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Getting used to a dog

pdaddio83

I have been struggling this past week because we have a new dog in the family. The reason I feel so stressed out and on edge all the time now is because I never actually wanted a dog, ever. My family have been pestering me for years, particularly my ASC daughter. However, I never grew up with dogs and am actually kind of freaked out by them, I never know what to expect from them. After a lot of talking over with my wife (who loves dogs, she's the other main voice on that side), I finally relented and we picked him up from the shelter last weekend.

I've now gone through a whole range of mixed emotions, from thinking this might be ok when he's calm, to thinking my life/marriage is over because I can't cope. I even had a meltdown on the 3rd day because the dog "bit" me (not actually, but exploring with his mouth while I was trying to stroke him), I couldn't take the uncertainty anymore. 

At this point I can start to see patterns now and understand the dog a bit better. But I know this isn't good enough, I do need to take joint responsibility too . I'm still scared to go near him when he's all jumpy and overexcited, and I don't want to live in fear in my own home. Currently there are times I have to force myself to be nice to him, it just does not feel natural to me.

Has anyone else ever had to go through something like this? I think things might be normalising slowly, but I need to imagine that my life will get better when I've had absolutely no previous experience of this.

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  • in reply to profdanger

    Hey, sorry for not replying to anyone, been busy. It's been two weeks now and things have started to settle down a bit. The more something happens, the more normalised it becomes. It was basically a sudden shock of my life going one way to suddenly feeling completely out of control!

    The good news is the dog is getting into a routine (of sorts) and when he's calmer I can actually approach him, maybe even like him. I'm still not confident what to do when he gets overexcited though, like when he has his evening "zoomies", a word I'd never heard before but he gets all his excess energy out before sleeping. He does sleep very well though and is quite clean at least.

    We are going to train him though, even my wife can see that, although he is generally good, he does have some bad habits before he can be considered well behaved. My wife is also doing the brunt of the work so far because she's trying to shield me from more chaos, but I want to be involved with the training too.