four year old rescue who was solid on alone time for two years has regressed into clear separation anxiety in the eight weeks since my partner started a hybrid work schedule and i need the version of this guidance from families who have worked through a regression triggered by a household schedule change rather than a generic separation anxiety case

Marlow is a four year old neutered male we think is some mix of hound and shepherd, fifty two pounds, adopted at twenty two months old from a regional rescue who pulled him from a rural shelter where he had been surrendered by his original family with no explanation written down. His first six months with us were the rough adjustment most rescue families know, mild crate distress and a lot of velcro behavior and a tendency to track me from room to room around the house. By month nine of having him he had settled into a calm pattern with alone time, we worked up to four hour stretches at home alone using the standard counterconditioning approach with the lickmat and the frozen kong and a slow build of duration, and from about month ten through the next two years he was honestly steady. We could leave for a normal workday, six to eight hours, and come home to a dog who had napped in his bed and was relaxed when we walked in.

The change started about eight weeks ago and it lines up too cleanly with one specific household shift to be a coincidence. My partner switched from fully in office five days a week to a hybrid schedule, two days at home and three days in the office, starting at the beginning of April. The first three weeks of the new pattern looked fine on the surface, Marlow seemed pleased to have my partner home more often and the days my partner was in the office did not seem to register as different. Around week four we started coming home to subtle signs of distress, water bowl tipped over, a chewed corner on a throw pillow that had never been an issue before, the kong from the morning still mostly full. Around week five he started doing the low whining at the door when one of us would leave that he used to do as a young rescue but had not done in years. Around week six i set up a camera and what i saw on the footage is what brought me here. The footage of the in office days now shows him pacing for the first forty to fifty minutes, panting heavily, doing the door check loop every few minutes, and only settling into something like rest after about an hour and a quarter. The hybrid at home days he is calm and asleep within ten minutes of my partner moving to the home office, so the differentiator is genuinely whether he expects someone to be in the house or not.

What the published guidance does not address well and what i actually need. The published material on separation anxiety is pretty good for the original onset case, the puppy with no history of alone time being conditioned to it for the first time, or the adult rescue with no baseline being built up to alone time across the first months in a new home. What it does not address well is the regression case where a previously solid adult dog has lost the skill because the household pattern changed around him, and what the rebuild looks like specifically when the dog has historical evidence that alone time is fine and you need to recover that baseline rather than build it from nothing. The framing the published material defaults to is that you start from zero with desensitization protocols, and the families i have talked to who have walked through a regression say that approach is structurally wrong for the regression case because it does not use the dogs existing history with alone time as the foundation it actually is.

The specific questions i would like the thread to address. one, for families who have walked through a regression triggered by a household schedule change, what was the actual rebuild like and how long did it take to get back to a comparable baseline. two, the trigger question, is the right intervention to address the underlying schedule volatility directly by stabilizing the pattern so the dog can predict the day, or is the right intervention to do desensitization work on top of the volatile schedule because the schedule is not going to change. three, the medication question, our vet has raised the possibility of a short course of trazodone to break the anxiety cycle while we do the behavior work and i would like to hear from families who have used trazodone for situational separation anxiety in an adult rescue with no prior medication history, what the experience was like, whether it helped, what the downsides were. four, the timing question, eight weeks into the regression is still early enough that intervening now should produce better outcomes than intervening at six months, and i want to make the right call on what intervention to start with rather than try the wrong thing first and lose time. happy to share more detail on the camera footage and his daily routine and to answer questions about his history, looking for the rebuild story from families who have specifically walked through the schedule change triggered regression