This past July, we adopted a 1.5 year old rescue. She’s adapted pretty well to our home, routine and so forth. But she will not come upstairs and avoids it as much as possible.
Just to be clear, my dog is not afraid of stairs. She will go up and down our basement steps no problem and the steps to our front door. She will even come upstairs in the morning to get my attention if I were to wake up just a little late for our morning walk – she just won’t stay any longer than she has to. At night she sleeps on the floor in my office on the first floor.
The biggest problem with all of this is that she wakes up and barks in the middle of the night randomly, like she’s frightened of something. She will always calm down if I sit with her for a few minutes. It seems that’s all she wants during these bouts of barking. But I can tell by the way she stares at me as I walk back up that she’s nervous, like I’m leaving her or something.
I’m just sort of at a loss of what to do. On one hand it’s not incredibly disruptive or negative to our lives, she’s more independent (or tries to be) than my previous dog which I kind of appreciate. I just want her to know the whole house is hers and not just the first floor and it saddens me a bit that she won’t even come into our bedroom. I feel like she would be less anxious at night if she just came into our bedroom.
How can I show her that it’s ok to be upstairs? And that our bedroom is a safe place and not to be avoided?
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