E380: 바비 밤브리(Bobbie Bhambree) - "더 회복력 있는 개를 위한 회복력 프레임워크 만들기"

So I have a lot of clients that call me not just because they might be struggling with a behavior issue in the ring, like maybe jumping up and biting their handler while running through the course or having struggling with arousal regulation. But I also get a lot of dog sports people calling me because maybe two dogs are not getting along in the house or one is fearful or things like that. Um, so I, I love, I'm very passionate about working with the dog sports community specifically. Very cool. So how did you originally get into the dog world? Was it the agility angle there? No, I was, uh, 22 years old and I got my first dog. I grew up with dogs. Apparently my mom said I used to watch like Marty Stouffer's Wild America, like every weekend apparently or something. And I'd always watch National Geographic. And, you know, to this day on the weekends, if I'm not competing at an event, when I wake up in the morning, I don't turn on the news. I turn on like BBC's like Planet Earth or whatever with David Attenborough. Um, you know, he's the, like the commentator. Um, I love nature. I love animals. And, um, when I was 22, I got my first dog, uh, as an adult, my own dog. I mean, who's really an adult at 22. I thought I was a little, a pit bull rescue named Claire. Um, she was a lot of dog and in retrospect, she really wasn't. But at the time she felt like a lot of dog. I just didn't know what I was doing at all. I made a lot of mistakes along the way, but she working with her. Um, help because she became reactive. She would get very frustrated on the leash. Um, and so that helped me get into this world. Um, and my, uh, partner at the time also had a dog and he was doing a lot of work with him. And so we just fell into it like dog walking and loving dogs and going to seminars and initially volunteering at the ASPCA. I happen to be wearing a sweatshirt of the ASPCA right now. Um, then getting jobs there when they were just a little, uh, shelter organization in New York city compared to now where they're, you know, have a national, even global reach. Yeah. So, okay. So it sounds like maybe that's part of how you got into resilience and behavior work. Is that, is that right? Yes. So much of it was shelter work initially and, um, learning along the way, sometimes the hard way, how, uh, supporting mental and physical wellbeing is more important than skills training. Cause if this mental and physical wellbeing is not taken care of, you know, learning skills, it's just not going to happen. Not in an effective way. It's going to influence how they're learning. It's influencing what they're learning.

Um, uh, what's associated with that experience. So, yes. So resilience is a big part of that conversation. Can you talk us through kind of how you define and think about resilience when we're talking about dog training and maybe, you know, kind of why it's important that we're thinking about it, right? Why it's part of the picture. Yeah. So it's, I'm very lucky to have a friend who's a neuroscientist. Her name is Dr. Kathy Murphy. I think she's going to be doing something for you guys soon. And she and I've been friends for maybe 13 or 14 years. And early on, you know, she knew that, and she's also a veterinarian DVM. So early on, we would have these conversations coming from two different perspectives about the dog world. And through these conversations, you know, she was learning more about the practical side of things. Cause I am a practitioner and I was learning more about what was happening in the brain, what was happening in the body, right. And how the environment can impact, uh, behavior, but there's so much more to it than just the environment, right. There's all these internal processes that we might be able to guess what's going on, but, um, scientists can actually track what's going on because they're in a lab and they're doing these studies and they're doing the work and they have the equipment attached to the animals that they're, that they're researching these concepts on these theories on. And so through these conversations, we started to look at resilience through a neurobiological lens. And essentially what it is, is resilience is the ability to bounce back from stressors. It's a dynamic process. Cause so you might be really resilient at one point in your life and you might be, you might have low resilience at another point of your life because of a number of factors, um, which I'll get into in a moment. So not only is it the ability to bounce back from stressful events, but it's also the ability to resist, um, the negative impacts of stress. And when I say stress, I don't necessarily mean like, oh, I have this deadline coming up and I'm really stressed about it. Cause stress can also be a good thing. I spoke at the APDT conference and I was stressed before it, but I was also so excited. So stress is not necessarily a barometer of where you are emotionally. It can always, it's, it's just what we're looking at it as where you are physically, physiologically before I got married the whole day, you know, I'm with my bridesmaids and I'm really excited. Um, and I just remember my entire body was like vibrating. I was so nervous, but I was so happy. Right.

So physiologically, my body was under a lot of stress and anticipating reading my vows in front of all these people that I love. Um, it was my second marriage. So it was like a very big deal to have gotten through the process of healing and then discovery and then meeting my, um, now husband and then getting married for both of us. We got married, um, to, in our mid to late thirties. So it was a very different experience. And I was so stressed all day long and I was so happy all day long, but my God, I had to take some time to like quietly sit or like take the dog, my dogs for a walk around the grounds because I was so nervous. So stress is really what it's a physiological process to get the body ready, more oxygen, more glucose, like to prepare the body for the event that's coming up. Or the event in the moment, right? Like God forbid a car accident, right? Your adrenaline starts going so that you can do what you need to do to take care of yourself. So, um, there's, you know, short-term stress where, you know, in the moment that car accident, or you have a deadline coming up for work, uh, then you have kind of medium stress. Like maybe you're dealing with some work drama, or maybe you're dealing with like, you're struggling with communication with your kid or something in this moment. And then there's chronic stress and the chronic stress in your body is really where breakdown happens, where, um, injury, illness, disease starts to happen. Um, where the stress is now impacting your ability to, or whatever chronically, because your body is activated, all the stress hormones are activated and staying activated the entire time. You're now, it's impacting how you're digesting your food. It's impacting your quality of sleep. It's impacting your mood. It's impacting. So your cognitive function, there's so many different things impacted by chronic stress. Now, chronic stress could be a result of external factors. Like I was living with my husband and I were living with his parents for a number of years, and we were supporting his dad and taking care of my mother-in-law who had Alzheimer's. That's chronic stress being a caregiver at that level. Right. And then, um, then there's like, what are you doing for yourself in those situations to recover from that chronic stress? Um, my husband felt it more than I am, than I do. And he is just now, she passed away this past April. She was in a home for like three years, I think, a care facility, uh, four years. And so, yeah, four years. So, but only now is his body starting to recover from that.

And he is working with professionals and the right people to support himself in that process. But when you've got years of that kind of stress that your body is dealing with the whole time, um, stuff happens, like your body breaks down. And then I know this is a very long explanation, but coming back to dogs. Now, even if at home, everything is really like lovely and relaxed, they have this, you know, really balanced quality of life. When you bring them to these events, their bodies have to become stressed so that, and that doesn't mean it's a bad thing. A lot of, most of these dogs who compete in whatever sports they're in, they're in love what they do. They either inherently love it or they grow to love it, right? So a lot of them love what they do. They get so excited when you arrive at the site, for example, but their bodies have to prepare, um, for that event. So as a result, everything is activated to get into that optimal state of performance. Now, if things are not done to support them in coming back down, they could potentially stay in that elevated state. Now, some dogs can naturally just do that. Some dogs, um, have people who either are aware of this and support them coming down, or just happen to live a lifestyle that supports them coming down. Where you can, a really strong example of where you see a body that's activated into this kind of level of stress and not coming down is maybe operational work with dogs that do operational work. Dogs in the military, they're in these police dogs. They're at this high level of stress and the information is, is there, but it's not in these fields yet. It's not a lot of people don't yet know. A lot of professionals don't yet know the value of supporting the body and completing that stress cycle so that they're not staying in that elevated stress. Even, uh, even though the dog might love the work. Does that make sense? Yeah. I think that's such a kind of an interesting way of thinking about it too, with, um, with dog sports and you're going to these events, especially if you're competing like every single weekend for months on end, right? Like thinking about the fact that your dog's body is going through that every single weekend, in addition to like the wear and tear of training, which I think people are becoming more aware of and kind of thinking about more intentionally. So yes, absolutely. Absolutely. Ton of super interesting pieces in there. Okay. So talk to me a little bit more about some of the sciencey bits you mentioned in there. You know, what do we kind of know from a science perspective?

What do we maybe think about from a science perspective? What's out there, but maybe not true. Um, yeah. So that stresses all stress is bad. I think, um, I think people know now in mainstream culture that not all stress is bad. Um, when we're looking at stress in this conversation, we're looking specifically about how the body is responding to the environment or events in the environment, or if it's a human being thoughts, some of our own thoughts create that physiological response, right? Um, like, uh, I started my own business and I was like really worried and stressed about it. And as a result, I've got this ugly cold source. I'm so glad we're doing this audio and not video. Right. But it's like, this is just what happens with your body. So I think that, um, the other thing is, uh, and this might be a little bit controversial, but I'm, and I'll say it anyway, is that it's more than operant. So the working through building resilience operantly works. Absolutely. Right. So meaning there are exercises that you can do and skills that you can teach the dog to support building resilience. And it's not the only way you really have to look at what is the, what are you doing to support the body neurobiologically? So that they are recovering from stress, um, or basically the stress response cycle is completing. So the stress response cycle is a HPA axis, hypothalamus, pituitary, adrenal gland axis. So the hypothalamus is in your brain pituitary. It's like the back right here. The pointing, like you guys can see the back of your brain, back of your head. Pituitary is just kind of below that, almost like in your neck, back, your head area where it's meeting. And then the adrenals glands sit on top of the kidneys. So that's those three glands work together to activate, to support the body, giving it the muscles, more oxygen, glucose, you know, whatever, getting the brain into a place to be more sharp, more focused, everything needed to respond to the, the, the events in, in the environment. Um, but if that activation system, sometimes it's genetics, epigenetics, learning, like it could be a, it's a whole range of things that can create or prevent the body from naturally completing that stress cycle or bringing them back down to baseline. Um, and that's where you can develop like chronic disease or behavior issues. There's a lot of dogs, for example, that are just sort of naturally fearful that now they're living in an urban environment and they're never completing the stress cycle, or you have dogs in a shelter environment, you know, being in that environment is so hard and then maybe

they're there for months. And that's why you might see them take months for their baseline to lower, lower, lower, because it's been elevated for such a long period of time. Um, so just by teaching skills, working operantly with some of these dogs is not enough to support them coming back down to their baseline. And the other thing is, it's very cool. That blew my mind is that your baseline, you can, through this work of really understanding resilience, you can lower your baseline more, more, more so that, um, your ability to handle stressors improves. You could be more resilient to stressors. I'm assuming that some of this is what led to the resilience rainbow. So can you talk about kind of what that is with where that idea came from a little bit? Yeah. So it's through these conversations I was having with Dr. Kathy Murphy and we both happened to adopt dogs around this. I think I had Marvel. He's my Jack Russell Yerkey mix. I was doing agility with him. I got him in, I think 2013. And then a couple of years later, she got, uh, she rescued a Rottweiler from Romania because my friend lives in the UK. Kathy lives in the UK. And she and I were both discovering for different reasons that the way that we were training dogs or support doing behavior modification, we're not supporting these dogs. So Marvel got him at five months old from a shelter. He looked like a tiny little red squirrel. He kind of still looks like a, now a bigger red squirrel. He's only seven and a half pounds. So you think, oh, not a, whatever. It's like, whatever, if he barks and charges and lunges and whatever, he's a tiny thing, but it's not okay for many reasons, right? It's just not okay across the board. Um, he wasn't like that when I first got him. And then as he got older, he just started to change. And, um, and I remember I was at a seminar, it was a three day seminar and he was doing so well, but by day three, he was just barking and lunging at every single person and dog. And he wasn't doing that before. And it felt like something in his brain snapped is how I was describing it to Kathy. And around the same time she had rescued a dog from Romania, a Rottweiler who was only about a year old or a little under a year old. And she was beautiful. And she looked like in the foster home, she was on a farm and like looked really lovely with the chickens and the kittens and all this, another dog walking around. Um, she arrived at my friend's home. She lives in a kind of urban residential area at the time. And literally the dog was bouncing off the walls, terrified, shaking.

And so we thought, okay, uh, with her dog, she was like, well, this dog, she finally got to the place of, she does not feel safe. Like the first thing I have to do is help her feel safe before we do anything. So her nervous system can calm down and actually, um, process what's going on around her in a way that's more supportive. And for Marvel, I was like, how do I counter condition and desensitize the entire world? Like, how do I counter condition and desensitize an entire competition environment? Like that doesn't, how do I do that? And that's where those, those questions, um, really started to bring us into this, this thought process about resilience. And at the time I was calling it bandwidth. I'm like, Marvel only has so much bandwidth. 8 a PM at night needs to go to bed. If I don't put him to bed, he's going to start growling and guarding the couch and not letting anyone near him and biting people. Like it was just, and at the time, like I said, I was living with my in-laws. So I just called it bandwidth. I'm like, how do I preserve his bandwidth so that he can do the game that I love? And I was totally ready to say, okay, maybe we don't do agility. Maybe we just don't do it. Right? Like if you, if this doesn't get better, or if you don't feel better, we don't do this, but it wasn't happening just in that environment. It was happening everywhere. And, um, it was, I think in 2014, I read an article, a blog post that Dr. Patricia McConnell wrote, and she used the word resilience. And then I was like, oh my God, this is my dog. This is Marvel. Like when I read the blog and I thought, well, I don't believe he had any trauma because the, she was fighting trauma research and for trauma research to build resilience for someone who's traumatized. And this is human trauma research. It was, you're, you're looking to create support, mental and physical wellbeing, safety and security agency and social support. Those are the four pillars to build resilience for someone who's gone through trauma. And when I shared this with Kathy, I was like, this is, we both were like, this is what my dog needs her Rottweiler safety and security. Social support wasn't even an option because the dog did not trust Kathy at the time, even though Kathy did nothing. Right. So our dogs let us down these paths of exploring these conversations around resilience. And what does it look like physiologically so that they get into a place where how their brain is processing the environment is in a more supportive way versus a reactive way. Okay. So out of that came this concept, right? So is there, is there a short definition?

I don't know for kind of what the resilience rainbow is or kind of like, is there a, I don't know. Yeah. I'll give you a short one. I know I keep going on. No, it's okay. It's okay. Okay. It's interesting stuff. So Kathy and I are very visual people. And when we came up with our seven domains, which are the four pillars for trauma research first, which is mental, physical wellbeing, social support agencies and safety and security. When we were looking at things where I was looking at things as a practitioner, we added these other components, which was predictability. And that's where the practitioner trainer can really influence things. Decompression, right? And I love Sarah's trimming, really coining that word decompression walks and bringing that into our industry in a bigger way. And, and, and using that intentionally, right? Not just, Oh, I'm hiking my dog today and we're just hanging out. But actually what I learned about the neurobiological benefits of those kinds of nature walks from Kathy and the research that we did to create this framework. Um, and then, so those three, and then completing the stress cycle and the, where I got that is I was reading in 2020, Amy and Emily Nagowski's book, completing the stress cycle burnout. And I thought, and this, you know, in 2020, we were dealing with the pandemic. So I thought, Oh my God, this is what I need to do for myself right now. Cause we're all panicking about this pandemic. And this is when the shutdown was in place. Um, and I think I started reading it in the early summer when we were just starting to come out of the shutdown in America, but other parts of the world were just still in the shutdown. Like Kathy UK was in for the rest of the year, essentially. Um, and so I, my husband and I, we got like a Peloton bike and we were exercising and we were watching funny movies cause laughing and all these things completely stress cycle. So you're looking to get your HPA axis down to baseline again, so that you have more of ability to deal with stressors in general. Um, and there's a lot of different ways to do that. So those, through those seven domains, we just kept coming back to them. I'm sure there's others out there that support resilience, conditioning, resilience, building and, um, and such. Uh, we, because it was seven, we thought, well, what's an easy way to remember. And then we came up with the rainbow and the rainbow, seven colors, seven domains, resilience rainbow. It's fun to say it's a memory aid. Yeah. So that's how we came up with it. Awesome. Um, okay.

So in there, one of the things you kind of mentioned was kind of helping a learner acquire skills to process stressful experiences. Can you, can you just talk a little more about that? Kind of what you mean by skills, maybe an example. Yeah. So it's about coping strategies. A lot of it is, um, I'll point to the pattern games. I love Leslie McDevitt's pattern game and, uh, she didn't know it, but at the time, and hopefully she does now because we've shared the neurobiology with her, but she didn't know that she was creating an ingenious set of games. I know she has a whole program, but I'm going to point, I'm going to stick with the pattern games. So with the ability to, um, create a pattern like experience, many things are happening for the dog. So, uh, it is a bit of a skill because they're learning to look at you and then move to a target or if it's a Superbowls game or whatever the game is, um, they're processing what's going on in the environment, but they're doing it in this rhythmic way. And anytime you're creating a pattern like experience through movement, it actually can change brain wave frequencies to get them into a calmer state. And it doesn't mean that they're relaxed. It just means it gets them into a brain state that creates, uh, an opportunity for optimal learning. Um, it's something that has to be practiced over time. It'll, it can also support arousal regulation. Like there's just so many things physiologically that are happening when you play a pattern game, for example. Um, there's things that you can do to create the, uh, the, the experience of predictability. So in a lot of the behavior work I do, I teach a dog to target, uh, um, like a target stick, like a wand. Right. And so if they see this target stick, it's predictable. It means one thing, no matter where we are in the world, no matter what we're doing now, if they're terrified in the middle of a ring and shutting down because the judge is there or whatever, the buzzer went off. Yeah. That's not going to work. Plus I can't bring a target stick into the ring, but it's a whole progressive process to get to the point where the dog's like, yeah, this is no big deal. So it actually helps them process what's going on in the environment without making whatever's going on in the environment, the focus. Interesting. Very cool. Yeah. Um, okay. So you are doing a webinar for us on the 24th, specifically kind of on some of this stuff. Can you share a little bit more kind of on what you'll cover and maybe who should consider joining us? Yeah.

If you are a dog trainer, a behavior consultant, a pet guardian, a competitor, a sport enthusiast, an instructor, a coach, this is for you. Uh, vet tech, veterinarian, like it's across the board. It's pretty, it's applicable to so many different things. So once you understand the concepts, you can apply it. We've had a lot of people apply this framework to other species like horses. We've had people apply it to shelter dogs, like, and it's just been an amazing, it's been amazing to see them, um, basically create, have more resilience in the shelter environment waiting for adoption. So it's across the board. So the webinar, I'm going to go through the resilience framework, the seven domains and give real world examples of how to utilize the domains and some of the exercises we suggest using or considering for each domain. Um, I wish we had time, maybe in the future we can do like a case study to show how I've used the framework to apply to my cases when I work with them, whether it's a dog sports or a pet guardian. I mean, across the board, uh, separation, anxiety, foveas, aggression, like it works for raising a puppy. I raised my youngest two dogs through this framework. Very cool. Yeah. Um, all right. So, uh, I think that gives folks hopefully a little bit of an idea why they should join us in the 24th. Do you have any, you know, kind of final thoughts or maybe key points that just want to kind of leave folks with? Oh gosh. Yeah. I don't, uh, let me think about that. Uh, well, yeah. So resilience has been out there for a very long time. There's so much science about resilience. Um, but what I want people, I hope, what I hope people will come to with this event is look like, look at or consider what are the practical things that we can do to actually condition resilience and then support resilience once we've conditioned the resilience and then understanding how to put it into, you know, a schedule. Like a lot of us dog sports people build a schedule around our sport, right? Taking care of the dog, rest days, conditioning days, training days, um, uh, competing, you know, how much are they sleeping? What are they eating? Like there's so much to it and resilience can be a resilient support can be part of that conversation. Awesome. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast, Bobby. This has been fascinating. Yay. Thanks so much for having me. Absolutely. And thanks to all of our listeners for tuning in. We'll be back next week. Don't miss it. If you haven't already subscribed to our podcast in iTunes or the podcast app of your choice

to have our next episode automatically downloaded to your phone as soon as it becomes available. Today's show is brought to you by the Fenzie Dog Sports Academy. Special thanks to Denise Fenzie for supporting this podcast. Music provided royalty free by bensound.com. The track featured here is called Body. Audio editing provided by Chris Lang. Thanks again for tuning in and happy training.