The Resilience Framework

“Resilience” refers to one’s ability to adapt successfully, or to recover quickly from stressful events, situations, and conditions.

 

Resilience is an imperative component in preventing anxiety caused by the inability to recover between acute stressors, as well as benefiting one’s ability to remain optimistic during periods of chronic stress. 

In mammals, stress causes significant physiological changes which impact behavior and the intensity of certain responses. Stress also negatively impacts the portion of the brain responsible for rational decision making, while causing the emotional portion of the brain to function on overdrive. This is highly detrimental to rational learning, but can cause an animal to have extremely vivid memories of a stressful experience and how they felt during that experience. These powerful memories often cause the animal to respond more intensely the next time they are in a similar situation, and over time can become generalized to other less similar situations. As an animal finds itself in increasing numbers of stressful situations, a chronic overload of stress signals make it impossible for the animal’s body to recover, eventually leading to the beginnings of system collapse. 

Stress is serious, so why don’t all animals respond to it the same? Although the answer to this is complex, resilience is a significant attributing factor. If an animal is less impacted by a stressful event and able to easily recover from it, then the animal’s body is able to quickly complete the stress response and return to homeostasis. If an animal is greatly impacted by a stressful event, however, this process takes significantly longer or may not occur at all. A lack of resilience can present as generalized anxiety, behavioral malfunction and even ill physical health. Resilience is a quality of life concern which has significant implications for an animal and everyone around them. 

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So what is the Resilience Framework?‍

The Resilience Framework is a program developed by Dr. Kathy Murphy and Bobbie Bhambree, CDBC, to help animal professionals and dog owners understand the neurobiology of stress and resilience, and how to cultivate resilience in dogs. Using seven domains which have been scientifically proven to build and optimize resilience, participants learn how to develop effective behavioral strategies appropriate for helping their clients or pets. 

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The Seven Domains of Resilience: 

• Mental and Physical Wellbeing

• Social Support

• Predictability

• Agency

• Completing The Stress Cycle

• Safety and Security

• Decompression

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In the Resilience Framework, you will learn:

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• How does the stress response work? 

• What is resilience and why is it important?

• Which interventions and exercises are most effective in building resilience?

• How do these interventions help, and how can you implement them? 

• What does a resilience conditioning training plan based around the Resilience Framework look like? 

• What are the advantages of this approach? 

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In this program, you will delve into the neurobiology of resilience, learning how to build resilience in puppies, sport and working dogs, adult pet dogs and shelter dogs. Follow Dr. Murphy and Bobbie as they discuss real life behavioral cases and how the Resilience Framework helped resolve these concerns, enabling the dogs to live their best possible life. Dr. Murphy and Bobbie will also provide a roadmap to addressing a variety of behavioral issues while exploring the practical application of resilience conditioning. 

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To learn more about how you can foster resilience in animals, use resilience conditioning to resolve behavioral concerns and truly make a meaningful positive impact on an animal’s quality of life, join us for a two-day seminar:

Resilience…

What should you incorporate into your early training plans to help develop resilience in a puppy?

How can breeders implement resilience conditioning into their early life stages conditioning programs?

How can resilience conditioning exponentially improve performance and offer longevity in dog sports and working disciplines?

How do you build and support resilience in stressful environments, such as urban living?

How do you build and support resilience in shelter dogs awaiting adoption?

Where does resilience conditioning fit when addressing behavior issues, such as aggression?

How can you use resilience conditioning to provide pet dogs and their families the opportunity to live their best possible quality of life? 

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Keep your eye out for upcoming seminars and events here!

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