If you love your dog but quietly carry a sadness about the experience you thought you’d have, this episode is for you.

Dog parenting grief is one of the most common, and least talked about, parts of the overwhelmed dog parent experience. The gap between the dog life you imagined and the one you’re actually living is real. And so is the exhaustion of carrying it quietly, without anyone really understanding.

In this episode, I share my own experience bringing Bonnie home and the whirlwind that followed, the tension with Maisy, the walks that didn’t go to plan, the reactivity I didn’t see coming, and what I wish I’d known. I also explore the psychology behind why this gap feels so painful, and what attachment research tells us about the bonds built through the hard stuff.

In this episode:

• Why the gap between your expected dog experience and your real one creates genuine psychological discomfort

• What dog parenting grief actually feels like day to day - and why it’s so hard to name

• The guilt that layers on top of the grief (and why you’re carrying more than you need to)

• Why this kind of grief often goes unacknowledged - and what happens when you finally let yourself feel it

• What attachment science tells us about the bonds built through difficulty

• A gentle, honest acknowledgement for those who are really struggling - and what it’s okay to say

• How to find genuine peace with the dog experience you actually have

This episode is for you if:

• You have a reactive, anxious, or difficult dog and feel like you’re failing

• You love your dog deeply but don’t always enjoy dog ownership

• You’ve felt the quiet grief of the dog life you imagined - but never said it out loud

• You’re exhausted from pretending you’re okay

Download my private podcast mini series: https://lavendergardenanimalservices.myflodesk.com/private-podcast-series

Leave a review on Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/40SrT1P

Keywords: overwhelmed dog parent, dog training anxiety, reactive dog owner, dog parenting grief, dog training guilt, nervous system dog training, difficult dog, dog behaviour stress

Welcome to the Mindful Dog Parent, the podcast for overwhelmed and anxious dog owners who are doing their best but still feel like they're getting it all wrong.

I'm Sian, a trauma informed coach and ethical dog trainer.

I created this podcast because dog parenting isn't always cute reels and perfect walks.

Sometimes it's tears after training, guilt in the quiet moments, or just feeling like you're the only one struggling.

If you've ever said, I love my dog, but this is really hard, you're in the right place.

Each week I'll bring you calm, compassionate guidance to help you build confidence, regulate your emotions, and reconnect with your dog, even when things feel messy because you're not failing, you're just overwhelmed.

And you don't have to figure this out on your own.

Before we get into today's episode, I just want to take a breath with you, just for a second.

If you've had a hard week, if things are feeling really heavy, if you're tired, this episode is for you.

So I've been thinking about this topic for a while, and I think it might be one of the most unspoken parts of the overwhelmed dog parent experience.

Today we're going to talk about grief.

Now, it's not the kind of grief that comes with losing a dog, though.

That is so real.

I hold that with so much care.

I've experienced my own version of grief when Maisie passed away, which I do talk about with clients and how I kind of dealt with all of that afterwards.

But this kind of grief is the quieter grief, so it doesn't have a name.

It's the grief of the dog experience that you imagined and the one that you actually got.

And I want to start today by sharing something personal because something I don't talk about that often because I think it might help you feel a little less alone in what you carry them.

So.

So when Bonnie came home with us, and this was about 10 years ago now, I had a picture in my head of what it would be like.

I'd had Maisie, and Maisie was Maisie.

She was my world.

And I thought, another dog, more love, more joy.

This is going to be the best thing ever.

What I didn't expect was that Maisie didn't particularly like Bonnie, not at first.

There was a bit of tension between them and I remember feeling this low level anxiety every day in my own house, just like kind of keeping an eye on them, managing the space between them and trying to make everyone feel okay.

And Bonnie herself was.

How do I put this?

Really gently.

A force of nature.

She was a destroyer of things.

Absolutely anything she could get her.

Like her mouth on when we weren't around.

She destroyed a rug, a chair, the sofa, DVD boxes.

This is how long ago it was.

And.

And on walk, she would just stop, like completely stop.

Just plant herself and refuse to move.

And at the time, I didn't understand what that meant.

I didn't have the knowledge and the frameworks.

And I wasn't a trainer.

I was a dog mom.

I didn't know.

She was telling me she was struggling, that she was overwhelmed.

And the world just felt like too much outside that front door.

And if I.

If I'd have known what I know now, I would have done everything so differently.

I would have slowed right down.

I would have taken so much pressure off her.

But I didn't know.

And she did continued to find walks hard.

She actually started going the opposite way and she started pulling and then she became really extremely dog reactive.

And I've talked about that before in previous episodes.

So we went through a real whirlwind with her.

And throughout all of that, I was grieving.

I didn't call it that at the time.

I called it stress or guilt or worry, all of those things.

But underneath it all was this quiet, persistent sadness.

This is like what I thought.

This isn't what I thought it would be.

I thought it would be very different.

And I think most of us come to dogs with an image already formed.

Maybe it was built from a childhood dog or a dog you saw on someone's Instagram feed, or just a feeling that you'd got.

So, like a sense of what it would be like to have this companion by your side 24 7, who you love endlessly.

And you pictured walks that felt really easy and calm.

A dog you could take anywhere, weekends away, cafe tables and in the sun.

A dog who made life feel lighter.

You might have pictured a dog who loved other dogs or who was relaxed around strangers who.

Or like they just made you feel good, made you feel like you'd done this right.

And then the real dog arrived, and the real dog was wonderful, but also nothing like you imagine.

Nothing like the image that you'd made in created in your head so there could have been reactivity or anxiety or a relationship between your dogs that didn't start the way you'd hoped, or walks that felt like battles, or a home that felt tense instead of peaceful.

And here's what I want to name the gap between those two things.

The imagined experience that you'd had in your mind before you bought them home.

And the real one, that gap is genuinely painful.

And there's a reason for that.

And it's a really, it's like a real psychological reason.

So psychologists have name for what happens when reality doesn't match our expectations.

And it's called cognitive dissonance.

So it's this mental discomfort we experience when two things don't fit together.

In this case the dog experience we expected and the one we were actually given.

And here's the other important part to it.

Our brains don't just tolerate that gap, they try to resolve it.

And often the way they resolve it, especially for dog parents who care really deeply, is to turn inward.

So if the experience isn't what I expected, it must be because I'm doing something wrong.

If my dog is struggling, it must be my fault.

It doesn't actually help that people are told that it is their fault by other, what I would say are professionals.

Apparently being told that it's all your fault that your dog's doing these things is not helpful in any way, shape or form.

But that's another story for another day.

The discomfort of that gap gets converted into guilt, that gets converted into self blame.

And it's converted into this constant background noise of I'm not getting this right.

That is so, so exhaust.

Because you're not just managing the reality of a difficult dog experience, you're also carrying the psychological weight of believing you're the reason for it.

Especially when people are telling you it's you as well.

But what if the gap isn't evidence of your failure?

What if it is just a gap between what you'd hope for and what it, what actually is?

And what if you were allowed to grieve that without it meaning anything about who you are as a dog parent?

The thing about this kind of grief is that it doesn't announce itself.

It doesn't feel like grief at first.

So it comes out like it feels frustrating, like that tightness in your chest before a walk.

It feels like that quiet resignation when you cancel plans because it's just too complicated to bring your dog.

It feels like the flicker of something.

So it could be sadness or envy.

Maybe when you see someone walking their dog and it looks so easy or relaxed.

Especially that sometimes it's a memory of the dog experience that you'd planned the holiday that you'd imagined, the off lead beach run, the dog who just loved other dogs.

And the quiet realization that it looks different to what you pictured.

Sometimes it's just that bone Deep tiredness that comes from constantly managing, preparing and worrying.

And underneath all of that, sometimes it's a thought that you might not even let yourself finish.

This isn't what I thought it would be.

Now, here's the part that makes this grief even more painful the moment you feel it.

So that sadness, that loss, that awareness of the gap, there's usually a second voice that rushes in really quickly.

You should be grateful you chose this.

Your dog's lovely.

What have you got to be sad about?

Imagine how your dog would feel if they knew that you were thinking these things.

And so you shut it down.

You don't let yourself grieve because grieving feels ungrateful.

It feels like a betrayal of your dog, like something you couldn't possibly say out loud.

And I want to tell you about what happened with Bonnie and Maisie, because I think it's really relevant here.

There were moments, real moments, where I wondered if this was ever going to feel easier, when I looked at the two of them and thought, did I make a mistake?

Not because I didn't love Bonnie, I loved her, like, so, so much.

But it was.

Because the gap between what I'd hoped for and what we were living felt so wide and I didn't know how to cross it.

And I couldn't say that to anyone, because from the outside, what was there to complain about?

I'd got two dogs, I'd got love in my home.

Who was I to grieve?

But the grief was real and the guilt on top of that grief was very real.

And carrying both of them silently was one of the most exhausting things that I' done.

So if you're in that place right now, I want to say something so clearly to you.

Grieving, the experience you hope for, is not the same as not loving your dog.

Those two things can exist at the same time.

So that love is real and the loss is also real, too.

And you're allowed to feel both of those things.

We live in a culture that doesn't really make space for this kind of grief.

There's no name for it.

There's no, like, ceremony, there's no nobody sends flowers.

In fact, if you try and talk about it, you get the opposite response.

So people say, oh, but they're just a dog.

Or have you tried to do something differently with them?

Have you tried using a different trainer?

Or the well meaning but slightly tone deaf?

At least they're healthy.

Psychologists sometimes call this disenfranchised grief.

So grief that's not socially recognized or validated it's the grief that doesn't get witnessed because the people around you don't understand why you'd be grieving in the first place.

Now this is actually on a wider scale of grief for, for lots of different scenarios.

So I'm literally just putting that wider, disenfranchised grief scenario into this specific topic.

Because when that grief's not witnessed, it doesn't disappear, it goes underground.

It turns into what, like chronic level, low level anxiety.

That background home of I'm not okay.

And that's hard to explain even to yourself.

So what you're feeling isn't a problem to be solved.

It's an experience that needs to be seen.

And that's what I want to do in this episode.

I am not going to give you a five step plan to feel better.

I'm not going to tell you to reframe it or look on the bright side.

I just want to say I see it and it's real.

It's a hard thing to talk about.

It's a hard thing to acknowledge and accept or have an awareness of potentially starting to think, well, actually, yeah, this is how it feels.

That gap is exactly what I'm feeling right now.

And having that awareness of it can be a difficult thing to live with because that's how I kind of felt at the time.

But here's what I've noticed with myself and with the dog parents that I work with.

When we allow ourselves to grieve the experience we imagined, when we actually feel it, rather than pushing it down, something does shift.

It's not a median, it's not completely, but something just loosens.

Because when that grief is no longer being suppressed, it stops taking up so much energy.

All the effort of not feeling, of keeping the lid on, of pretending that you're fine, it is genuinely exhausting.

And when you put the lid down, when you take that lid off, even just for a minute, you get some of that energy back.

Your nervous system, which has been working overtime to manage the unacknowledged feeling alongside everything else, gets a little more space and a little more room and a little more capacity that I've talked about before.

And then something else happens when you start fighting the experience that you have, you can start actually being present in it with your dog, not constantly measuring the gap.

That's where the real connection lives.

Not in that imagined version that didn't ever exist in this real life connection experience that you're living right now.

I want to share something about attachment that I find really moving.

So in Attachment research, both in humans and in the science of human dog bonds, one of the things that builds the most secure attachment isn't ease.

It's repair.

It's the experience of things that go wrong and then coming back together, of struggling and staying, of being in difficulty with someone and not leaving the dog.

Parents who've never had a hard walk don't know what you know.

They haven't had to learn what you've had to learn.

And they haven't had to develop the sensitivity and the attunement and the sheer depth of knowing that comes from working through something hard together.

So with Bonnie, the dog who stopped on walks, who pulled, who was reactive, who tested everything I thought I knew, what we built together was something I couldn't have planned.

And it's a bond that was forged in difficulty, a level of understanding between us that only came because we went through it.

Research on human dog attachment shows that dogs read us deeply.

So our emotional state, our nervous system, the subtle signals we don't even know we're sending, and when we have to slow down and tune in and truly pay attention, as the difficult dog experience often forces us to do, what develops is a quality of connection that genuinely is rare.

Your dog doesn't know about the version that you'd planned.

They only know this one.

And in this one, you show up every single day, even when it's hard, even when you're tired, even when the grief is quiet and present underneath everything else that isn't that consolation prize or a, you know, anything like that.

It's a different kind of relationship, and I think it's a deeper one.

Now, I'm not saying if so this is.

This is so nuanced and it's so individual.

I'm not saying if you feel like you are really struggling with your dog and it's become.

It's got to the point where you are feeling extremely low and extremely anxious every day because of the things that are happening with your dog and their behavior.

And things have got to the point where they are so, so difficult and you are working with someone and it just feels like it's not working.

It is also okay to say that it's not working.

I want it to be really clear that it's not something that.

Like what I've just said, those things that I've just mentioned.

It's not to say that you just got to keep pushing through.

I'm not saying that at all.

Keep pushing through isn't something that I think works in every scenario.

It is so individual and so nuanced.

And if you feel comfortable enough and confident enough in the connection that you have with the person that you're working with, if it's a trainer or a behaviorist or, or the vet, and you have that confidence to say these things out loud, it should be something that you can talk about openly and not, not feel judged.

So if you say, and I've had these conversations with clients previously and when it's been difficult behaviors and, and it has got to the point where, you know, this is the last resort, this is the last thing that they can do and try before potentially rehoming the dog.

And that's a whole different thing in itself.

That's a whole other episode.

It's a whole other conversation in itself.

And you should be able to talk to someone about that and not feel judged or feel like you haven't tried hard enough.

So this is, this is just something that I want to mention because you had got a plan in your mind of what it looked like and you have acknowledged the grief that's hidden underneath it all.

And yes, you are going to build a deeper bond with your dog after you've worked through these things.

So I've worked with clients who've said, you know, I've considered rehoming my dog before you worked with me and now at the end of the program, we're best mates.

Those are verbatim words.

Those are words that a client has said to me.

I was considering rehoming my dog before we started working together.

Now at the end of the program, on our last session at the, as I walked out, we're best mates now.

And those, that, that's the kind of thing like there's a difficult difficulty level and everybody's got their own kind of point that they can reach with these things.

So you should be able to have these conversations with the person that you are working with.

And if you're feeling alone and you're not working with someone, my recommendation would be to find a professional, ethical, science led, qualified, certified trainer or behaviorist that can help you with it.

Because working on stuff like this alone is super difficult.

And you will find that you potentially are stuck in a cycle and you need somebody to kind of have eyes on the outside to break that cycle and help you through it.

And you should be having those kind of conversations throughout and saying, is this working?

Is this a realistic goal for starters, and is this something that we think we can achieve?

And I just wanted to add that in because I don't want it to come across as.

You've just got to keep pushing through.

If you just feel like in your gut this isn't working and you've tried all the things and you still feel absolutely rubbish and anxious and all that kind of thing.

So if you wanted to talk to someone about it, would definitely recommend that you do.

And it needs to be somebody that you feel comfortable talking to about these things without feeling like, like I say, that you're going to be judged or anything like that.

So I just wanted that to be something where, like, your dog doesn't know about that version that you had got planned.

They only know the experience that they're in now with you.

And you do show up every single day, even when it is hard and when you are tired and when that grief is there.

But the caveat is, if you are feeling like this over a long period of time and it doesn't feel like it is getting any.

Any better, doesn't feel like there is any improvement, it, you know, like for me, my experience and my relationship with Bonnie changed completely and her behavior changed.

It may have been a different conversation if that hadn't have happened.

And that's okay as well.

So I do just want to add that in.

So finding peace with the dog experience that you have doesn't mean settling.

It doesn't mean giving up on the progress, and it doesn't mean pretending everything is fine.

It means being willing to be here in the experience with this dog in this season.

It means letting the grief exist without letting it define the whole story, because the grief and the love are both true.

And the love, the love that you show up with every single day, even on the hardest days, is evidence of something really important about who you are.

I think back to the early days with Bonnie sometimes.

The tension with Maisie, the walks where she stopped, the reactivity that came later, all of that.

And I also think about who she became and who I became and what we figured out together.

The piece I found wasn't about the experience becoming easier.

It was about me stopping, fighting against the experience that I had and finding something real and good inside it.

And I want that for you, too.

But I do want to acknowledge that it is really difficult and it's okay to feel like it's not working.

And having those conversations is okay as well.

So if you're sitting with some of that grief today, that quiet kind, the one without a name, I just want you to know you are not alone in it.

It is one of the most common things that I hear from dog parents that I work with and one of the least talked about.

You're allowed to feel it.

You're allowed to acknowledge the gap.

And you're also allowed, slowly and gently and in your own time, to find something real and good in the experience that you actually have.

And if you can't, that is where another conversation is needed.

So if this episode's resonated with you, I'd love for you to share it with another dog parent who might need to hear it or leave a review.

It genuinely helps more people find the podcast when you leave a review, even if you don't leave a comment and you just leave a star rating, I would really, really appreciate it.

And if you're ready to go a little deeper, to start building something calmer and more grounded with your dog, I have created my dog Parent path.

It's the place I've created for exactly this.

It's nervous system aware support built for dog parents like you who are doing everything that they can and still finding it hard.

You will find the the link to a resource that's going to start to help you in the show notes.

It's very new and I am building it right now.

So this is like a little sneaky peek into where we're going with it.

But that free resource, if you're kind of interested to find out more, is linked in the show notes.

So I just want to say take care of yourself this week.

Do talk to someone if you feel you need to, and I'll see you in the next episode.

Thanks so much for tuning in to the Mindful Dog Parent.

If this episode gave you something to think about or it just made you feel a little less alone, I would love it if you followed the show and shared it with another dog parent who needs it.

You'll find all the links and resources mentioned in the show notes@lavendergardenanimalservices.co.uk podcast and I would love to stay in touch, so head there if you want to explore more ways to work with me or get support.