What animals won’t talk about
My dog Dax used to bark at me and I had no idea why.
It was confusing, unsettling, honestly a bit triggering. My instinct was to fix it. I wanted to understand the behavior, so I kept trying to get to the bottom of it. But the more I pushed to understand, the worse she seemed to feel.
It wasn't until I worked with animal communicator Jacquelin Smith that I understood why. Jacquelin went in slow and gentle, and instead of asking about the behavior, she let Dax talk about her feelings. That's when it came out. Dax had spent months in a kill shelter before she landed with a wonderful foster family, and during that time in the shelter she was told, over and over, that she was a bad dog. Talking about her "issues" made her feel like she was that dog all over again.
She didn't want to talk about her behavior. She wanted to be understood. Once she was, we could work on a path forward.
As an animal communicator, I've had to bring in other communicators just to talk to my own dog. That's how I first learned something I now see constantly in my practice: there are times when an animal simply doesn't want to talk about the very thing their person booked the reading for.
For some reason, I get a lot of people with animals that are suddenly peeing in the house. What I have found is to take the gentle approach. I don’t go right in with “Why are you peeing in the house?” I sense that they know why we’re all in this conversation and instead I ask “Can you tell me what’s going on?”. If something is upsetting them and bringing up their anxieties, that can trigger the behavior. I give them the space to express themselves.
Going in slow, letting them be heard will bring out what’s happening and help the family to support their animal family member more fully.
Another area where I have found resistance is when asking about their past. Animals live in the present, and when they had a difficult past they don’t want to revisit it. I will ask and honor their boundaries. They may tell me a lot, nothing or just a few things.
Understanding their past can help in understanding their current behaviors, however, you don’t want to be framing them within their past treatments. Bring them into the present and out of the past. They will appreciate that and love you more for it.
I find the most difficult is when they don’t want to talk about a health issue. They have their own reasons for it. They may not want to go to the vet. They may be worried about you being worried about them. If you’re particularly sad or concerned about a health issue, they know it. They misunderstand your concern for them being in trouble because from their perspective they are making you sad.
There have been times when I ask an animal how they are feeling in their body and they don’t share everything or they minimize the symptoms. This is why I will ask their person to let me know if they don’t tell me something and if there’s an area that I should ask about specifically.
I’m not a veterinarian and I can’t offer medical diagnosis or advice, but I can give insight into what the animal wants their person to know.
I think about Dax sometimes when I'm sitting with an animal who's holding back. She never did get comfortable narrating her own behavior, and she didn't need to. What she needed was someone willing to go slowly enough to hear the feeling underneath it.
That's what I try to bring into every reading now, whether the boundary is around the past, a behavior, or a health issue. I'm not there to get the answer the person came for. I'm there to let the animal decide how much of it they're ready to give. Sometimes that's everything. Sometimes it's nothing at all. Either way, when you honor the boundary instead of pushing past it, you find out what they needed to say.
That's usually the thing nobody thought to ask.