Putting the Pieces Together

When I am working with an animal, I get information in many different ways--physical sensations in my body, pictures and images, words and phrases.  There is often some interpretation required to understand how everything I am picking up fits together.  When I am asked to help "solve a puzzle" the animal's guardian is often the key ingredient to making sense of what I pick up.

I recently had an experience that showed how all of these pieces work together.  I was asked to do a session with an older pit bull who was crying all day long.  For months, the only time he stopped crying was when he fell asleep and his guardian was very concerned.  She wanted to know if I could help them figure out what was making him so unhappy.

When I first put my hands on me, my stomach began to hurt.  It felt inflamed and irritated but I couldn't get a sense of why, so I asked this sweet boy if he could tell me why his tummy hurt so much.  He showed me the sensation I feel when an animal is struggling with allergies.  I explained this to his guardian but after reviewing what he eats and how long he's been eating his particular food and treats, we couldn't figure out what he could be allergic to.  My stomach still really hurt, which told me that we hadn't identified what was going on yet.  (Once I "name" or "identify" what is going on, the sensation will go away, so when the sensation lingers, it indicates to me that we haven't figured it out yet).

As I continued to give him Reiki in the hopes it would help soothe his tummy, his guardian and I moved on to the other questions she had about his health.  While we were covering those other topics, his guardian asked me if he mentioned his skin, as he has some pretty severe skin allergies.  I was telling her that his itchy skin didn't bother him at all in comparison to how bad his stomach hurt when all of the sudden I could see a major light bulb going off in her head.  She explained that she had been spraying something on his skin to stop him from itching but that he was constantly licking it off.  She asked if that could be the cause of his stomach pain and offered to grab the bottle of this spray.  I took one whiff of it and knew it was definitely the cause - not just because of the smell of it but because of the way my stomach hurt just talking about it.

His guardian and I sat there, putting the pieces together. She realized that his constant crying started about the same time she started putting this particular spray in his skin.  I realized that when I asked him why his tummy hurt and he gave me the "allergy sensation," I interpreted it as food allergies because it was something he was ingesting but he was trying to show me it was connected to his skin allergies.

She said she'd never use that spray again and we also talked about some things she could do to help soothe his stomach.  We were both so relieved to put all the pieces together and figure out what we could do to help her sweet boy feel better.  Animals do the best they can to communicate with us and as I was reminded last weekend, partnering with the guardian is the best way to ensure I am interpreting the messages correctly.

There are often many causes

One of the things I am more sure of now than ever, is that when we or our animals don't feel well, there usually isn't just one cause.  I believe we have a far better chance of feeling better if we look at all the possibilities . . . not just the medical causes, but the potential nutritional causes, the potential emotional causes and the potential environmental causes.  I have learned that if we just look in one place, without exploring the other potential causes, we often never get all the way to feeling well.  Often the solution lies in understanding how interconnected all the potential causes are and how they play off each other.

An example of this that I experienced myself was several years ago when I was having ongoing stomach problems.  I saw a medical doctor that wanted me to take a prescription medication to feel better,  I saw a nutritionist who wanted me to make changes to my diet and take supplements, and another alternative practitioner who thought the problem was caused by stress.  After a long period of trial and error, my stomach problems were finally resolved.  

I am not much of a pill taker, so I opted to skip the prescription that was offered and tried the nutritional approach.  That helped some, but not completely, so I decided to address the circumstances that were causing me so much stress, ultimately learning to give myself permission to walk away from things that didn't bring me joy anymore.  In the end, I realized that because of the stress I was under, I developed a sensitivity to certain foods, so I needed to address the nutrition aspect as much as the emotional aspect.  Once the emotional aspect had finally been addressed, I was no longer sensitive to those foods and was able to reintroduce them into my diet. 

I share this story about myself because I often see the same thing occurring in animals that I am working with.  I have seen animals with stomach problems, skin allergies, behavioral issues, etc that don't get "all the way better" because we're not always looking at all the contributing factors and seeing the interconnections between those factors.  To me, the emotional piece is often the most important.  It is often the root cause that creates all the "symptoms" that we see and if we are just treating the symptoms, we often end up treating them forever, never getting to "all the way better."  

I worked with one animal recently that had an upset stomach and frequently threw up.  When I spoke to the animal, I found out what was upsetting him so much and we worked with him on an emotional level, helping to put his fears and concerns to rest.  His stomach instantly felt better and he hasn't thrown up in months.   

I worked with another animal who had stopped eating for nearly a week. Fearing the worst, the guardian was ready to pay for thousands of dollars worth of tests to find out what was going on. After talking to him for a while, I discovered that he and his wife had been fighting a lot and the day his dog stopped eating was the same day that his wife had threatened to walk out on their marriage.  Once he understood this, he explained to his dog that he and his wife had just been having a rough go of it lately and that they had been taking their stress out on each other instead of pulling together to help each other through it.  He assured the dog that he was going to do his part to get his marriage back on track and also assured him that he would always be loved by both of them. The dog ate that night for the first time in six days.  

Then there is the animal I worked with that suddenly started to do strange things like going to the bathroom in the middle of the family room when he could have gone to the yard through the backdoor that was wide opened, or pulling things off the table, like the woman's purse and ripping apart the contents, or jumping up on the table and eating the food she had just prepared for herself.  She was beside herself when she contacted me, because in the previous five years, her dog had never done ANY of these things.  We discovered that her dog was just desperate for her attention.  

She had recently started working outside her home and the dog wasn't used to being alone that much.  He was letting her know how he felt about being alone, and also letting her know how much he needed and wanted her attention.  She said, "What can I do - I can't quit my job!! I don't want to lock him in the backyard or lock up my purse when I come home!!" We started by acknowledging her dogs feelings, letting him know we understood what a big and difficult change this must have been for him. We explained how important it was for her to work and how she needed to do that so they could continue to live in their house together.  She told him that she would make sure she spent time with him every night, focused time where she wasn't trying to do anything else, and she also reassured him that they would have a lot of time together on the weekends.  Within a week, things were considerably better.  No more purposely peeing in the house to get her attention, no more pulling things off the table or rooting through her purse.  She did sense he was still lonely though, so she decided to find a dog walker who could come by mid day and take him out for a walk.  

Another animal I worked with was having terrible skin allergies.  After some conversation with the dog and her guardian, we identified a potential root cause.  The guardian's boyfriend had said repeatedly that when he moved in with the girlfriend, he wanted to get a dog of his own. The dog was stressed about the idea of her life changing that much . . . a new "dad", another dog in the house, less time with her "mom," etc.  There was also some worry that the boyfriend wanted to get "his own dog" because he didn't like the girlfriend's dog very much.  Long story short, the boyfriend agreed to take it one step at a time, moving in first and getting settled before making any other changes to their household.  After he was moved in, he began to develop more of a relationship with the girlfriend's dog and even began to refer to her as "his dog."  Amazingly, the dogs skin allergies started to improve and within a couple months, her skin was 75% better. Eventually, they went to see a holistic vet to see what else they could do and by switching her to a different food and adding more oils to her diet, her skin improved that last 25%.

By sharing these stories, I am NOT trying to make you feel bad about how much your personal relationships can affect the health of your animals . . . only so that you can be more aware of the impact that your animal's emotions can have on his or her health.   If we only treat issues from a pure medical standpoint or a pure training standpoint, we can miss out on an important root cause.  I am not suggesting that you stop seeing your veterinarian or your trainer.  I just want to point out that there can often be other contributing factors to what may seem to be a medical issue or a behavioral issue. 

There is a saying that goes something like . . . "if all you have is a hammer, everything is going to look like a nail."  I guess that's what I am trying to point out here.  If we only take one approach to helping our animals, we may miss out on key pieces of information or they may not end up being "all the way better."  And I think we all deserve to feel "all the way better!"