Hello, fellow dog trainer. This is Hannah Branigan, and you're listening to Drinking

from the toilet, a podcast about dog training reality

and connecting the dots between what is supposed to happen according to the books

and what actually happens in real life and real training.

Today's topic is frustration.

The inspiration for today's topic is brought to you by a combination of my

personal life experience and a presentation by Dr. Susan Friedman. Who might like to send out a virtual

audio wave? I spend a lot of time thinking about frustration, so this is a topic near and dear

to my heart. I spend a lot of time dealing with frustrated dogs, frustrated handlers, dealing with a frustrated

child, and being frustrated myself.

I got to see a little preview of one of Dr. Friedman's presentation, and during that preview,

she mentioned the following.

Happiness is a function of reinforcement.

Depression is a function of punishment.

And frustration is a function of extinction.

Now, the first two are interesting and probably worth podcasts in their own right.

But the third really struck me. And I thought maybe you might also feel frustrated sometimes or see your dog feeling frustrated. And so I thought that might

be an interesting thing to talk about. But I want to lay a little background first. In order to talk

about frustration, we need to be able to describe and define it. Emotions, any emotion,

really is a construct, right? It's a combination of different behaviors that we can see from the

outside. Some are voluntary and some are involuntary. And all those things together make up a constellation,

and we call that the particular emotion. So let's do a little visualization exercise.

...