his dog. We will pose challenges that will provoke ambiguous states of insecurity and prospective curiosity in him and we will let him manage them freely. He himself will decide if he wants to overcome a challenge and how he wants to do it, always supported, emotionally and socially, by his tutor. This self-management of experiences will progressively provide the dog with two capacities that result from facing and overcoming fear; courage and a taste for challenges.
Fearful dogs have a hard time feeling relief after an emotionally unpleasant episode. This ability to move from a negative emotion (a fright) to a positive one (relief after the fright) is acquired through experience, having repeatedly moved from one emotion to another.
Sensory stimulation work will facilitate this training and will play the role of an emotional emulator through which the dog will be able to transfer the skills learned during the sessions to the problematic situations of everyday life.