Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
The old paradigm is breaking apart. The new one is still not fully shaped.
If we're going to emerge into a just, equitable - and above all regenerative - future, we need to get to know the people who are already living, working, thinking and believing at the leading edge of inter-becoming transformation.
Accidental Gods exists to bring these voices to the world so that we can work together to lay the foundations of a world we'd be proud to leave to the generations that come after us.
We have the choice now - we can choose to transform…or we can face the chaos of a failing system.
Our Choice. Our Chance. Our Future.
Find us at: https://accidentalgods.life
Find Manda's Thrutopian novel, Any Human Power here: https://mandascott.co.uk
Find Manda on BlueSky @mandascott.bsky.social
On LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/mandascottauthor/
On FaceBook https://www.facebook.com/MandaScottAuthor
Manda: Hey people, welcome to Accidental Gods. To the podcast where we believe that another world is still possible and that if we all work together, there is still time to lay the foundations for a future that we would be proud to leave to the generations that come after us. I'm Manda Scott, your host and fellow traveller in this journey into possibility. And this week, we're exploring a field that I've been hovering on the edges of for at least 30 years. I was fascinated by animal behaviour when I was a vet. I very nearly went off and did a PhD in ethology amongst many other PhDs that I thought about doing. And then when I realised I actually wanted to be writing for a living and began to step away and was able actually to get my own dog (yay!) that's when I realised the huge, huge gap in my own knowledge. And I've been trying to fill it in ever since. Because it seems to me that if we can learn how to be around another sentient being with whom we don't share verbal language, then we are learning something incredibly valuable that will help us to connect to the rest of the web of life. So I've been exploring this, going to workshops, reading books, watching webinars, listening to people lately, exploring Facebook. And at the turn of the year, I joined one of those multi lecturer webinars where you get everything for free, and then they want you to sign up for their own thing. And I discovered Andrew Hale, who was not trying to get me to sign up for everything.
Manda: He was just making astonishing sense, bridging the gap between human psychology and the psychology of dogs. Making generalisations that completely landed with me. And I've been exploring his Dog Centred Care, the YouTube channel where he brings in the most amazing people and then holds really raw, passionate, deep, fruitful conversations with them. So I wanted to have one of those conversations on the podcast, and finally we got to it.
Manda: So a bit of a biography. Andrew was trained in human psychotherapy, and he's now a certified animal behaviourist who specialises in working complex behaviour cases, especially those involving what people call reactivity and aggression. And I invite you to look around you at the world we're in. Look at the news. What two words best describe the nature of our local, national and geopolitical processes? I would say reactivity and aggression are really distressingly high on the list. So what do we do about it? Andrew is one of those remarkable people who is committed to a dog centred care approach. His website is called Dog Centred Care. His Facebook page is called Dog Centred Care and I have put links to both in the show notes. He works with empathy and compassion to understand why any being is behaving in the way that it does. His focus is on dogs, often on dogs that are actually physically dangerous. But what we're learning, and the reason I've invited him onto the podcast, is because we know now that all the theories of secure or ruptured attachment of the need for co-regulation of autonomy, agency, confidence, safety, apply in dogs and in people or any sentient being.
Manda: So the question then is how do we do that for ourselves, for each other and for everything around us? And that's where we went. In this conversation we dived deeply into trauma or at least trauma responses, and Andrew was very open about his own childhood trauma. We looked at our capacity for secure attachment in the modern world, our parenting skills or lack of them, our skills as people who choose to share our lives with other people and other sentient beings. And ultimately, we looked at our skills in helping ourselves to cope with a culture that is increasingly going off the rails. And it's not about to get any better. So the more we can find out about ways to create stability, to co-regulate, to find the capacity for compassion and empathy and awareness and kindness and all of the things that help us to be stable, the more likely we are to be able to help others. So that's what this episode is all about. Relax. Go get yourself a cup of tea and let's explore what really makes us tick. People of the podcast with great heart and great joy, please welcome Andrew Hale of Dog Centred Care.
Manda: Andrew, welcome to the Accidental Gods podcast. I am so pleased to be talking to you at last. How are you and where are you on this sunny October morning?
Andrew: You know, it's great to see you, Manda. I've been really looking forward to this. And I love that as a question: how are you? Because that's a really important question, isn't it, for all of us. And it's a question we should ask ourselves and ask our loved ones and ask our animals too. How are you? So I'm well, I've just come back from holiday, so that's been great. And I had a wonderful week with my husband. We do feel a bit like kind of ships in the night sometimes, you know, it's like when you're busy doing things. So it's just nice to kind of feel each other's quality of each other's presence, if you like, for a week. So that's been great. And where am I? I'm very lucky, I live right opposite a beach down in Devon. I was going to say sunny Devon, but it's not particularly sunny at the moment. But Yeah, down here in Devon and in the UK, and we're just blessed down here. We love it. I don't think I could be too far away from the sea, Manda. I love how special it makes me feel, but also the humbleness of kind of recognising your smallness in comparison to the might of it. I just love to see it.
Manda: Yeah. Exactly that. It's hard not to be humble when the might of the ocean and its fluidity and the way that it changes. It's such a beautiful reflection of who we are as people and of our relationships with ourselves and each other. And that's why I wanted to invite you on today. I listened to a lot of your YouTubes. I am a fangirl, so I'll endeavour not to get too fangirly, but there's so much compassion and raw humanity in what you do, and so much of it makes sense. When I first started getting interested in dog behaviour work back in the 90s, we were lucky if anybody used a clicker. And they didn't use them very well. But it was a reflection of our own way of treating ourselves, it seemed to me, everybody was behaviour; we will behave the way we are told to behave. Because the people who were dog training in the 80s and the 90s had grown up in the 60s with parents who had gone through the war. And it takes a long time, it seems to me, for society to catch up with what's real. But we are beginning to. And your dog centred care, and all of the way that you talk about it, seems to me to open doors much, much wider than simply people who have trouble with dogs not behaving in our mad world, the way we want them to. So before we go into all the ways we could go, can you just give us a grounding in what brought you here? Because from what I know of your background, you had quite a hard childhood. And obviously you said already you're a man with a husband. I'm a woman with a wife. Growing up knowing that, the ages we are, was hard. Tell us what brought you to where you are now.
Andrew: So before I came to working with animals, I've got a human psychology background. And I worked in human based therapies for about ten years, I suppose, before I moved over to animals. And I often get asked, you know, why are you working with dogs now? And that's because of my own breakdown in my 30s. I had my own breakdown. And the mother of all breakdowns I call it, because it really came. And it just goes to show, just because you know about stuff academically it doesn't make you immune to stuff necessarily. And I always find it really interesting when I interview people, on my kind of platform. I'm always really interested in their backstory. Because I understand now, because of my own, I had sexualised trauma when I was young, with non-family members. I always like to point that out. My pursuance of the interest in psychology was actually about my trying to understand self. And I think a lot of our own stories are about that, because whether we know it consciously or subconsciously, I didn't know it at the time, but it's very clear to me now. So I had my breakdown. I also had a drug addiction building up to that. And looking back now, I think, wow, it all makes sense to me. And this is the thing about allowing ourselves to be vulnerable about our own story, because it's the best antidote to shame, really. I won't feel shame. And that's why I'm happy to share about my story, because it's part of my story. And it makes sense to me.
Andrew: So for me then, this is the side of things. I think within the similarities between the progressive side of child educational psychology and development, which has really moved on a lot in the last 20 years or so. In fact, my Dog Centred Care title, if you like, is an adaptation of child centred care, because that's where things shifted a lot. But we've still got a long way to go. And with animals, we also have a long way to go. Because there is this difference, Manda, I think. A lot of people who think they understand behaviour, actually really they understand how to make another behave, and there is a big difference. So that's what's happened; many of us are conditioned into this construct called the good/bad continuum, that most of us have been indoctrinated into in a very heavy way. So much so that we don't even question it until we do. So the good/bad continuum kind of proposes that somehow behaviour is seen as being on a continuum of good through to bad, and that we should do what we can to reward and support the good and punish or ignore the bad. Yeah. And actually, most people hearing that think, well, that's right, isn't it? We want more good behaviour, we want less bad behaviour. And I totally get that. We do need to have some societal norms, rule of law, social decency and all this kind of stuff. However, the question and this is the thing that I'm really keen about thinking about; who's deciding what's good or bad?
Andrew: What is motivating those narratives? How arbitrary does those outcomes have to become? There's so many threads to this that we have to understand, but our brain is a judging machine. Especially as adults, we have created our 'safe world view', as we call it, which is based on our belief systems, our value systems. Our beliefs are what we believe to be true, and our values are what we feel is important. Now, the interesting thing about a lot of these things, is a lot of that has been inputted into us when we're young, without questioning it. Most of our core beliefs have no necessarily factual basis other than somebody told us. So all these things come in there. So our brain is designed to do what would be classed as cognitive appraisals, which is quick thinking judgement. So we are designed to judge. And there's two things about us humans. One is we love to judge. Secondly, we hate to be judged. Because we know our individual experiences are complicated. And so I think actually there are only two types of behaviour, really. There's all these people with different views on behaviour and different camps. Any dog people, dog professionals listening in, you can take my word that the human psychology world, the clinical world, the medical, they're just as kind of disparate and full of different camps and different people saying, 'I've got the answer!', 'no, I've got the answer!'.
Manda: They tend not to use electric collars, I have to say. That went out a while ago.
Andrew: It did go out a while ago, but you'd be surprised how often that kind of approach is still used, actually.
Manda: Okay, okay, we'll use violence but it won't be as overt as strapping something around your neck and then electrifying it.
Andrew: Exactly. Yeah. And this is why we've got to challenge what's going on in animal training, for sure, and see it for what it is. And we can perhaps come back to that. But the thing is, there's two types of behaviour for me: the behaviour we judge in others, and understanding that and understanding the kind of challenges with that; and the behaviour we do ourselves. Because guess what? It's complicated. How we behave is complicated. And behaviour really is often an expression of need and an expression of self. But as I say, because we're so indoctrinated into this good/bad continuum, from a young age a lot of our needs are overlooked because somebody has decided our behaviour is bad, disruptive, difficult, challenging.
Andrew: And I've experienced that myself, because when I had my abuse as a child, guess what? It affected my behaviour. The one thing about trauma, especially when it becomes traumatising is that nothing changes; nothing changed for me after that experience. My parents were the same. My friends were the same. My school was. What changes is your perception of it. And I went from feeling very safe as a child to not feeling safe, and that's a big thing that we have to recognise, safety. We can unpack that a bit more as well. So my behaviour changed and it was noticed at school and it was noticed at home. The school took a very disciplinarian view and I ended up having the cane eventually.
Manda: I'm just in shock, but yes, but of course that's what happened in those days.
Andrew: I think anybody under a certain age Manda would be like God, they used to hit kids with sticks. So I had the cane and guess what? My behaviour changed because I didn't want to get the cane anymore.
Manda: So it supressed the overt behaviour that they were actually targeting, but it didn't change the fact that you no longer felt safe. In fact, I'm guessing you felt even less safe.
Andrew: Exactly. And my parents took a different view because they were very successful and they worked very hard, and I had everything I wanted as a child.
Manda: Materially.
Andrew: Materially. But I didn't have them much. Because they were working and they were going to functions and all the kind of things. So my father kind of picked up on that a little bit, and he thought my behaviour change was me being more rebellious and everything else. So he thought, look we do need to spend more time as a family. It's going to be contingent on you behaving better. So guess what? I wanted the love of my parents. I wanted them more. So guess what? My behaviour changed. So my behaviour changed on both fronts. This is the thing about when we think about things through what we call an operant lens, you know, this kind of notion of getting more or less behaviour in a very arbitrary way, as though that's the most important thing. So my behaviour changed. So the consequences in the moment worked. But the real consequence for me came some 15 years later with my drug addiction and my breakdown. So I think I've always had this personal connection, also this recognition of the importance of trying to find out, recognise more about the individual's lived emotional experience, and seeing beyond the behaviour. Because that's important.
Manda: Whether it's a dog or a person or a cat or a giraffe or a bull or a nation, I would suggest, looking at what's happening around the world.
Andrew: Yeah. This is important because as a species it's hard for us, because we think we're different, but we're not really on many levels. And, a lot of the emotional responses, a lot of those initial emotional loads that we feel, they trigger responses. And actually it's very easy to give in to those. Very easy, actually. And getting to a point where you can change your relationship with those feelings and judgements, so that they don't necessarily drive a response, is something that is relatively new to us as a species.
Manda: Is it? Okay, I realise you're in the middle of a sentence here, but I really want to unpack this because I'm living in a frame at the moment where our trauma culture, the trauma that 10,000 years ago split us off from the web of life. But there are indigenous cultures and also the whole history of humanity, where we were intimately connected with the web of life, where separability was not a thing, and where people grew up. I'm reading a lot of Bill Plotkin at the moment, and he has eight stages of human emotional evolution two in childhood, two in adolescence two in adulthood, two in elderhood. And he says, most of Western culture is locked in early adolescence. We never progressed beyond that. But indigenous cultures do. And I'm wondering whether what you're referring to is a Western thing that may not apply to genuinely realised individuals in indigenous cultures. Does that Land at all?
Andrew: Totally. What we have to recognise, I think, is if you think about emotions, moods, feelings, all that kind of stuff we have; and then behaviour, you know the behavioural output and the consequences of that, which gets fed back in. I think indigenous cultures kept that process whole. You feel, you act, you respond. You're very aware of the social dynamics, the importance of social groups, the importance of structure while staying grounded with Mother Nature and being part of the cycles of things. Part of the process of becoming 'civilised', part of that process as we created more complex social structures and our inventiveness and creativity, which started to come more into what we started to invent about making our life easier and not having to rely on Mother Nature so much.
Manda: Or we tell ourselves we don't.
Andrew: Well, no. We were over in Crete, or was it Rhodes? I can't remember. We were in Greece anyway. And they were talking about the sponges that people go down and dive for. And back in the day when you were reliant upon how long you could hold your breath for to go down, it was a natural way of preserving it. And then, of course, when the iron helmet came along...
Manda: Oh yes, you could go lower for longer and clean out the sponges.
Andrew: And they've all gone. That for me is a good little representation of a bigger picture for what we're doing, because we can. I think the kind of by-product of that is that we've almost taken behaviour and consequences away and separated them from the emotions, feelings and moods. Because of the structures that came in, a lot of things around social decency and rules of law and all these kind of things. Especially here in Britain, with our stiff upper lip and that whole kind of thing that we think about. But this is relatively new stuff for us, I think. So we're very constrained, really constrained. There's a saying which I think is probably one of the most damaging, which is, 'well, they've got to learn'. You know, kids who feel uncomfortable changing in a communal changing room or being made to be social with the family, when we think in terms of social safety and emotional safety. Well, they've got to learn. What are they learning? They're not learning to be sociable, they're learning to mask it, they're learning to find coping mechanisms.
Andrew: And I think most of us then actually, I would say by the time we become adults, we have a belief system which is deeply corrupted, actually. Not just about those around us, but also about self. And then if we add into that part of our makeup as a species, which is a big driver for us, Manda, a big driver. This will lead us into attachment and all sorts. but to be sociable, to have kind of cooperative care and social safety, it takes a lot for the brain to feel okay, I feel comfortable with this. So we tend to seek those that we feel safe with. And so we find our our group, our kind of tribe if you like, our whatever. And that was a lot easier back in the day when we had that notion of locality and village elders and family and all these kind of things. Now, of course, we're spread out. So this leads us then to the problem of 'othering', which the political classes seem to quite like to dive into a little bit, because they're different to you.
Manda: Oh God, yes. And watching the Tory party leadership contest of who can other the most people the nastiest, is going to win. And then the American election.
Andrew: And suddenly it has a lot of political oomph to it, in these days, I'm afraid. Because people need somebody to blame for their lack of opportunity, their lack of housing. So it's better to blame other than to actually think about we're not structuring society very well. That's another story. So this comes on to this thing that to navigate these feelings that you might have, and to change your relationship with them, and not have them drive different responses. And this is what I love about compassion, because compassion isn't about condoning or approving of, it's about turning up anyway. But to have that, to think, okay, I can see that person might have done something that I feel uncomfortable with, or say something that I'm uncomfortable with. But despite that, I'm still going to try and turn up anyway. That is seen as being a weakness almost, it seems, being a kind of snowflakey wokeness. Actually, I think it's the pinnacle of human development because it's hard. It's easy just to work on that initial cognitive appraisal, that initial judgement. It's easy to do that, and I think social media makes it even easier to do that. So there you go.
Manda: Yes. Social media doesn't have to. I read a lot of Audrey Tang and she's coming on the podcast later in the year. And she developed in Taiwan, with the government, a social medium that excluded the tribal chaos at either side. It just didn't get repeated and pushed up. And people got more exposure for endeavouring to build bridges across divides. And it was an entirely different feeling. So our social media does what it does because it makes more money for the people who run it if we're screaming at each other, than if we're trying to be collegiate. That's that's a separate thing. I have a whole bunch of questions before we move on to attachment theory, which I really want to. Way back, you said not all traumatic things are traumatising, and I think that's a really important concept; that a trauma response or a traumatised response is a response, and that things can be traumatic and we don't end up traumatised. Is that a thing you would like to unpick? Can you unpick that? I've been listening, again, Thomas Hubel that comes from. If that's not a thing you want to unpick, we'll leave it and go on.
Andrew: I'm happy to look at anything. I think it's important for us. I try and look at most things. We all have a lens that we look through in life. I've kind of classed mine as the emotional experience lens, because I find it's the one that matches most of how I want to try and connect. The thing about the emotional experience is we all have one. This is the point. And this is why science struggles with some stuff. I value science, it helps me hugely in my work. I am led by the science, but I am not defined by it. I think that's very important that we have to think about that. I'm not waiting to be have something proven by anyone, there wasn't a study on that. I'm happy to think my own observations seem to imply to me that this dog is telling me this, and I'm happy to have a study of one. And that's okay sometimes.
So that's the thing about emotional experience. We all have one and we're all a unique combination really, Manda, of our genetics, our experiences, our trauma, our secure and insecure attachments, our learning histories. So the information we take on through our senses, that notion of sensory integration, will have all these different filters and all these different ways of looking at stuff. So the individual lived experience is a unique one. This is the thing. We all have an emotional experience. And even now I think most people, I don't know anybody now who would say, well, the dog doesn't have one, or the cat doesn't have one, or the horses have one. But they will often say, well, we don't know how they think and feel.
Manda: Yeah, because we can't anthropomorphise and they can't tell us.
Andrew: And actually people would say the same thing about children back in the day.
Manda: Yes, when I was an anaesthetist I had a paper from the 70s, so not outside our remit, by a professor in Edinburgh saying that babies did not feel pain because they could not articulate it and therefore they didn't need analgesics.
Andrew: Wow.
Manda: And that was published in a peer reviewed journal, a good peer reviewed journal. So yes.
Andrew: This is the tricky thing about just looking at things purely from a behavioural output point of view. Because what happens in animal training, especially dogs, cats, horses, is this notion of, well, we don't know what they think and feel, so we'll just look at behaviour. Are we getting more of it or are we getting less of it?
Manda: And that's what you talked about, an operant lens. You said that earlier. Most people aren't going to know what that is. So if you could unpick an operant lens and then carry on with what you're saying, that would be really useful.
Andrew: Yes. So we have the operant quadrants. And this is Skinner's work really, but looking at how we influence the behaviour of another, whether we get more of it or less of it. And we have positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, positive punishment, negative punishment. Positive and negative aren't value statements, they are just adding or taking away. So positive means I'm adding something. Reinforcement and punishment: reinforcement means we'll see more of the behaviour and punishment means we'll see less of it. And that operant lens is heavily used within animal training but also with children. When you think about the ABA, the applied behavioural analysis side of things, especially with children who are non-communicative, verbally. Nonverbal communicative. So there's this focus on thinking I don't know how the animal thinks and feels, so we're just going to utilise operant means often to get more or less behaviour. Going back to that emotional experience lens, this is the problem for me, so we all have an emotional experience right? But the second thing is they are all unique to us as individuals. So the point is, Manda, I don't know how you think and feel, let alone the dog. So should I ignore that then and think I'm just going to get Manda to behave in a way that I think is appropriate?
Andrew: And especially when we start thinking about projecting safety onto another. Manda, if you would behave like this, you'll feel safe and you'll feel okay. And that's the point. And there's a great saying, which is 'the path to coercion is often laid with good intention'. And I think that's important, isn't it? Because quite often we think, oh, if only my husband would behave or do this, he'd be happy and it'd be okay. But will he? Maybe. Who knows? And that's what we have to recognise. It's very easy to project our own idea of and sense of safety to another.
Manda: Right. And it might not be theirs. Right.
Andrew: Exactly. So we have to think about that. And this is the big shift that's going on, because a lot of the work we do with animals and children is being very transactional. So when I think about that story I shared with my parents, that was transactional.
Manda: Totally. Their goodwill and emotional availability was contingent on your behaviour. And surprise, surprise, 15 years later you fall apart.
Andrew: Yeah. And this is a big thing that happens with children of course, because they want to feel love. They want to have connection. And so they will behave to get it, even at the expense of their need to feel safe. We have a bias when we think about safety in another, of physical safety, because that's what we can get feedback from.
Manda: Right. And to an extent, that's what I can create. I can not let my dog be near a giant threatening other big dog and then I decide that my dog feels safe. I might have three kids in the house that are pulling its ears off, but I don't know that.
Andrew: Exactly. So with our own brain and the brain of dogs, it's more focussed on emotional and social safety and that's why you can be safe and not feel it. So this is really important then. A great colleague of mine Rachel Leather, who is a trauma expert, she was a trauma expert with humans and now she works with animals. One of her sayings is 'you can't teach safety' because the other has to feel it. Now that is accurate. And it brings into question then, oh, if you can't teach safety, what do we do with dog training then? And I can answer that: not much. I've got a great little analogy, which is if you imagine the brain has lots of little doors in it, we need as many doors to stay open for us to have a chance at being able to process well, for that sensory integration process. The sensory integration is just how our brain takes all the information from our sensory system, internal and external, and processes it. Pain, trauma, stress they're all big door closers. We know that. You know, if you're stressed, we have sayings, don't we: I can't think straight right now, I don't have the bandwidth for this right now. So guess what the first doors are going to be, when that animal starts to feel a stress response?
Andrew: The first doors that are going to start closing are the doors where the training is behind. Why? Because the bulk of training has little intrinsic value to the animal. The doors are likely to stay open are the survival doors. And that's why the dog is not listening to you right now. But the problem is, because the general public have been convinced, and again it's a relatively new thing, Manda. The last 20 or 30 years. I remember growing up in the 70s while we watched Barbara Woodhouse on the TV, maybe that was about it. Most people didn't train their dogs, they just had a relationship with them and they were just with them. But now the general public have been convinced the most important thing is a well-trained, obedient dog. Now, I'm not saying we shouldn't be doing training; training is fine. But if that's the most important thing, where's the opportunity for that dog to say I can't right now, I'm struggling right now, I need you right now. And I have my 'learn, support, teach' mantra, which helps us. Because we need to learn from the dog first. The problem is, there's a great kind of construct in human psychology, which is there is a difference between what we're taught and what we learn. And I want people to really think about that: the difference between what we're taught and what we learn.
Andrew: So the problem with what we are taught, that is invariably another feeling your 'I that knows' must teach 'you that do not. And that's fine, but what are we learning in that process regarding our own sense of safety, our own sense of agency, our own ability to say, you know, whatever it is we need to do? And people might have heard this example before, but it's a good one: if you imagine little Johnny, he's in school today. Well, that's an achievement for him to even be in school because he didn't sleep last night, he didn't have breakfast this morning, he's traumatised by stuff that's going on at home. But he's now not in a frame of mind to learn in the structured learning way that is happening at school. So he's disenfranchised in that learning, which is going to affect his behaviour. Now he's classed as difficult, disruptive, whatever else. And I think we risk the same thing with these dogs. So the dogs I work with, about half of my caseload, what might be classed as dangerous dogs because they've bitten. And in my local area, the vets will always turn to me when dogs go in for euthanasia. They'll say, have you seen Andy? Let's have a look. And these are dogs who clearly don't feel safe, who clearly haven't felt heard. And it's been escalated.
Andrew: And invariably the caregivers, through lack of awareness, have just challenged what they perceived as being naughty, difficult, wrong behaviour. And most of the time, this is the thing that I said earlier about how do we know that dogs seek social safety and connection? Because most of the stuff that we know about ourselves regarding social pain, social processing, attachment, social threat evaluation, we've learned from studies on animals, including dogs. In fact, what we now know, the big thing in human psychology at the moment is understanding how challenging social disconnect is, social rejection, loneliness, if you like. And how it affects us physiologically. So we know now that the system, if it perceives lacking in social safety or social connection, it dials up our inflammatory responses and it dials down our antiviral responses. And it makes sense, right? Because if I've been detached from my social unit, the body's thinking, well, I don't need to be protected against common colds now because you've got nobody around, but there's a bigger likelihood now that you might get jumped on by a wild animal, so I need to make sure your inflammatory systems is up. So that makes sense now with information we learned before about chronic illness within the lonely population. Where did that journey start from? It started from Panksepp back in the 50s with his social pain hypothesis, which started on studies on dogs, where they took puppies away from mum.They were distraught, they injected them with a mild opioid (because they used to do that kind of thing) and the puppy was like, yeah, I can cope now.
Andrew: So he hypothesised maybe social pain, because it could be kind of neutralised a little bit through pain relief, is something similar to physical pain. Now, if we jump forward to the work of people like Matthew Lieberman at UCLA, a great book called Social, (I highly recommend that book if anybody's interested) he has proven this now with fMRI research, showing that that part of the brain overlaps completely as in social pain, social rejection with physical pain. Because it hurts. Which makes sense. So this is a beautiful thing now, Manda, I think with behavioural science; because hang on, we learned a lot of this stuff from animals, right? But our human ego was like, well, we're different. The wonderful doctor Robert Falcon Taylor, who's a veterinary neuroscientist, he shares a lot of stuff about the humble fruit fly and how much we learned from them around our own neurology, let alone the mammals like mice and monkeys.
Andrew: So, yes, I think we can say, do you know what? Yes, we're humans, but the dogs need for social secure attachment is important to them. And how often, because of the lack of awareness of who dogs are and what dogs need, especially because of the really damaging notion of dominance and corrections and all these kind of things. And this is the saddest thing for me about aversive training now, I think, when I see these dogs, many of the dogs I work with who who are really struggling with life. The caregivers have been told by previous aversive trainers to do that. So I also have to help them, as well as the initial problem for the dog, rebuild that relationship. Because guess what? When they're using a shock collar, often because the dog is likely to bite them, it's not the trainer who puts the shock collar on. They give it to the caregiver to put it on the dog for them, from a distance. What is going through that dog's brain, you know? It's tough. So this is important for us when we start thinking about these things.
Andrew: The only emotional experience we can truly validate is our own. So everything else, regardless of species, is guesswork really. But actually, if we allow ourselves to feel for ourselves and think, well, maybe they might feel something similarly, and I don't necessarily have to wait for a study on that yet. I think that allows you to have that connection, to think, yeah, that's going to be painful. One last point on that, I think it's important to be more available to the emotional experience of others, but also recognise that we're not responsible for it. Because that's important for us, especially when we're working in these ways. My own emotional and social safety always comes first. I have to protect self. I do a lot of education, I do workshops in emotional health for professionals, because there's an emotional health crisis within training and veterinary and shelter. And we have to recognise that and we have to we have to understand our own self. And it's interesting how others find that hard. So I try and create platforms that are open and safe and try and talk about things in a compassionate way, but I also have my own boundaries and my own safety to think about. So sometimes I might say no to somebody, or I might have to enforce a boundary or think, actually, I can't be in this space for my own emotional health. And then others will perceive that as you not being who you said you were before. Because before they just heard a message of being open to others and supportive, without thinking actually, we might have to support ourselves sometimes, and that's okay. And actually, it's important. In fact, it's crucial.
Manda: Yes. Gosh, that opened so many new doors. This may end up being flakier than you would like, so hold clear boundaries. We're recording this two days after I've come back from teaching a weekend of shamanic healing, and one of the clear premises of that for the students is you have to be doing some kind of contemplative practice very regularly, preferably daily, in order to know what your own energetic system feels like. If I feel anxiety, I know what my anxiety feels like because my experience of working with animals and people, locally and distantly, is that not all the anxiety I feel is mine. This is a particular memory of I was in a room with a group of people and we'd been training in Craniosacral, and the teacher said okay, now we're going to practice on each other, we're going to put this into practice. And this wash of terror ran around the room. And the woman next to me went white and very nearly fell over. And I said to her, I don't think all of that is yours, which enabled her to sit up and carry on and do what we were doing. It wasn't that scary. It was just, oh my goodness, now we're going to have to actually remember everything you've spent the last three days telling us. And my experience is that yes, as long as I know what my terror or rage or grief or confusion or unsafety feels like, and I feel a wash of that in a circumstance where that's probably not mine and I'm connected at an energetic level with a person, or a horse, or a dog or a crow or whatever. It's not an unreasonable inference that that comes from them.
Manda: And provided I've got that sense of clarity of myself, then I can choose what to do with that. And I find it quite useful separating between sympathy, which is 'I see your pain' and empathy, which is 'I feel your pain', but I can get quite caught up in it. And there's quite a lot of interesting MRI studies on if I am hugely empathic, it actually reduces my capacity to respond. But compassion, which is 'I completely see your pain. How can I help?' Which is the 'I wish to offer agency to both of us', if I can be compassionate and inquire in that moment what can I do to help? Then I can perhaps be useful. And I wonder, how does that Land? Just because it's not within the normal behavioural structures which say we cannot know what someone else is feeling. And I think actually, if we let ourselves step out of the Citadel mind (that's Tanya Luhrmanns concept) that the West gives us, which is I am a discrete unit and there is no energetic flow, and allow that there is an energetic flow, but I just have to recognise what it is without projecting. And that's the key thing. I have to have done enough work to know when I'm projecting and to know when I'm not. Is that something that you recognise?
Andrew: Yeah, I think it's crucial if we want to turn up to support another, whether that's professionally or just by being. The darker side to empathy is the righting reflex. This notion that I've got to put something right.
Manda: I have to fix this.
Andrew: Yes. And I think that's something to bear in mind. And actually, the righting reflex really, you know, countries go to war over that kind of sense. It comes back to that othering thing again, 'we must protect this' and we do all these kind of things. So I think it's very important, from a human therapy point of view it is absolutely crucial that if you're going to turn up to support another, that you're in a well-regulated state yourself and you have to have a look at that and it's very important. And I think this all connects in what we were talking about earlier, about how attuned we are to others on that social element. Going back to Matthew Lieberman's work, he's coined this phrase social evaluative threat. That part of the brain that is looking for social approval and social rejection and feeling these kind of things that we have. What you talked about there, Manda, in a really beautiful way, is it's not about the feelings we have, it's our relationship with them. And we've got very good as a society, especially here in the UK, of not having a relationship with them, putting them aside. When we think about emotional safety, there's two sides of emotional safety. The first one is feeling safe to even feel.
Manda: Or to acknowledge that we're feeling. Because the feeling is there, it's just that we don't let there be a response to it that we see at a cognitive level. You know, 15 years after suppressing everything, you had the breakdown. It wasn't that you weren't feeling, it's that you weren't allowing yourself to know that you were feeling. Yes?
Andrew: Yes, exactly. And I love a book by somebody called Candace Pert called Molecules of Emotion. Brilliant book. Some of the science in there is a little bit...
Manda: Yes, dodgy.
Andrew: But I love her approach because she's a dyed in the wool scientist and she understood this. And there's two quotes, I'm going to kind of adlib here a little bit because I can't remember them directly, but one is that she recognised that from a science point of view, especially Western science, if you can't put it in a test tube or you can't measure it, then it's classed as a non-thing. She goes on to say for the individual, the Non-things are everything. And that's the challenge for us. If I'm going to turn up and truly support you or truly support that dog, I have to find ways to navigate my own biases, my own beliefs and values, and recognise how corrupted they've been over time. And we have to be present. We have to be. We have to allow that flow and feel it, whilst also protecting self in that process.
Andrew: I have my my CAKE acronym: compassion, awareness, Knowledge and empathy, Kind of in that order really. Because we all love cake, right? So I try and take CAKE and so compassion for me is about turning up anyway. You know, it's very easy, especially in my job, because invariably a lot of the caregivers I might meet, they've tried everything. They've used shock collars, they've used aversion, they've used all these kind of things. So my judgement brain will fire up a bit. But compassion allows me to turn up anyway. The awareness and knowledge of what you're talking about, to truly try and be aware of what the lived experience is of the other, and to seek knowledge of that, not the knowledge that we have, I think, as a professional. Whether you're a doctor or a nurse, a trainer or whatever, when you have a bank of knowledge, it's easy to hide behind that and just throw it out there, without being humble. This comes back to that learn-support-teach I was talking about earlier, and it goes for the human as well. Learn from the other first. Support what you've learnt and then if you're going to teach anything, try and teach things that are likely to be intrinsically valuable as part of that experience. And then you can do what you like after that. So no, I hear you and I think empathy with the compassion, the awareness and the knowledge, then we can create that empathy more and feel it, whilst also being protective of self and not thinking, okay, I'm going to save you now or I need to do something.
Andrew: And I love the question that you asked there, and Susan Clothier talks about this a lot with dogs; you know, what do you need? What do you need? What do YOU need? Not what do I think you need. I think our conditioning, especially in the West, puts us into a cul de sac, and then we don't actually get the opportunity to look over our shoulder and think, oh, there's a way out there. And when we find that way out and it opens up stuff, whether you do this from a spiritual point of view or a psychological point of view or whatever, it's a beautiful thing because there is a richness. There is a beauty to the individual lived experience. There's a richness and a beauty to the subjective and the anecdotal but it's not the norm. And it's not the norm, not just because of how we're conditioned, but I think it's quite hard for the human brain, in this kind of society we live which has a lot of stuff going on, to break through some of the judgement that we have, which is often about protection.
Andrew: There's a part of me, when I look at the politics that goes on, and I'm a bit of a raging socialist really, but I look at people who are on the other side of that political spectrum, and I get it, actually, I get where the fear comes from. I get where the conditioning comes from. And this is the challenge I think, when we think about beliefs and values especially. I think you can interact with somebody who has different belief system to you, easier than you can if you are trying to interact with somebody with a different value system to you. And I think about my own parents, my father was a conservative and my mother was a liberal, but they both had very similar values. My father wanted better opportunities, better healthcare, better education, he just saw it from more of a capitalistic point of view; caring capitalism if that's not too much of an oxymoron. My mother was a liberal. But if he'd have been a Trump esque character, my mother would never have married him in the first place. So their beliefs were slightly different on how to achieve it, but the values were the same. And I see the same in dog training, actually, I think it's the value side of things. I think if you if you value the dog's emotional well-being ahead of anything else, it's hard to try and sit around a table with somebody who wants to abuse them. And that's a, that's a that's a heavy word. Manda. But for me, abuse on a very simple level is exactly what it says. The abuse of the power you have over another, whether that's in a small way or in a big way. And we all abuse that power all the time, because we do. With loved ones and everything else, you know, most of the time we do that in a compromising way. Sometimes it's in a way that just is. But when you start ramping that up to a point of inflicting deliberately pain and fear onto another, then that's even more challenging. But I think we have to recognise for me what abuse is. It doesn't have to be necessarily the outcome that we look at. I think it's the intent to think I can make you do this and that's just an abuse of power then.
Manda: Yes. We've been talking a lot about people, but just for a second, it seems to me that the reasons people get animals, dogs particularly now, are very different from when I was a young vet back in the 80s. There's much more projection going on. There's much more 'it will be looking like this on my Instagram feed', or 'I'm going to dress it up like this', God help us all, and that the dog's emotional needs don't come into it at all. And given that we are somewhat more emotionally literate as a culture than we were back in the 70s, certainly back in the 60s, I still don't quite understand where that comes from. But I guess it comes back to your we are built to judge and be judged, and we have more windows on the world through which people are potentially judging us, and we want to show up in a way that we think will be looked at with social approval by our group. I remember listening to a webinar, I think you were on it, behaviourists talking a lot about attachment theory in the States. And the woman running it said she woke up every morning praying for something as simple as separation anxiety and she hadn't had that in several years, because what she was seeing now was incredibly complex behavioural issues. And she was seeing the dogs as being the canaries in the coal mine for the behavioural issues that were happening in the family unit, that the anaesthesia of the dopamine hits of social media were masking, and the dogs were not having the dopamine hits of the social media and were acting out the emotional chaos in the energetic field in which they lived. Is that a thing that you see?
Andrew: I think we have a welfare crisis for dogs, and it is not down to deliberate cruelty and abuse, although we have that. It is down to a lack of awareness and awareness of the needs of other. And I think we've never known more about the individual lived emotional experience of the dog, and yet the general public have never known less about it. But I think we could also argue the same, even now, for children. Attachment theory especially was fringe stuff for a long time in psychology, and then it became more central ground, and now when we think about the progressive side of educational psychology, it's really important. Where's the education for parents about it, though still? And as a society, we still have a big core notion that that's all fine, but the children have to behave. And I think what's happened especially in Europe, where we've had a swing to the far right, which is basically pulling people over with this notion of blaming others, invariably immigrants and others that are different in society.
Andrew: And so I think the thing that's also come up from that is this notion also about a single idea about how behaviour should be. Often from a place of privilege, often from a place of white patriarchal privilege, actually. And, you know, increasing voices like Andrew Tate with the misogynist view of women. And I thought we'd really moved on from that, but we haven't clearly. And we had this notion of children should be seen and not heard, women should be seen and not heard, minorities should be seen not heard, dogs should be seen and not heard. And what that really means is they should behave in a way that the ones with the power have decided you must behave. Now, you and I both know, as members of the LGBTQ community, how challenging that is. When this notion of behaviour as a sense of self, behaviour, as a sense to kind of find our safety. You know, I talk about my husband a lot because I really value the fact that he's my husband now, that's even a possible thing.
Manda: That's a possible thing. Because when I grew up, that was not even on our radar. It would have been nice to be able to even be in a relationship and not have to hide it. The idea that there was going to be some kind of legal structure for that was was not even a possibility, I don't think.
Andrew: Even just going into every card shop with Mr. and Mrs. on the front and the husband and wife. All these kind of things. It's very hard when you feel so different to the world around you. And the problem when we think about dogs, so I'm giving a talk in the next month, actually, at a conference that is designed around the notion of dogs that bite. And my talk's called Devil Dogs and Monsters, because I really want to unpack this. Because it's very easy to think, you know, my dog would never be that dog, because that's a devil dog. And that's how the media do it. And equally, that person who's done that horrendous crime, 'the monster'.
Manda: Right. 'I would never do that'.
Andrew: Two big meta analysis studies of men in prisons in America and Europe who had committed violent crime, this is meta analysis of multiple studies; the studies were done with interviews, and a big proportion, over 70%, ended up identifying as having insecure attachments. Which makes sense because if you start as a young child to think my emotional needs are not met, I try to connect to my secure base and I I am kind of rejected from that. And especially insecure ambivalent, which is where you're more likely to have had abuse, physical, emotional or sexual, then it's hard to connect to other. It's hard to connect to other. So if you are committing a violent act against another, you're less likely to feel for them. Because that's the one thing as a social species, especially when we think about cooperative care, we have to have an element of that, because I don't want to hurt you, because I don't want to be hurt, which is one part of it. But also I know what that might feel like and that makes me feel bad. And that's the balance.
Andrew: My husband's an end of life nurse. He works at a hospice and in one of the local prisons they had a prisoner who was end of life and they couldn't support their symptoms in the prison hospital, so the prison had to come to the hospice basically. And this is a really powerful story because this man, violent criminal, there was a lot of friction between the hospice and the prison. Because you can imagine, the prison governor was like, well, this is prison now, de facto, you know, armed guards and all that stuff. And the nursing teams are like, yeah, but it's hospice. They're dying. Right?
Manda: He's dying. And we want to offer him compassion.
Andrew: Exactly. And that's that thing about compassion again, because it soon got around about what he'd done and who he was. So my husband was giving him giving him care and at first the guy was really resistant to it, very off with Kieron. But over time he softened and he felt the quality of Kieron's presence. But this is the point that I wanted to make here; he said to Kieron at one point, which really affected Kieron, "you're one of the first people that's ever cared". That's powerful, powerful stuff. But the flip side there is 'but what about his victims?' And this is the other side of social structure. And of course, our society is rightly based on trying to protect the vulnerable and think about these things. So this is why we end up with this... Well, he's a monster, right? The problem there is can you speak monster, Manda? I can't. So as soon as we label like that, we're disengaging. So this is why it's so challenging as a society to have these conversations around aggression and conflict.
Andrew: Because on the one side, yes, we must recognise the damage done by aggressive and violent acts, whether it's done by a dog who has bitten or killed or maimed or poses a danger. And the same thing happens on both sides. This is why I wanted to give the talk in this way, because a lot of the people, especially on the aversive side, train saying, oh, you see, these dogs, only we can deal with them, right? Because they need that approach. And you have the same within the corrective system and jails and stuff. When I was working in human therapies, in the late 90s, early 2000, I was dealing with adult men who were the victims of the borstal system back in the 60s. So there was some good stuff that went on in the borstals, I know, but a lot of it was short, sharp, shock stuff with invariably young men.
Manda: Yeah. Basically violence. The human equivalent of a shock collar.
Andrew: To make them behave, right. But guess what? The reason that they were dysfunctional in the first place never got addressed. And many went on then to have drug addictions, drink problems. Many went on to have convictions for domestic abuse and all these kinds of things. But as soon as you have these discussions Manda, it's difficult because people think we are making excuses for people. No. For me, bringing it back to dogs, if we're going to either think, okay, how are we going to rehabilitate this dog or that human, if they are capable of, to make them safe for themselves and for society around them, we have to understand that story, which is often cyclic. Generational trauma happens again and again and again.
Manda: That's what I'm thinking. It goes back a very long way.
Andrew: A very long way. Or, if we can't for that individual, what are we doing as a society that is wrong, that we keep creating all the time? We have to have these discussions and this is the discussion I want to have within dogs. Because for me, we are getting fundamentally wrong the first 12 to 18 months of that dog's life. Like we talked about earlier, the general public have been convinced the most important thing is a well-trained, obedient dog. And so Molly is our youngest dog. She came to us at 16 weeks, she's had two homes, she was very fizzy.
Manda: She's a yellow Labrador for anyone who doesn't.
Andrew: And I've got great footage of her at 17, 18 weeks, she'd only been with us a couple of weeks, of her teaching me tons of stuff about how she needed to deal with the world. There were only three things I wanted to teach her. First of all was that she had a voice and she could use that voice. Secondly, that my husband and I were her return to safety, always. Always her return to safety. And thirdly, that we would learn from her how she needed to process and engage with the world. So this is attachment theory, right? This is about the importance of secure attachment. This is the importance of helping her to regulate herself. What I say to my clients is, you know, sit down, come, it's all fine and that's okay. But they're not life skills. They have no intrinsic value to the dog. It's much better to just think okay, you know what? We can teach that stuff down the line. The most important thing is to have a dog who can grow up, that they can regulate themselves. And we have a big role to play there in Co-regulation and how we manage the environment, how we set things up and how we take our time to build up. There's this big kind of emphasis of, you see programs online, you know, how to train your puppy in seven days. Socialise, you must get out. And there's this big myth, it's a big one and I'm sorry for my colleagues, but it's not true; that somehow you build a bond through training. It's part of it. You can have fun with it, but you build a bond through the quality of your presence.
Manda: And however much you train, your presence is there 100% of the time when you're training, even if you're training for hours a day. And I've watched some people who've got puppies for agility and they're already training it at ten weeks old. Or the people who turn up on Facebook groups, that I've had to come off most of them, because they turn up with the 'I just got this puppy last week and it'll already sit on command', and they don't even say cue, it's command. What are you doing? But it won't do what it's told. It's a ten week old puppy, it doesn't have the executive function.... Sorry, I'll stop ranting. You know this. And they've been told to lock it in a crate in the kitchen, because that's where it's got to stay. Because you can't let it think that it's going to be all right to get on the bed. And then you wonder why it's got separation anxiety 2 or 3 years down the line.
Andrew: Exactly. And, you know, most of the challenge, most of the presentations that we have for dogs, that we feel we have to have training solutions for, we've created in the first place. So Molly doesn't pull on the lead, she doesn't jump up, she doesn't do all these things. Not because I've trained her not to, it's because, you know, pulling on the lead, especially for me, is a direct relation to that nervous system response from any of these dogs. And a lot of people they don't get told this. So in the village hall where the dog is a bit more regulated maybe, and they connect to the food they're using or whatever it is that they're using, the dog can do it. When they walk outside in the real world, because that nervous system, that autonomic nervous system, that sympathetic system is triggered by the traffic, triggered by the social environment, triggered by having a sensory integration system that isn't working very efficiently for that dog. Or pain, even being uncomfortable. A lot of dogs, I do kind of get analysis with the dogs that I work with, because that's the first thing I look at, because especially the dogs that are potentially dangerous that I work with, I've not met one that wasn't in pain. Physical pain, often.
Manda: Horses too, I have to say.
Andrew: And social pain as well. They're all equally relevant. So quite often especially when you're counting the...
Manda: Stride length and paces.
Andrew: Exactly. And I think ah they're kind of going one and a half to two here, so just by having a longer lead, that dog is more comfortable.
Manda: A different harness because often they're being restricted in the shoulders or it's rubbing and they've been rubbing on their shoulders so long it hurts, so they can't step into the harness.
Andrew: Exactly. And I think and it's amazing how often, Sarah Fisher talks about this a lot, about how many dogs who are pulling because they can't walk comfortably at that pace. They have to have the extra stride. You know, all these things are important. So yeah, for me then, the point I want to make in that talk really, is the impact for us when we start thinking differently, and it is a mindset shift, we have to think about everything differently. We have to think about if the general public know how to teach 'sit' and expect it, but they don't know what pain looks like, they don't know about developmental stages, they don't know about attachment, they don't know about social processing, all this kind of stuff. Then we collectively, as the dog training industry, have to take some responsibility for that. And I'm not anti training myself, because I see training as neutral isn't it? It's not good or bad, it just is. I think the dog will decide whether it's been helpful or not. But I know people, I know dogs are picked literally because I'm going to do agility with this dog. Are you? Do they want to?
Manda: Yeah, I did that with Abs and she told me she hated agility. Once I started listening, it was like, no, I don't want to do this. Fine. Okay. No worries.
Andrew: I've been there. I think back to Arthur. So Arthur's our old boy, he's a kind of collie. He's a sprollie, actually, but nobody's ever told him. And I did way too much with him in those early days. He's 14 now. I look back and I think he just wanted to be with me. He'd have done anything for me. Harley however, our black lab, he does love it. He's got a good, strong working thing in it. And he just loves to kind of have things to do. Likes his brain working. Molly, because we brought her up in a very naturalistic way, she's a complete diva. And actually, we've done hardly any structured education with her, hardly any structured learning. But that doesn't mean she hasn't learned. She's learned tons of stuff. She's the most grounded dog you will ever meet. And also, she hasn't changed at all. And Kieron and I were talking about this recently. So she's three now. She still has that puppy enthusiasm about life because she hasn't had it trained out of her, if you like. The conformist norms of, well, you can't do that now because you're not a puppy anymore or whatever it is. And her social processing skills are amazing. And actually that first 12 months, because she was so sensitive, so sensitive, she hardly met anybody. We deliberately went to quiet places.
Manda: Completely against the you have to have met 100 people, including the squirrel in the balaclava, or your puppy will not cope.
Andrew: Exactly. Actually, that was proven for us because it was really easy to see when she'd get fizzed up. Because we called her Mollesaurus when she came, because she was very bitey. And actually it's hard for me and Kieron because I could see why she'd had two homes in a young puppy age, because she was really full on. And actually we learned from her by slowing down. That it was social engagement, she'd really struggled with it. So we had to have a hands off approach with her, which is hard because she was cute as a puppy.
Manda: And you want to cuddle!
Andrew: Yeah, exactly. Just like the andrex puppy. And so she defizzed gradually, and then the biting stopped and the pulling stopped and all these other things stopped. So we used to go to quiet places with her, and she really benefited then, when her nervous system started to slow down a bit. She likes to watch stuff. We're just going to sit and watch. I've got a beautiful bit of video of her with Kieron just sitting by the waves, because she was scared of the waves. So they're just sitting there and he'd go down every day just for a few minutes and they'd sit and watch. And it's beautiful. And no food involved, no see the way, have some food. And then she'd lean into you if she needed more comfort. And then when she was a bit more coping, you could tell because she'd walk away a little bit more, I can deal with this now. It's just beautiful, it's that lovely thing. And so when she was about 12 months, she met a horse up on Dartmoor. Never met a horse before. The first thing she did was back off and air scent. And I said to Kieron, that's the point. So is it more important to try and get the dog to meet loads of people and everything and potentially overwhelm them? And actually, you know, I don't have a chance to process stuff. Or for her to learn, and if I'm unsure, I have time to process. And she was so into using her nose all the time. The other problem I think with training is it's very visual and auditory.
Manda: Because that's what we do and we forget that their nose is so much more.
Andrew: So that's how she deals with new stuff. She's like, I'm not sure about this, I'll back off. Or if she's really unsure, because even at three she's still that sensitive girl. And that's fine. It's not a defect, it's just who she is. Her nervous system is particularly sensitive, and that's fine and we support her. But we know when she's struggling because she'll come and lean into us again, because we're her return to safety. And again, the old fashioned advice of if the dog's leaning into you they're trying to be dominant - no, they're trying to get connection from you. Even dogs jumping up, one of the big things with my clients. I know we don't like it much. But often when we slow things down, I call it supportive walking, where we're trying to support that dog's nervous system. And we're just really looking for signs of elevation, which is kind of increased stress and decompression when they're letting it go and how they're processing and engaging and seeking exits in the environment. That gives us all that information. And a lot of these 'reactive dogs', It's just because they're overwhelmed, because they don't have a chance to process in time, or engagement happens first. Or, a big one is they can't exit in time.
Andrew: So when you learn these things, that nervous system starts to kind of flow a bit better. And it's really interesting to see how things that would normally trigger a response, but when we slow things down, it's interesting. I can say to my clients then isn't that interesting? Every time we've had a little moment, they've jumped up at you afterwards. So maybe the jumping up is seeking something from you. And I know it's not great at the moment, but maybe we need to go with that for the time being until the dog's built some confidence.
Manda: Gives them the confidence that they need in the way that they need it. This is back to what is the dog feeling and what are its emotional needs. And the fact that you want to wear your, whatever, pink suit isn't necessarily going to work just now.
Andrew: And to get those best outcomes, the best outcomes come from a dog that can actually self-regulate. Which means they still feel something, but they're like, oh, this is a bit tricky, but I can go over there and...
Manda: Like Molly Air scenting. She's learned what it takes for her to be able to process stuff, but she wouldn't have learned it if you hadn't given her the space and time to do it.
Andrew: And for her to teach us that that's what she needed in the first place. A lot of dogs have to adapt to what we think they need. So when you think about those dogs, and we've definitely got an increase, all the data is telling us, in dogs who bite. Why? There's extra components to that of course, because of poor breeding practices and they're already compromised before they even start, but it's because from a young age that dog has not had enough agency to be able to communicate their own safety needs.
Manda: Right. And it's been communicating. I think it's like horses. They've been communicating for a long time, but you just haven't listened, and they've had to escalate to the point where you actually notice that they're in distress.
Andrew: You're dead on there. Because it's not that they haven't been communicating, you're absolutely right. They have been. But the lack of awareness and this notion of having to behave, this is the key. We see the same thing with children, this is the point I think. Most of us kind of muddle through. I remember almost exclusively, I think, when I was working with humans who had social anxieties and struggled with social kind of stress. Many of them pinpointed back to adolescence, formative time and being made to be sociable. Even something as simple as being in their room; you must come down for dinner because Auntie wants to see you; and most of us muddle through that. But for some, for that brain that is particularly socially sensitive, to be forced into these things, even something as simple as you must eat your vegetables or else you can't have your pudding. Now that seems pretty okay, doesn't it? But what are we saying to that child regarding the choices they make about what they put into their body? But also, what are we saying to that developing brain about well, you have to do things you don't want to do to get something you do.
Manda: Contingencies exist. The whole world is contingent and you just have to work out the contingencies. Speaking of someone who spent a lot of time working out contingencies, that's hard.
Andrew: And it plays into the abuser's handbook, that's the thing for me, for a lot of these children. This is uncomfortable for you, and the thing you want will come later. So it's tricky, isn't it? I think when we start looking at the layers. One of the things that Matthew Lieberman talks about, that parents could do to really help their child feel connection, is to not put things contingent on them doing things. Because what tends to happen is a child comes home from school, 'look mommy, I painted this'. Oh, my God, that's amazing I love you. I'm so proud of you. Just the simple thing of actually taking it off the child and saying, okay, I'm gonna have a look at that in a minute; I love you so much. I'm so proud of you.
Manda: Right. I'm not proud of you because you painted something. I'm proud of you for being a human being that I adore. And yes, you painted an amazing picture. Yay! Yeah, different order.
Andrew: So when we think back then, most of us, I think the thing about attachment is, this is really important. I don't know anybody actually that I've met, including myself and people I know professionally and also personally, who I would say had a perfect secure attachment and secure base. And the vast majority of our parents really were just trying their best. And actually, before my trauma as a child, I wouldn't have questioned anything about my parents. It was only afterwards I thought, you're never bloody here and I don't feel safe anymore. And okay, I've got all these toys, but I want you. And that's when it hurt me, and that's the point. So most parents, you know, it's hard. You can't be that kind of Zen like figure 24-7.
Manda: And we evolved as tribal beings. And it wasn't down to just two people to raise the kids.
Andrew: Exactly. And I was going to come on to that point actually, because it's important. So John Bowlby is the person that people often think about regarding attachment. But Mary Ainsworth, I want to talk about her because, as is often the case sadly, the men tend to get all the focus. So before John Bowlby, all the other stuff was done on animals regarding attachment. The rhesus monkey experiment was the one that really got John Bowlby's interest.
Manda: Oh, it was really horrible.
Andrew: They call it the wire monkey experiment or wire cage experiment, but that was basically taking the baby monkeys away from mom. And then they had a wire monkey that had a furry outside, and then a wire monkey that was just a wire monkey. Both had the milk. But when they thought, let's just give the milk to the wire one and no milk on the one that had the fur, this is the thing that broke away from the very strict behaviourism model that, you know, babies are only into their moms because they're going to feed them, because that's positive reinforcement.
Manda: I just would like to interject and say, what kind of public school backgrounded bloke thinks that that's a thing in the first place? I mean, imagine the trauma that's happened to somebody to get them even to posit that babies only want their mums because of the milk in the first place. Anyway, let's carry on. So the monkeys are given...
Andrew: This is the challenge of behaviourism and operant conditioning as an only lens. And actually there's a lot of adult, especially neurodivergent autistic people who experience that approach through an ABA process when they were younger. I think ABA has come on a long way, I would like to think, but back in the day it was like, no, you will behave this way. Because again, it's that behavioural output, a very strict behaviourism approach whilst emotions are recognised. There's this notion that somehow the environment is what triggers stuff all the time. But that's not true, because the one thing I would say that really shows that, is grief. Because guess what? There isn't anything happening in the environment. And also trauma. My environment didn't change, my external environment didn't change, my perception of it changed. That changed my emotional responses and my mood state. And I moved to more of a pessimistic outlook after that moment. I had an optimistic one before.
Andrew: And I think if you have an optimistic outlook, then you tend to be a bit more resilient about stuff and it's like, well, I'm not necessarily presuming something good is going to happen, but I'm going to not necessarily presume something bad will. The problem with a pessimistic outlook is again, you're not necessarily presuming something bad, but you're not expecting something good. And if you've got a dog in that state, there's no point using reinforcement then is there? Until you change their mood state fast. Important. But yeah. So coming back to this then, what they found was the baby monkey would stick with the one with the fur on.
Manda: Rather than the one that had the milk that was just a wireframe. Yeah. So important.
Andrew: Because they wanted the comfort, they wanted the connection. It's the feeling they wanted that was more important than the sustenance. So this is important for us. So when we think about this stuff, it's gone kind of full circle really for me. In the ethology community, especially in people like Kim Brophy and Simone Gadbois and others; there is hardly any dysregulation in the adult species in Mother Nature. And they're fighting for their life on a daily basis. And we talked earlier about feelings, mood, emotions, behaviour, consequences. They're still attached. So they feel something, they act on it, they get over it. Okay. Live to another day. Great.
Manda: This is back to why do zebras not get ulcers? Yeah.
Andrew: Yes. Great book. Yes. And the indigenous, when you think about that, that kind of notion of going through those cycles internally as well as being connected to the external. Because we've separated behaviour and consequences as a 'civilised' species. This is my theory on it. We've disconnected on a very fundamental level. It's like you can feel it but don't act it. That is hugely damaging. So John Bowlby really picked that up. And so he created this notion of okay, how does this work then? And he looked at in a very clinical way with mother and child. But it took a woman to take that and emotionalise it more. And Mary Ainsworth, I would highly recommend if people are interested to look up her history. There's some great books just written about her, let alone the book she's written herself, because it's such an inspiring story. So she thought, I'm going to take myself to Africa. She went to Uganda, actually. Because she kind of knew what you were saying, Manda. Something about I recognise my cultural bias here in the West; what are they doing there? And she found this connection.
Andrew: There was a discipline. There were boundaries. But those boundaries weren't barriers to unmet need. And there was that kind of structure, the shared responsibilities, everything was about that child being able to express themselves, to have a voice. The things I was talking about with Molly. And to connect with nature and to kind of learn the things that were important, whilst allowing the individuality to come through. And so she picked all this up, and she then took attachment and created this notion of the different types of insecure attachment when that couldn't happen, which she didn't experience over there. Interesting. And then we have kind of insecure avoidance. The insecure ambivalent came later, somebody else came up with that title. But so it's interesting for me and I just wanted to mention her because I think it's important we celebrate her. Because she worked kind of under John Bowlby, if you like, with him at least, and she obviously credits him for starting that thought process.
Manda: But she took it into the level of let's see that this isn't how we evolved. This isn't how people need to be. Which is another of our cultural overlays in the West, is what we do is a natural thing and it's a consequence of being human. This is just human nature. And it's not. I think it's a really important thing to take home. We are so far over time. I was wondering, was this going to go into being a split into two? And we could still do that, but let's wind up for now, because I think I've probably occupied you for long enough. But I have a final question. Given all we said, given what Ainsworth found, given that we know this doesn't have to be the way the world is. If you and I were to structure a program for our culture, we've said right up at the top that there are beliefs and there are values, and that the values that we work from are inculcated at a very early stage. If we were to try to create a different values field, such that we raised people with secure attachments and a culture that was based and rooted in those values, what would you think those values would be?
Andrew: Justa little addition to that very quickly. You and I both do this in different ways, trying to support a space where people can think about self fast, because we have to understand the layers before we can open up that mindset to considering how we do more. And that's breaking that generational trauma is finding ways to look at that. And actually, I've had so many clients over the years trying to work in this way with them. Because I'd always start off by trying to hear their emotional experience first, and then frame it around and think about the dog, who break down about stuff, because they see through their animal. Their own conditioning. And actually, I had the wonderful Amaia Espindola in my emotional Well-Being and animals last night, talking about cats. It's the same for cats, horses, there's a a richness there by reconnecting back. And actually, that's what our dog can gift us, and cat and horse or whatever. I think the value for me is about recognising more the collective responsibility for our physical, emotional and social safety needs. I think one of the things that's happened and it's happened at a remarkably alarming rate in recent times. My late father, used to say there's no bad people, just selfish people. And I think that's the key, isn't it? Even when we think about the adverts now, it's like, it's not Terry's, it's mine. And if I think back to the 70s and 60s, it was like, who would you give your last Rolo to? It was about connection. And so I think this is where we have to think about the relentless march of capitalism is about how you feather your own nest. Not necessarily about who you invite to share it with.
Manda: Yeah. Yeah. And the values of who dies with the most toys wins, basically. And it doesn't matter who you destroy in your effort to be the one with the most toys.
Andrew: And you know what? I think if everybody spent a day at a hospice, because actually, one thing to mention here about the hospice side of things, people think it must be a sad place. But my husband will tell you often it's a joyous place. It's more representative of life, actually. It's real.
Manda: Yeah, it's real because you have to get to grips with real when you're about to die.
Andrew: But Kieron has beared witness to thousands over the 7 or 8 years being in hospice, of deaths. Many of us may only witness 1 or 2. And like he says, he's never had anybody say to him, I wish I'd had more money, I wish I'd done this; that most of the things that people share are regrets about not connecting more with loved ones, not doing more in society, not leaving a more positive legacy. Guess what? It's too late then. And also, there's a big correlation with those who have the biggest regrets and the more difficult passing. And I think actually, there is an element of be careful what you wish for. I just think we need to start thinking about how we put an emphasis on what we educate children with. Again, the political classes aren't particularly interested in well regulated kids. They just want the next lot of doctors, nurses, soldiers, you know, getting the Academic League. You know, that structured learning is more important than experiential learning. Which is a problem, because remember, there's a difference between what we're taught and what we learn.
Manda: And we have to assume that our political class, most of them are not very securely attached either. There's a very good book called Why We Get the Wrong Politicians. The people we elect are not the people we need to be governing us. We know this, so we need to change that too. But I'm thinking we get the value change first and then we can change the governance systems.
Andrew: But you know, I think there are some people who have the platforms and have the the energy, frankly, to deal with the bigger picture stuff. And I think that's great. But everybody listening must recognise the value of the ripples they create. And I think we just have to find out where our light comes from and cast it as best we can. And some people will feel the warmth of that light, some people will be blinded by it. And I think that's just the nature of it. And we shouldn't feel overwhelmed because we can easily with this big stuff. But it's the little differences. They soon add up.
Manda: Okay. That's beautiful. Let's stop there because we're at an hour and a half, and that's enough for everybody. Thank you. The little ripples add up. I will take that away and remember it through the days. Andrew, thank you so much for coming on to the Accidental Gods podcast. I feel this is probably the first of several, but it's an extremely good one to start with. So huge thanks for your time and the ripples that you put out into the world.
Andrew: Thank you. Manda.
Manda: And that's it for another week. So much thanks to Andrew for all that he is and does. For taking time out after his holiday, when he has not been brilliantly well, to come and talk to us. And particularly for his capacity to join the dots between human understanding of what makes us tick and that in other species. Honestly, his Facebook page is amazing. He has very regular conversations with some of the most switched on, smartest, interesting people I have ever listened to. It's become one of those things where if I know there's something on I really have to blank it out on my calendar. And anyone who's tried to book a call with me knows that there are not many spaces on my calendar. So if you're on Facebook, head over there. It's definitely worth it. And I have put links in the show notes. And that apart, it is increasingly seeming to me that finding ways for humanity to grow up, or at least for our culture to grow up, for us to move beyond what Bill Plotkin calls the early phase of adolescence, the striving to find out what we're for in the world, to actually being that for some of us, to stepping into elderhood. This is essential, and we're not going to do it if we can't find the ways to look at ourselves on the inside. I would say that personal therapy or something equivalent is becoming pretty much essential to our survival in the modern world. And I know it's a privilege. I know having the time and the money to do it is so unlikely.
Manda: So what else can we do? We can try to understand what motivates us, each of us individually. What triggers us and how to step back from being triggered, and then how to help others step back from being triggered. And if we can do this with other species as well as ourselves, then we are at least a step on the road to healing the trauma of our culture. So I thoroughly recommend Andrew's YouTube, Facebook page, website, and any of the books that I've put in the show notes. Do some of the inner work, whatever it takes. And then we can move on to doing the outer work. So there we go.
Manda: That's it for this week. We will be back next week with another conversation. In the meantime, huge thanks to Caro C for the music at the head and Foot. To Alan Lowles of Airtight Studios for the production. To Lou Mayor for the video, Anne Thomas for the transcripts, Faith Tilleray for the website, and all of the tech work behind the scenes that keeps our gatherings and our newsletters and the podcast and everything else ticking over. And as ever, an enormous thanks to you for taking the time to listen. If you know of anybody else who wants to understand our place in the world and how we can interrelate with the more than human world in ways that really count, then please do send them this link. And that's it for now. See you next week. Thank you and goodbye.