We've been doing desensitization training & all other types of trainning trying to address our dog's anxiety / isolation anxiety for almost a year. She is a 2-year-old rescue mix with general anxiety (afraid of the car & vet) and isolation anxiety which at it's worst presents via barking & howling but these days is mostly just panicked movements around the house (we haven't let to her get to the barking stage in a really long time, I'm not even sure she would still do it). When we adopted her we had no idea what we were getting into, but we loved her and we were ready to strap in and put in the time to address this. We found a trainer, started the protocol, did everything right. At one point she was holding for close to 45 min.
Then we pushed too far too many days in a row (we got over excited at her progress) and since then we have watched months of really hard work basically come apart. She's back down to a threshhold of like 4-5 minutes, and the past 2 months of training I haven't seen much improvement upon this despite people's notes that dogs who regress bounce back quickly.
I think what I'm sitting with right now is: maybe we can't cure this. The amount of energy we've put into this - daily trainings, obsessive research, coordinating schedules, finding sitters, testing daycares, canceling & rearranging plans, spending tons of $$$ — has been genuinely and truly exhausting. I was happy to do this when we saw progress each month, feeling like it was all getting us to our end goal, however slow. But I never would have guessed that 1 year later we would be at only 4 minutes...It feels like we have tried everything to help our dog and nothing is working. Our friends think we're a little crazy, and I'm starting to wonder if we are crazy too. And the hardest part is that after all of it, her progress turned out to be so fragile - like any bad day could upsend it. Do I recommit to all this hard work even when months of effort can just be decimated with 1 or 2 bad sessions? I can't control everything.
We are hopeful since we just started working with a vet behaviorist & are going to try a new trainer & a new cocktail of meds for her (she was on prozac for a while which did work for a bit, but now we're putting her on sertraline + a situational med). But I am also skeptical since meds have not been a silver bullet for us in the past. We've discussed rehoming her this devestating to think of - she is the BEST dog besides this, and we truly love her and she loves us. Rehoming would be traumatizing for both of us (more traumatizing than a 40 min absence here and there), and I'm not sure we could find the right set up for her. I feel like we would consider a 2nd dog before this.
I have hope for our next steps but as a backup I'm genuinely curious: has anyone gotten to this point and just... stopped trying so hard to control this? I can keep doing the formal training sessions, and if I'm out for a long stretch I'll absolutely still get a sitter. What I can't keep doing is coordinating one every time I need to run out for 30-60 minutes. For context, she's not destructive, at worst she'd bark and disturb the neighbors, which was our biggest concern when we started all of this. It's funny (not funny) that what once felt like an urgent problem now seems so small given how much we've upended our lives trying to fix it. Have people found a way to just live, accepting that the dog might struggle during short unplanned absences? Is that a real path?
Would really love to hear from anyone who's been at this long-term and found some version of peace with it, whatever that looked like.