my 9 month old menace is officially 19 months old today and i want to write down what changed because i remember when posts like this saved me

Quick context for anyone scrolling. Got a german shepherd from a working line breeder at 9 weeks. Did everything right. Puppy class, socialization, mental enrichment, the works. He was a dream puppy. Then at exactly 6 months he turned into a different dog. Selective deafness. Barking at his own reflection. Counter surfing things i didnt know he could reach. Picking up rocks on walks and refusing to give them up. Mouthing my hands so hard i had bruises. I cried in the laundry room more than once. I googled "rehoming a dog you love" at 2am during month 8 and i am not proud of it but i want to be honest.

Today hes 19 months. We just got back from a 4 mile off leash hike on a busy trail and he checked in with me every 30 seconds, ignored a deer, said polite hello to two dogs and one toddler, and laid down at my feet at the brewery afterwards while i had a beer. Hes laying on the rug right now and he looks like an adult dog. Like, he holds eye contact. He waits before going through doors. He doesnt counter surf anymore. He is not magically perfect, he still has things he will probably always work on, but he is functionally the dog i pictured when i picked him up at the breeders.

What changed, in case it helps anyone reading this from the laundry room. Honestly its three things. One, time. Just brutal amounts of time. I would not have believed anyone if they told me at month 8 that my dog was going to come back to me, but he did, and a lot of it was just maturation. The brain finishes developing somewhere in this window and you can feel it land. Two, i stopped trying to outsmart him. Every time i tried to find a clever training fix for a problem behavior, i made it worse. Going back to extremely boring basics, ten minutes of nothing-fancy obedience a day on a long line, did more than every fancy technique. Three, i took the pressure off both of us. We did less. Fewer outings, simpler walks, more couch time, fewer expectations. He needed permission to just be a kind of mediocre dog for a few months instead of being trained into the perfect dog every waking second.

If you are in the teenage stretch right now and you found this thread by googling something dark at 2am: he is in there. You did not ruin him. You did not pick the wrong breed. The dog you got at 8 weeks is going to come back somewhere between 14 and 18 months and you are going to forget how bad it was within a month of him coming back. Im not promising the timeline because every dog is different, but the trajectory is real. Just hold on.