The 14th Annual UKRCB Symposium, sponsored by James Wellbeloved, was held on Sunday, October 1, 2006, at the Thistle East Midlands Hotel, located near East Midlands Airport, off the M1.

Our subject this year was Rescued Dogs and how we as re-homers, carers and potential owners can help rehabilitate them both in the re-homing centre and settling them into their permanent homes.

For a review of the symposium, please click here.

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Report on The 12th Annual Symposium took place on Sunday, October 3, 2004 at the Connexion, Ryton-on-Dunsmore, Coventry. The subject this year was

PEOPLE, PETS AND PROBLEMS

How often do we as trainers and behaviourists remark that the owner/dog relationship is making successful training more difficult than it needs to be? Are there really no bad dogs, only bad owners? How has a family let a situation with its dog go as far as it has before seeking help? These are all the questions we have asked ourselves whilst working with people and pets. If we are to offer effective help, then we need first of all to look at the problem holistically and recognize that a difficult owner/dog relationship may well reflect personal issues. We need to get a measure of the whole picture, rather than relying on quick, and often ultimately unsatisfactory fixes.

To help us realistically reappraise difficult situations and advise us how to design an acceptable behaviour modification programme, the UKRCB was delighted to welcome from the USA Joel Gavriele-Gold, PhD., Author of the best-selling When Pets Come Between Partners and Dr. Anne McBride, B.Sc., PhD., Director of the Companion Animal Behaviour Counselling Diploma Course at the University of Southampton. They jointly presented an exploration of case studies based on actual situations, with full discussion on how problems can successfully be resolved for both ends of the lead. Both speakers are widely experienced in both dog and human psychology.

Course notes for the presentations are available below, and may be cut and pasted into any word processing document and printed out.

Notes for the presentation by Joel Gavriele-Gold:

UNCONSCIOUS PROCESSES
The unconscious can be regarded as the storehouse of all that has pass through our senses. If you compare the unconscious to where you live, it's like not realizing how much stuff you have stored in your attic until you have to move it.

Almost always, our need to displace old relationships and feelings onto the present operates in the unconscious part of the mind until it is made conscious, usually through therapy. Part of the way to resolve the problem is to put all the displacements into perspective that is, to make them conscious enough so that you can see the true role they play. This is the only way to avoid rekindling the same problem over and over again. People relate to each other in the world on many levels of awareness of consciousness.

DISPLACEMENT:
Displacement is the unconscious act of putting past thoughts, moods, feelings, images, impulses, and even actions onto present-day individuals and situations. For example, someone might fear a very large dog because of an association with an overbearing parent.

DISPLACEMENT = FROM (the past) TO (the present)
Positive displacements are rarely a problem for people. Displacement is reacting to a person or an animal or an object in the present in the same way we reacted to someone in our past - usually from our early childhood and usually in connection to a parent or a sibling. If the pet stirs up feelings of an abusive father, a non-nurturing mother, an older brother who got all the good stuff or a younger sister you had to drag everywhere, then the present relationship will suffer because of the displaced reactions.

Displacement can become a problem in a relationship when it involves an unconscious (stress unconscious) meaning not conscious and negative association with a person's past.

Some of the questions you might want to think about in relation to your own clients are the following:

• Are you using a dog to tell the world how you were treated or how you would have liked to be treated?
• Is your dog getting caught in unfinished business from you past?
• Are you trying to tack a happy ending onto unfinished business
• Are you perhaps using a dog (yours or someone else's) in trying to master a personal issue?

PROJECTION
In projection, we unconsciously ascribe to others thoughts, feelings, and deeds we do not like or do not wish to acknowledge in ourselves.

Projection occurs when we UNCONSCIOUSLY put a piece of ourselves into another person or a pet - that piece could be a feeling, a thought, or an idea.

PROJECTION IS ALWAYS UNCONSCIOUS which makes it particularly difficult to catch in ourselves. We project onto others those aspects of ourselves that we have either not acknowledge or prefer not to own. To turn around and face those unpleasant parts of ourselves that we project onto others takes courage and persistence. A projection is a long-standing part of a person's personality that he or she would prefer not to deal with. The question is not - are we projecting? But rather - what we are projecting?

There is no way of avoiding projecting entirely. Consciously or unconsciously, there is a reason for the way we act. The way we respond to people and events reflects an attempt to resolve or relieve some personal issue. The trick in dealing with it is to be aware of what projections are and how they may be distorting a current relationship with people or with dogs.

REPETITION COMPULSION
As if the rational, logical world of intellect and comprehension is not interrupted enough by the displacement and projection, we add still another component: the repetition compulsion. This is an unconscious and repeated acting out of an issue again and again, instead of moving it from unconscious memory into the conscious world, where it can be dealt with and put to rest. Through repetition compulsion, we attempt to change the past by unconsciously reliving, so to speak, unfinished business from an earlier period in the hope of finally tacking on a happy ending. With this going on most, if not all of the time, it's a wonder that we get any work done!

When couples realize they are engaged in repetition compulsion, they are often surprised at just how powerful the compulsion really is. Many couples, upon learning of their particular repetition compulsions, thank me and soon leave after therapy. To them, just knowing what the repetition compulsion is seems to be more important than resolving the problems connected to it. Unconsciously, they have a need to continue the repetition compulsion because breaking the cycle might be more frightening than just letting it continue to play out.

Repetition compulsions also involve a recreational aspect. Couples can experience ongoing excitement in trying to get what hey believe they want from each other, and this constant cycle actually binds them together. Each is perusing his or her own repetition compulsion, hoping to magically create through the other a happy ending to unresolved childhood problems.

Joel Gavriele-Gold, PhD.

Notes for the presentation by Dr. Anne McBride are available by clicking the link AMcBride06Notes