Listening to your gut

In the days since my last post, here’s what I’ve learned: sometimes you need to manage your internal state—and changing that can make a lot of difference—but sometimes your internal state is telling you that something external needs to change. Translation: sometimes you need to listen to your gut.

While Lupin and I did make some progress with the cow, the tying, and ourselves in certain ways, our sessions did not continue to head in a direction that felt right to me. For one thing, no matter how much progress we seemed to make, Lupin continued to pull back day after day. We were definitely being successful in conjuring a primal fear to confront, but we seemed to be less successful in actually dealing with it.

I began to sense, in fact, that things were unraveling. I knew I couldn’t walk away from this issue now that it was in front of us, but I was concerned that it was going to start to destroy our relationship, and I could see us going back to the brief and bizarre period during which things had gotten so bad that, while I could do highly advanced moves with Lupin, I couldn’t lead him in from the field.

So I retreated some. We started working on tying in a totally different location. Once again we used the blocker tie so he could move his feet, and I confronted Lupin with a series of potentially scary things, each time starting small and close and then getting to where I could run at him with the thing from a distance. I used violently flapping plastic bags right up in his face; I had a friend run at him shouting and wearing a tarp cape; we took turns banging trash can lids right next to him.

I had done some of this before with Lupin without much effect; now, re-energized by his encounters with the cow, Lupin pulled back—sometimes quite violently and for several repetitions. We kept the stimulus up each time until he came back forward, lowered his head, looked directly at the thing instead of turning away, or licked and chewed. Since we were able to control the stimulus (and therefore both the extent of Lupin’s fear and when the stimulus stopped), we began making rapid progress.

Not only did Lupin pull back less and less far with each repetition, he began to get curious and mouth/lick the objects after he came back forward, even though they continued to scare him a little when they were in use. He also stayed very connected to me and looked to me for reassurance in a way that he hadn’t done much around the cow: there, he tended to stay focused on the cow and on getting away. That was what my gut had been responding to.

Being a recovering perfectionist, I try not to get too hung up on progress simply for the sake of reaching a goal, but sometimes a lack of progress is a good indicator that your strategy needs to change. Ultimately, it was the lack of progress that confirmed what my gut had been telling me and gave me the incentive to try something different.

The resulting change in Lupin has been huge. As soon as I saw the difference in the way he responded--not without fear, but with the ability to work through his fear--I finally understood what my gut had been telling me. The cow experience didn't look like learning; this does. And that gives me the motivation I need to commit to a long-term program (with plans to include bicycles, fake cows, llamas, and every potentially scary thing I can think of). I’m even resigned to the fact that I’m just going to have to buy a cow at some point.

But if we can work through a major confidence issue for Lupin, it’s worth the time, the effort, and even cow ownership. And the day that Lupin walks up and licks a cow? That will be priceless.