How to Help a Dog with Separation Anxiety: Don't Start with Pre-Departure Cues!
As a certified dog behavior consultant specializing in separation anxiety, I meet with a lot of clients who’ve sought me out after recommendations from other dog professionals failed to give them the results they were looking for. One of the most common recommendations clients hear before meeting me is to begin the process with pre-departure cue desensitization. If you’ve been advised to start your separation anxiety training journey by picking your keys up, putting them down, then not leaving (repeat ad nauseum) you’ve been advised to start your training with pre-departure cue desensitization.
In this post, you’ll find out a bit more about this training method, why many well-intentioned advice-givers will encourage you to try it out, and why I recommend that you don’t start your training with this method.
What are pre-departure cues?
Pre-departure cues are the things your dog sees as cues that a departure is coming. In other words, pre-departure cues are the clues your dog looks for to guess whether you’re about to leave the house and, perhaps even more importantly, whether you’re going to bring them along.
Everyone has their own unique pre-departure routine, and some of the pre-departure cues that set off another dog may be irrelevant to your own dog.
Some common pre-departure cues:
Picking up keys
Putting on shoes, or a specific type of shoes
Putting on a coat, hat, or scarf
Packing up a backpack or other bag
Putting your phone in your pocket
Turning on music, white noise, or the TV
Turning lights on or off
Telling the dog “I’ll be right back!” or other goodbye
For dogs with separation anxiety, isolation distress, and other separation-related behavior problems, time spent alone is an enormous event in their lives, one they’d like to see coming as far in advance as possible. Dogs are incredibly adept at noticing patterns and forming associations between events that tend to occur together, so of course dogs who are very concerned about the event of alone time are going to look for other events that predict it!
Unfortunately, for many dogs with behavior issues under the “separation anxiety” umbrella, learning to predict alone time doesn’t help them cope with it, because difficult absences are too frequent and too intense to get through, even when they see them coming. For these dogs, pre-departure cues become sources of anxiety! Instead of providing the dog with predictability and safety, pre-departure cues signal to dogs who are afraid of being left that their greatest fear is just around the corner - and they can’t do anything to stop it! Over time, the pre-departure cues, themselves, become a source of anxiety.
I work with many dogs who start shaking when their person picks up the keys, start drooling when the “calming dog music” YouTube playlist goes on, or become frantic when their guardian puts on their coat. These are dogs who have learned the pre-departure cues that mean they are about to be left, and the “alone time” panic begins even before their person is out the door.
If you are living with a dog who panics in response to your “getting ready routine,” you already know how this pre-departure meltdown makes it impossible to get out the door without distress. Read on to find out why many dog professionals recommend tackling this pre-departure anxiety first and why I don’t make that same recommendation to my clients.
Why would you start with pre-departure cues?
Many vets, dog trainers, and dog behavior consultants recommend their clients start the separation anxiety training process by desensitizing their dog to pre-departure cues. The idea is that breaking your leaving routine into small pieces and practicing these pieces on their own until your dog is relaxed with each piece will allow them to tackle your eventual departure with ease. If your dog is anxious about keys, you focus your training on keys until they are relaxed, then move onto shoes, coat, etc. Once your dog is comfortable with you standing at the door in all your usual “going out” attire, you finally begin to practice heading out the door.
This makes a lot of intuitive sense, and it follows a pattern we frequently follow in modifying other tough behaviors, but it’s not the approach I recommend to my clients. Read on to find out why.
Why don’t I start my clients with pre-departure cues?
Pre-departure cue desensitization is not very motivating for humans
If you live with a dog who barks and howls every time you leave and your landlord is threatening you with eviction, it doesn’t feel like a triumph to be able to pick your keys up 5 times and then sit on the couch. If you spend a month training and still can’t even close a door between yourself and your dog, how motivated are you going to be to keep going?
It may surprise you to hear that the hardest part of separation anxiety training is keeping dog guardians in the game! When done well, separation anxiety training has a great success rate and is gentle on the dog, but it almost always takes longer than we humans hope when we begin. I meet many people who have lost hope of ever leaving their dog alone because they’ve gotten so bogged down on pre-departure cues that they’re exhausted. Building emotional wellness and sustainable behavior change is a marathon, not a sprint, and we’ll never reach the finish line if people are burning out in the first few weeks!
As a Certified Separation Anxiety Trainer, I focus on getting my clients out the door as soon as their dog is ready, rearranging the leaving routine however the dog needs to make that happen. Thirty seconds outside the door in slippers feels a lot more exciting to most of my clients than 20 reps of picking up keys and putting them back down, and the sooner we can get that burst of relief and satisfaction on the human end, the more likely we are to maintain motivation long enough to reach our training goals.
It’s not necessary to tackle every pre-departure cue.
For many dogs, pre-departure cues have become such sources of anxiety that their inclusion in the leaving routine sabotages absences that might otherwise be successful. Identifying these “sticky spots” in the leaving routine and removing them from the sequence can get you out the door without panic sooner for longer than we might manage if we put all our energy in making these pre-departure cues “safe.”
Some of my clients leave their dogs in slippers and then change shoes in the hallway, because it lets them go grocery shopping while their dog naps. Some of my clients do a few extra “warm-ups,” coming and going a few times before they leave “for real,” because it means their dog can handle a few hours instead of a few minutes. Some of my clients put their keys in their pocket 30 minutes before they go, because skipping the extra jingle makes all the difference. After months of arranging a sitter for every run to the store and booking an expensive day at daycare for every day in the office, these little compromises offer immense relief.
Finding the unique compromise that helps your dog handle alone time isn’t always easy, but most of my clients are thrilled to change their leaving routine if it means they actually get to leave! If there are pieces of your leaving routine that are important or convenient, they can be folded back in once your dog has built new coping skills, allowing you to regain your comfortable routine without sacrificing the progress you’ve made with your dog’s training.
It’s easy to sensitize your dog instead.
Unfortunately, one of the biggest risks in this training method is that you may sensitize your dog to pre-departure cues, instead of desensitizing them! Desensitization occurs when a dog has repeated “safe” encounters with something they currently find scary; with repeated safe experiences, the dog learns that this stimulus is safe and they no longer fear it. Sensitization, which we’re trying to avoid, is the exact opposite: it occurs when a dog has repeated scary experiences with their trigger and these scary experiences confirm their fears.
While it may sound easy to avoid bad experiences and aim for good ones, identifying subtle signs of fear in dogs can be tricky, and many dog guardians accidentally sensitize their dogs while trying to desensitize them. When picking up and putting down keys, in itself, is enough to trigger fear, it does the dog no good to skip the actual departure.
Bringing a certified dog behavior consultant into your dog’s training team from day 1 can ensure you are working at your dog’s pace to reduce their fear, rather than accidentally increasing fear by applying broad advice that doesn’t work for them.
Pre-departure cue desensitization doesn’t help dogs predict what’s coming.
Pre-departure cues may be making your dog anxious, but they’re also providing some much needed predictability that could be helping them brace for hard absences ahead. Your dog worked hard to learn the clues in their environment that make life predictable, and we’re likely to make them more anxious if we tell them their past learning history no longer applies.
Anxiety loves information - your dog wants to be able to predict what’s coming next! A dog who has learned that keys, coat, and shoes mean their person is about to leave will probably feel anxious about keys, coat, and shoes, but they’ll be able to relax when their person isn’t handling those things. A dog who has learned that keys predict keys predict keys and that departures are completely unpredictable is probably not going to feel anxious about keys anymore, but they’re going to be experiencing more general anxiety because their greatest fear now arrives without warning.
When we take away the predictability our dogs depend on, without also resolving the stress they are doing their best to cope with, we end up with a lot more stress! Without a reliable way to predict departures, some dogs become much more anxious, hypervigilant and shadowing their guardian from room to room because they don’t have any better way to assess whether an absence is coming.
Pre-departure cue desensitization doesn’t fix the root problem.
Finally, the biggest reason I don’t recommend my clients start with pre-departure cues? It doesn’t fix the real problem! A dog who panics every time their guardian puts on shoes because shoes predict scary absence isn’t really afraid of shoes; they’re afraid of the absence!
We can spend months teaching your dog that keys and shoes and calming music mean you’re staying home, but those months of training haven’t done anything about the fact that your dog is still scared about being alone! As soon as we start practicing alone time, we’re back to square one with this primary trigger; your dog doesn’t feel any better about isolation than they did before you taught them not to worry about your shoes.
If your dog is afraid of being separated from you or being left home alone, that’s the fear we need to target. Once the fear of being left is gone, the fear of things that predict being left will evaporate on its own; clues that a safe experience is coming are safe themselves!
What do I recommend in separation anxiety training:
I recommend a training program that works on getting you out the door as soon as possible, so that you and your dog can start practicing the skill you really need: spending time apart. Once we’ve given your dog evidence that your departures are safe, it will be much easier to fold pre-departure cues back into the training process, because they now predict a safe event.
Of course, putting this theory into practice is not as simple as it may sound! Finding your dog’s starting point and easing them into a training plan that will tackle their greatest fear can be a tricky task, and you’re unlikely to find the personalized help you need in a blog post, book, or “how to” guide you found online. If such broadly distributed “one size fits all” advice was going to work for you, it already would have! Working with a Certified Separation Anxiety Trainer who will make a personalized, just-for-you training plan will help you get out of this rut and back to living your life.
Looking for help getting out the door? I’d love to hear from you! Please book a free call so we can find out what you and your dog need to succeed. It’s time to get back to the life you’ve put on hold!