12/29/2025
Here's some dog-science about the affect of stress, trauma, and resilience:
(Apply this to yourself, your friends, coworkers, kids, animals, cryptid in the woods, etc)
We live in this world where capitalism and colonization are constantly at work to tell us that we need to "desensitize". That we must adapt to accept uncomfortable and aversive (causing pain, discomfort, intimidation, avoidance) stimulus by way of ignoring or allowing it until we cannot visibly interact with it. We are constantly lead to believe by our society that accomplishing desensitization equals respect, professionalism, tolerance, stability, and success.
(Examples; I do not condone these.) Teasing a kid; rushing an employee; poking a dog to be silly and "help them not react to the kids"; tapping a horse lightly with a crop so they're "startled less when it's corrective"; using 'only the vibration collar with treats'; telling a patient in therapy for sensory aversions they "have to touch the trash bin to get over it" are all examples of "desensitization". People think "lesser" aversive things stacked can make them more tolerable, or think that pairing an aversive thing with an appetizing thing magically makes it non-aversive. They may even have visual success to their goal so consider that the same thing.
Have you ever heard of flooding?
Flooding is an outcome of being overwhelmed. I am sure you have heard this a thousand times, but imagine this is like putting a drop of water in a sink. Every little drop -like your alarm going off, or driving to work- is still adding to the sink. It unfortunately doesn't magically drain if you forget them. What happens when you lose your keys and are late? It adds a cup of water, and so on, until that sink is full. If you're already at the top when a gallon gets added, your sink is now flooding.
It means you are over your tolerance threshold and are going into Learned Helplessness response/shut down. You can no longer affectively process what's happening around you, or think rationally. Your body is hyper focused on safety and escape.
"Wait what's "Learned-Helplessness"? Isn't that learning to be lazy?"
Learned Helplessness Response DOES NOT refer to a behavior of an animal/person deciding to be lazy, refusing to learn, nor does it refer to intelligence or lack-of-agency due to assistance from others.
'Learned Helplessness' IS a studied process in which the body cannot escape the stress, and has no other options to regulate or de-escalate; Causing:
-Sudden shutdown of the brains PFC (Prefrontal Cortex).
-Overstimulation of the amygdala and FEAR/PANIC (AN) response.
-Increased activity in the brains dorsal raphe nucleus (DRN) leading to sudden massive serotonin release.
+More
What does this mean?
It means the body shuts down everything. No more thinking, it's trying to stop the pain the best it can, no learning can happen, and the body will do anything to get out of the stress quicker. That might mean freezing, shutting down bodily processes, it might mean performing resilience.
Whatever it /looks/ like, sudden 'flooding' of stress leads to a prolonged state of increased panic, fear, depression, isolation, chronic anticipation of aversion; decreased cognition, optimism, response to adversity and even illness.
Doesn't this go away when the flooding stops?
The only way to decrease stress, is to decrease stressors, while building the anticipation for a safe and reliable future without fear, pain, intimidation. Meaning if you're running on any system which encourages prolonged exposure to stressors without resolve, it's going to be causing harm and chronic shut down. There's other options.
So what about counter-conditioning and desensitization?
I have put a lot of thought into this throughout the years. Instead of desensitization I have always worked using models of force-free counter-conditioning. I separate them, I think it's important to.
Here's what I have come up with: If we set our goal to simply reducing stressors for our learners; we observe more, and experience greater success in almost all other goals.
Desensitization without using aversive punishers typically aims to pair an aversive event with a rewarding or neutral event. Still relying on 1. the learner perceiving reward, and 2. Exposure to aversive event.
Many pro trainers practice 'counter-conditioning'. Similarly, this describes a process which pairs an event anticipated to be aversive; with a low stakes *choice-based* alternative task. It means if I'm with a dog who is scared of cars, we can offer a cookie and fun task when we see a car might be approaching; but if the choice is seeing the car means the dog wants to walk away, I will modify the task to walking away if we see a car coming. Helping build anticipation that they CAN escape (and we will help them!) when something is scary. They don't have to fight it, or fear it, or like it, they can just move away if they want. Oh look, it doesn't chase them. That's great. Maybe it's not so scary? "Maybe I can learn more about it?"
Instead of expecting an aversive thing to become less aversive by having to experience it again and again; or thinking adding a cookie to the scare makes intending to scare less bad; do what a good dog trainer would do:
1. Set a goal of reducing stress for our learners in their goals.
2. Focus on a care & connection based approach.
3. Help modify the environment (area, gear, routine, etc).
4. Identify what the learner needs; instead of what they aren't doing.
[Photo shows 4 pointers sitting together in a room while smiling for the camera]
