Reframing personal feelings around undesirable or challenging behaviours; the more you learn the easier it is to extend compassion to the actor .

It’s easy to become engulfed by problematic behaviours when they occur in your actor, dependent, learner or pet, whatever you want to term the individual you are trying to assist. This blog post will help you identify some of the complex emotions you may be feeling as you navigate the actor’s life.

If we focus primarily on behaviours associated with defensiveness, reactivity, stress or anger we do have the capacity to increase the likelihood of the behaviours continually occurring. Please read that again. Now you feel empowered, that you may in part be strengthening a behavioural sequence you don’t enjoy I want you to pause and take a feeling of empowerment and ownership over your actor’s experience in this world.

To help minimise the occurrence of undesirable behaviour it is, in fact, incredibly pertinent to reframe how we feel about the behaviours as they present themselves. I am going to give you an example of bird behaviour to help you change your feelings around the actor’s display of stress, reactivity or anger.

I recently had a client contact me asking for advice regarding bird feeding behaviour in her garden. She explained to me that the garden was being dominated by larger birds such as magpies and other birds from the corvid family scaring smaller and juvenile birds away, the type they wanted to see more of in their garden. In our consultation I requested to the client that she place all bird feed as close to the property as possible. I then asked her a week later if she had noticed any difference in the bird feeding behaviours in the property. The client informed me that she had.

So why did this work? Why did moving bird feed closer to the property of her home increase the likelihood of smaller and juvenile birds feeding and minimise the larger birds especially those of the corvid families visiting? It worked because of this. Corvid’s are an incredibly intelligent family of birds with more complex ability to problem solve, using memories to retain information that equips them in the arms race of life, such as being away from humans, which may cause them harm. If you are struggling with corvids dominating your garden I do invite you to test this theory in your own garden and start attaching bird feeders closer to your property. Smaller birds, whilst still needing to be safe, are not as complex and intelligent as corvids (for example) and therefore lack the complex learning history that corvids attain.

So why am I explaining this in terms of compassion for dependents, pets, learners etc?

Dogs, like humans (and birds) demonstrate encephalisation and front focal vision, which provides us information about them. It means that they demonstrate evolutionary traits associated with higher organisms meaning that they have the ability to accrue a complex learning history and therefore absorb strong memories of (what are perceived as) dangerous experiences. A dog, like a higher organism of the bird family, practices behaviours associated with avoiding risk. This means that dogs are intelligent, sentient beings, just like corvids and just like children.

So when we reframe the language associated with stress, reactivity and defensiveness and start to unpick the way those behaviours make us feel and start to consider, instead as our learners being incredibly intelligent, sentient beings with a complex learning history and an inherent desire to feel safe from “risk” we can begin our commitment towards training, coaching or teaching (whatever you want to call it), with more compassion, a greater understanding and more patience for those undesirable behaviours we struggle with. Sometimes, the greater the response, we can consider the stronger the emotion, and therefore brain power behind it.

I did a vlog recently about animal learners being able to learn anything, but that vlog predominantly applies to higher organisms which can be recognised and characterised by showing encephalisation, front focal vision and complex learning histories. So, rather than thinking how can I get my actor, dependent, learner and so forth to be less defensive, reactive or stressed out. Think how can I channel the intelligence this animal has into something beneficial for both handler/leader and actor.

I hope this helps

R

xxxxx