Separation anxiety

Viewed in this light, separation anxiety is not a neurosis; it is simply a reaction to social isolation in a highly social species. It's a distress call, not a disorder.

It's a deficiency of stable social bonds, of enjoyable company and activities, of trust that those bonds will hold (i.e., that you will return) and that nothing overwhelming will happen in the meantime.

It's a lack of ability to cope on one's own for any length of time, whether because of past experience with abandonment or neglect, or simply from never having learned or realized that one can cope, that it really is alright.

In other words, it's a repeated and escalating excess of alarming aloneness, not a deficiency of anti-anxiety medication.

It's a repeated and escalating excess of alarming aloneness,

not a deficiency of anti-anxiety medication.

While we're at it, dogs scoring higher for Neuroticism on the canine Big Five Inventory of personality traits were more likely to have separation-related disorder than dogs scoring lower.

Being neurotic is not an inherent characteristic of highly sensitive dogs. In the validation study for the HSD questionnaire,* HSD score was only moderately correlated with neuroticism score (r = 0.41; P < 0.001).

*Braem M, Asher L, Furrer S, et al. Development of the “Highly Sensitive Dog” questionnaire to evaluate the personality dimension “Sensory Processing Sensitivity” in dogs. PLoS ONE, 2017; 12(5): e0177616.

This 'r' value indicates that the Neuroticism scores explained only 41% of the variability seen in HSD scores in the study dogs. Other factors explained the rest.

In other words, only some highly sensitive dogs are neurotic, and only some neurotic dogs are highly sensitive.

Only some highly sensitive dogs are neurotic,

and only some neurotic dogs are highly sensitive.

Even so, we may expect that highly sensitive dogs are more likely to develop separation anxiety when paired with a person who tends to avoid attachment.

Of course, not all dogs left alone all day or left outside at night have separation anxiety — but that's my whole point. High sensory-processing sensitivity is a normal personality trait, expressed by a small but significant proportion of the population, so it's best seen and managed as a normal variant, not a neurosis.

Any family dog left home alone all day or outside at night is probably experiencing some degree of social stress. To what extent, and with what result, depends on the circumstances and the dog, including where the dog lands on the sensitivity scale.

Separation anxiety is completely understandable, and even foreseeable, when a highly sensitive dog is entirely dependent on us, when we are the dog's entire social support system, and we're absent for most of the day, tired and distracted when we get home, and rushing to get out the door the next morning. And if we add children to the mix, well…!

The authors of the separation-anxiety study reached this remarkable conclusion:

❝ The results throw new light upon the possible role of the owner in the emergence of SRD in family dogs. Owners of dogs that may be prone to develop SRD could be made aware about the need of consistent and reliable responsiveness toward the dog. …

Based on the results, new approaches to behaviour therapy in dogs can be developed that include the improvement of the self-knowledge of the owner, or even the modification of his/her inner working models of attachment, hereby integrating psychotherapy and dog behaviour therapy.❞

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