Animals and emotions
Animals have feelings and emotions. Not just the basic emotions of happiness, sadness, pain and fear.... like us humans, they experience nuances of emotions. They feel embarrassed, they feel uncertain, they feel gratitude, and they feel grief.
A problem arises though, in that we humans are not able to identify our own emotions, and so we run the risk of either projecting our emotions, or what we think animals are feeling onto them; or we mislabel, misinterpret the emotions that animals are actually feeling, because we don’t have a deep understanding or “feeling” for the nuances of emotion. A typical example is labelling a dog aggressive, or angry, when the dog may be fearful or anxious. Different emotions requiring different responses, and yet we often get it wrong.
Think of it this way... as humans most of us, if not all of us, have experienced some form of early childhood trauma that made us either hide some of our feelings behind a mask of "everything is ok", or hide from our feelings. In both cases, the outcome is much the same in that as adults we struggle to name the deep emotions we feel, the ones that are hidden beneath the fear. This can lead to inappropriate coping skills, where we may "walk on eggshells" in our relationships, constantly putting our own thoughts and feelings aside to keep the other happy, or we battle to trust, and often live lives filled with anxiety and fear.
Now put this in animal terms. Animals can't complain, unlike humans they lack the capacity to be negative. When they experience emotional stress, it comes out in either frustration or anxiety or aggression. In every animal that I have worked with that has exhibited these behaviours in the more than 10 years I have been an animal communicator and energy healer, each animal has had an underlying emotional context to their behaviour. Working with them purely from a physical management perspective may not clear the underlying, deep-seated inappropriate coping skill that has developed as a result of the trauma.
As humans, as a culture, a society, a species, we appear to find it difficult to deal with our emotions. We don't teach emotional maturity to our children as part of their education. We make it a university degree, call it psychology and try to “fix” things rather than create the right foundation. No wonder it has been hard for us to acknowledge the fact that animals have rich emotional lives as well. Notwithstanding the sometimes difficult realisation that we may have inadvertently been the cause of some of our animals emotional distress at some point in their lives, acting from the programmed belief that they are “just animals” and don’t feel as deeply as we do.
The wonderful thing about animals and their emotions is that they are so willing to "let it go", to move into the present moment. They understand that the past does not have to be the future and they exhibit remarkable levels of forgiveness. Very often the emotional reaction is locked into a physiological trigger, especially in relation to trauma…such as in the case of a horse that was terrorized by dogs, that reacts to the sight of dogs, immediately feeling uncertainty, fear and anxiety. The sight of a dog is the trigger to a full body fight or flight reaction coupled with emotional anxiety, much like a panic attack in a human can be triggered by the sight of something. Or the dog in a shelter who was frightened each day by a man with a hose pipe cleaning the enclosure, and developed an avoidance reaction towards all men.
There are ways to help an animal through stuck emotions, past trauma and dysfunctional behaviour. Over the years of working with animals, allowing them to teach and lead and guide both my understanding and perspective, I bring a combination of intuitive and vibrational healing to each situation which, together with the communication and understanding that I feel with each animal (and with humans too), allows me to identify and “map” the emotions of the animal, offer release and healing through the various modalities I have available in my “toolbox”, and further identify what changes can be made at home, in terms of environment, healing frequencies (e.g. colour, sound, scent etc.), with the ultimate aim of helping the animal come to balance within themselves and in their surroundings.
Working with several modalities, bypassing the conscious mind and working directly with the subconscious and emotional bodies, an emotional charting session helps identify the strongest emotions being felt by the animal, as well as the techniques, modalities, reprogramming and reconditioning that can be used to help the animal release, overcome and heal from lingering past, programmed trauma and stuck emotions. It can be a powerful tool for understanding, enlightenment and change. (These techniques are also offered to humans as part of the human therapies I offer).
Please email me on choosepeace101@gmail.com, should you like to know more.
If you are interested in reading further into the scientific research into animals and their ability to feel emotion, here are some interesting links:
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-2615/8/7/101/htm
Please also look into the work of Dr. Marc Bekoff, at http://marcbekoff.com/