The Nervous System Is Learning Too

Adoption, behavior, dogs, and learning to look through a different lens

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I'm doing something a little different and a little more personal with this one.

Today is my adoption day. I've joked before about having a "gotcha day" just like the dogs, but the older I get, the more complicated adoption feels to me.

I was given up by both of my biological parents. There was heavy drug use during the pregnancy with me, and then I grew up in an environment that was very different from where I started. For a long time, those were just facts about my life. I didn't really think about what any of that could mean for a developing brain and nervous system.

As I've gotten older and learned more about CPTSD, neurodivergence, masking, conditioning and burnout, I've started looking at some of my own history differently.

And, apparently, I can't think about anything for very long without eventually connecting it to dogs. 😂

What We Learn Without Being Taught

I've spent most of my life learning about dogs.

I started raising guide dogs when I was around 11 and continued until I was 18. Later, service dogs became part of my college experience and I had the opportunity to learn from Dr. Bonnie Bergin. I eventually studied canine behavior more formally, completed a variety of dog training and ethology programs, including Kim Brophy's Family Dog Mediator course, did my master's work in canine studies, and just kept collecting different ways of looking at behavior.

Somewhere along the way, I realized how much of what I was learning applied to something bigger than training.

We're always learning. Not just when someone is intentionally teaching us something.

Our nervous systems are constantly gathering information about what is safe, what predicts conflict, what works, what doesn't, when we can relax and when we need to be ready.

Our bodies learn patterns too.

Growing up, a lot of my memories involve correction, negative feedback and conflict around behavior or emotional expression. There was very much a children should be seen and not heard mentality.

When expression itself regularly creates conflict, you get pretty good at monitoring yourself.

You learn to anticipate. You learn what gets noticed. You learn what not to do. You learn how to be quieter or smaller or easier. Eventually, shutting down can be easier than constantly being corrected.

From the outside, that might even look like improvement.

That's something I think about a lot with dogs:

Did we actually help them understand and regulate?

Or did they just learn that expressing themselves doesn't work?

Those aren't necessarily the same thing.

The Reflection We're Given

When you're young, so much of how you understand yourself is reflected back to you through the people around you.

If the reflection you're constantly getting is that you're difficult, too emotional, too loud, too sensitive, frustrating, or always doing something that needs to be corrected, eventually that becomes information too.

You don't necessarily have the ability yet to step outside of it and think, maybe this environment doesn't understand me very well.

You just learn that there are parts of you that need fixing.

So you adjust.

You monitor yourself. You become whatever version of yourself seems to create the least conflict. And after doing that long enough, it can get surprisingly difficult to separate who you actually are from who you learned you needed to be.

I think about this with dogs too. We decide a dog is stubborn, difficult, dramatic, reactive, lazy, too much, not motivated enough…and then we start interacting with them through that lens.

That changes the environment around the dog, which can change the dog's behavior, which can then reinforce the story we already had about them.

Sometimes the lens becomes part of the problem.

Maybe There's a Reason Those Dogs Have Always Made Sense to Me

When I was training service dogs in college, we rotated dogs between students so we could gain experience working with different breeds, ages and personalities.

Somehow, I kept getting most of the dogs with behavior problems. 😂

They were the dogs other students would complain about or make comments about hoping they would never be assigned. Sometimes a dog's reputation seemed to enter the room before the actual dog did.

I loved them…and I definitely learned more from those dogs than I did from the "easy" ones.

One of the most interesting things was watching the same dog thrive with one person and really struggle with another.

Some handlers communicated with the dog, played with them, fulfilled them, built a relationship and adjusted when something wasn't working.

Other times, training could become almost mathematical:

I did X. The dog should do Y.

And when Y didn't happen, the frustration went toward the dog.

The dog isn't listening. The dog knows this. The dog is being difficult.

I kept wanting to look at the whole picture:

What's happening in this environment? What's happening in this relationship? What does this individual dog need? And what are we bringing into the interaction?

Years later, Kim Brophy's L.E.G.S. framework - Learning, Environment, Genetics and Self - gave me another way to organize something I think I'd already been noticing for years.

Behavior doesn't happen in a vacuum…and humans are part of the environment too.

Change the Lens Before You Try to Change the Behavior

I think this is one of the biggest things dogs have taught me. It's more than just trying to "see it from their perspective," because we're still viewing their experience through our own brain.

I want to understand the being in front of me.

Their history. Their biology. Their genetics. Their sensory experience. Their environment. What they've learned. What brings them joy. What overwhelms them. What we're asking them to suppress just to fit into the life we've created.

Often, the first question shouldn't be:

How do I stop this behavior?

It should be:

Why does this behavior make sense to this nervous system?

That doesn't mean we don't teach skills, have boundaries or help individuals learn how to navigate the world. It means understanding comes before assuming.

Sometimes we need to change (or at least understand) the environment instead of constantly trying to change the individual.

Being "Good" Isn't Always the Same as Being Okay

This is probably where my own experiences with masking and burnout have changed the way I think about dogs even more.

You can become incredibly good at functioning in an environment that doesn't work very well for you.

You can learn what's expected. You can perform it. You can look completely fine from the outside while spending an enormous amount of energy staying that way.

Dogs can become incredibly compliant too.

I don't mean that dogs experience human masking or that we should diagnose them with human conditions. I mean that dogs learn to inhibit behavior. They learn what works, what doesn't and what gets corrected.

Sometimes suppression can look a whole lot like success from the outside.

The absence of unwanted behavior isn't automatically the presence of wellbeing; that's especially important to me with service dogs.

I don't want a service dog's entire life to be about everything they need to do for a human. I want to know what we're doing for the dog too.

What fills their cup? What speaks to their genetics? Where do they get to move, sniff, chase, search, tug, play, rest and just be a dog?

That's a huge reason biological fulfillment, play, relationship and dog sports have become such important parts of how I train.

I don't want dogs who are simply really good at tolerating their lives.

I want dogs who enjoy participating in them.

We Are Part of the Environment

Another thing I think about constantly is emotional regulation. We ask children and dogs to regulate themselves all the time.

Calm down. Stop reacting. Control yourself. Pay attention.

Yet it's incredibly difficult to teach regulation when the person asking for it is escalating too.

I certainly don't expect anyone, including myself, to be perfectly regulated all the time. Regulation itself is something we learn and practice.

Sometimes our reactions happen incredibly fast. Our bodies can be responding before we've had much time to consciously think through what we're doing. That's another reason I think it's so important to practice regulation ourselves when we're responsible for another nervous system that's still learning.

Children and dogs aren't born knowing how to navigate every emotion or situation we're asking them to handle.

If we're the ones teaching them, what are we showing them?

Sometimes we're tired. Sometimes we're frustrated. Sometimes we react badly.

The goal is to practice “noticing”, not to expect  unrealistic perfection. It's being willing to recognize when I'm contributing to an interaction that isn't working. Maybe neither one of us is learning anything useful anymore. Maybe we need to stop, change something, regulate, repair and try again.

We can't continually demand regulation from another nervous system without considering what our own nervous system is bringing into the interaction.

And Somehow, This Brings Me Back to Myself

I've spent a huge part of my life being drawn to the dogs people were struggling with. The dogs that were too much. The dogs who shut down. The dogs who didn't fit neatly into someone's expectations. The dogs who seemed completely different when you changed the environment, the routine, the relationship or the person working with them.

Maybe there's a reason those dogs have always made sense to me.

Learning about my own neurodivergence, CPTSD and history hasn't made me want to explain everything about myself through a diagnosis or through adoption; it's made me more curious.

There are things my nervous system learned long before I understood what was happening. There are adaptations that probably helped me at one point and exhausted me later. There are things I've had to unlearn, and other things I've realized don't actually need to be "fixed."

Funny enough, that's what I've been asking people to do with their dogs for years:

Get curious before judging.

Look underneath the behavior.

Consider the history and the environment.

Remember the individual in front of you.

And sometimes, before trying so hard to change the behavior, change the lens you're looking through.

Behavior is information.

Suppression can look like success.

Adaptation can be impressive and still be exhausting.

And whether we're talking about dogs or humans, one thing I keep coming back to is this:

The nervous system is learning, too.