Our client Jana came to us with two Great Pyrenees, a home that hadn’t known peace in years, and the certainty that everything she had tried was not going to work.
Abby, the older female, had become Jana’s emotional crutch: clingy, anxious when alone, stealing food at every opportunity, barely touching her own meals, and chasing the family’s chickens. On walks, she lunged at certain dogs, and the reactivity was getting worse. Rogan, the younger male, never truly relaxed. He held all his tension in his body, contorting himself and trembling on the grooming table. His guardian instinct had found the wrong outlet: he was claiming and possessing Jana’s husband Sam, channelling his frustration onto Abby in ways that had already led to one serious fight and real tension between Jana and Sam over how to handle it all. He was entitled, depleted, and lacking the self-regulation that a dog with his drive needed.
What Jana wanted was simple: peace. Dogs that got along. Both of them settled enough to step into the lives they were built for.
She had tried everything she knew, and then some. Beyond mainstream training approaches, she and Sam had sought out mediums, homeopathy, herbs, and biofeedback. Some things helped temporarily. None of it held. Through all of it, not a single person had said to Jana that she and their way of life was the problem. She knew it in her bones that it had everything to do with relationship and bond. She just didn’t know how to heal that bond.
Admitting she needed help was, in her own words, a very hard pill to swallow.
The shift came in two stages. First, Abby and Rogan had a serious fight. A few months later at a dog show, a stranger grabbed Rogan from behind and he snapped. Standing in that parking lot, Jana had a thought she keeps with her now: maybe he can’t stay. It was the moment she stopped arguing with what the situation required.
She had already picked up The Way of Life Method. What struck her immediately was that it spoke about relationship, not management nor suppression. The thing she had always sensed was at the root. She joined the Academy and began the slow work of trusting a process that was fundamentally different from anything she had tried, but that she felt, intuitively, was the answer she had been looking for.
The challenges were real: trusting fully that it would work, working through the fear of being out with dogs who might react, and learning to apply an unfamiliar approach to two livestock guardian dogs with very different histories. But with time and experience, she built the confidence to read Abby and Rogan, meet them where they were, and know what to do.
Abby eats now. Really eats, finishing her meals and settling into her own space. She goes to her crate willingly and looks back at Jana as if to say she’s fine, you can go: the precise opposite of the dog who couldn’t be left alone. Rogan no longer contorts himself. He stretches out, relaxes, and sits through a grooming appointment without shaking. On walks, people pass within feet of him and he holds steady, ignoring them completely, the dog who once pulled toward every person he encountered. The chickens move through the yard unbothered. And when Abby approaches Rogan now, he wags his tail.
Jana is peaceful now, more patient, more confident, and more humble than the woman who first came to us. She knew something had fundamentally changed on the morning she walked Abby and Rogan separately for the first time: both dogs stepped out differently, and she came back inside knowing this was going to work. She has been building on that certainty ever since. When the time comes to raise another puppy, she will do it right, with everything she has learned about what it truly takes. The peace Jana always said she was after was never something the dogs could give her. It was something she had to become.
