Today I’d like to share a little bit about how I work and tell you why I value live communications so much, to get to the bottom of problems. And to show you that we don’t always get a clear answer to our questions right away. Sometimes we have to explain and understand first. Even though our animals are conscious and often wise beings, they are different from us and they don’t question their behavior the way we do. They live in the moment.

So this week I had a session where my client wanted to find out why her dog had been pushing his water bowl for some time and even increasing it lately.
When I asked him to share how he felt about it, I got frustration and anger. I then asked his human if anything had changed about the bowl or its position lately? No, everything was the same as always. Ok, so that’s not where these feelings are coming from. But then the dog sent me feelings of joy and play. But it didn’t seem to be joy about, for example, the sloshing water.
So I asked his owner again, if she could say something else about the situation? When he started to push his water bowl, she was always very upset and scolded. She then worked on herself and now takes it calmly. But when she told about how she got upset and even threw pillows at her dog, I suddenly received that joyful play feeling from him again. And when she proudly reported how calm she is now, I felt his frustration, his anger.
Aha! So for him it was first a kind of game, an interaction with her, and then when she stopped responding to him, he became more and more frustrated. As it turned out, the calmer she got, the more he spread his water. He wanted to encourage her to “play” with him again.
Then when we talked about play for a bit, it occurred to her that she hadn’t been playing with him for a while. Because, due to his age, he can no longer physically manage the games they used to play together. And because he hasn’t called them in anymore, his human thought he was generally tired of playing. On top of that, because of Corona, they both don’t do as many visits or other exciting things together anymore. The sweetie, however, would like to play and interact with his owner from time to time and has tried in this way to lure her out of the reserve. Together with him we thought about what he would like to do and what they could do together.

So you see, finding out the reason for a behavior is often quite complex. And most of the time our animals can’t give us an immediate, clear answer. Because animals live mainly in the moment, we need to get right into that moment when the behavior occurs and then explore the emotions and motivations there. This is best done when his human leads us there together through his narrative and memory, when he provides details to which I then get a reaction from the animal. And then, when you have found out the real reason, you can also consider together what an alternative behavior might be. Simply telling the animal, don’t do that, usually doesn’t work.

And of course, in a live call, they can both talk to each other because we are really having a three (or possibly more) person conversation. They can ask each other questions and explain. It is also often the case that an animal opens up more easily and is more willing to share something when its human is there and shows that they are really interested in sharing and understanding.

I wish you a beautiful week despite the current events and send
Light & Love for you and your pets
Tanja