Flood Out The Fear: Attacking The Roots of Stress - a podcast by Ty Brown

Flooding. No, I’m not speaking about what’s been happening in Louisiana and Texas lately—I’m talking about a psychological term for something that happens when you deal with a lot of stress.

If you read my previous blog post about counter-conditioning, I mentioned that it can only get you so far when dealing with a dog’s fear. Maybe the threshold is too big, maybe the dog’s fear is too big, maybe the dog doesn’t have a large enough motivator. It’s not feasible or realistic to use counter-conditioning through the entire process in those cases.

However, flooding is often useful where counter-conditioning leaves off. Flooding is a tool that we use to help dogs, sometimes properly and sometimes improperly. It’s essentially saying to the dog: “Here’s something you’re afraid of and you can’t run away from it. What are you going to do?” It’s been called “immersion therapy” as well, and has also been performed with many human subjects over the years.

When the mind is confronted with something that’s terrifying or nerve-wracking, it has two options: adapt or die. Of course, there are a few other options like fighting, fleeing, or avoidance. But let’s say that the opportunity to fight isn’t there and that the opportunity to flee has been taken away. In that situation, the dog can either adapt or die. I know that sounds extreme, but I don’t mean it in that way: you and your dog aren’t actually going to die. In theory, someone could be put into a room of snakes and be so terrified that they have a heart attack and die. But in reality, flooding won’t cause death.

What can flooding cause? Adaptation! When I say “adaptation,” all I mean is the process of learning how to cope with stress. In the example I used in my last blog I talked about a dog who was afraid of men, especially men who tried to touch or pet it. So we talked about counter-conditioning, having the man move and then feed the dog over and over. But the dog is also afraid of men making a sudden movement in the house.

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