Pets Teach Us How To Love

I've always had animals around me from farmyard animals to cats, dogs, rabbits, and goldfish.  Right now, I'm taken care of by two wonderful rescue cats.  They look after me and my partner each day.  They make sure we are loved and looked after and we're never alone.

Pets show us how to love one another.  They really do.  If you have a pet, you'll know this firsthand and I'm not telling you anything new.  Unfortunately, we sometimes forget just how much love we are given by our pets.

I wish humans could learn to love one another as our pets love us.  Rather than getting caught up in all the political discussions of the day filled with ego and hate and ill-will towards one another, we could experience love.  The love our pets show for us.

Our pets don't look at us and say, "you're this or that or the wrong thing".  Our pets don't look at us and claim how much we do wrong.  Our pets don't see the differences in us and they often act far better than many humans.

I wish humans could view one another through the eyes of love, just like our pets do.  There would be no issues with color or race or sexuality.  We wouldn't work so hard to divide and separate one another from each other.  We would just look at each other with love and respect, nothing more and nothing less.

I wish humans could stop preaching to one another how much they love all mankind, while showing through their actions and words, the complete opposite.  Let us be like our pets where they show us love through their actions and attentions, meows and barks.

We could learn so much from our pets if we allowed ourselves to learn.  We could look at others with oneness rather than separating our species out of fear and hatred and ego.  We could truly learn what being human is about if we let our pets show us how to love one another.

Do you have a pet?  How do they show you how to love?  Feel free to share in the comments below.

The cat in the picture above is Corey, our orange cat.  Topanga did not make the picture this time.

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Blog Post And Images (c) 2016 by Don Shetterly

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Medicating Pets Is Not The Answer

Recently I saw an article on CNN about a person giving "happy pills" to their cat because of behavioral issues.  I'm not going to reference this article because it really added no value to life.  It was poorly written and done so from a view point that was very one sided.  Trust me - its not worth your time.

Unfortunately though the individuals in this article felt that the cat needed happy pills and were convinced the cat's behavior changed as a result.  I'm sure they could prove that it did.  However, the thing that disturbs me is how quickly we turn to medications and pills just to solve problems.  For the most part, this is not needed in animals nor in humans.  Yes, there are some exceptions, but they are few and far between.

I do not make these comments because it is my belief.  I have worked with thousands of animals over the years and dealt with all types of behavior issues.  Most of the time, the issues either boiled down to the caretakers or the animal's home.  Yes, once in awhile there was some disease or other health issue impacting things, but that was limited to a small percentage of the time.

Horses, Buck and My Animal Connections

I was watching the documentary once again about the horse whisperer.  The title of this film is "Buck" and is about the life of Buck Brannaman as he teaches horse clinics and people about the greater truths in life.  I've hardly ever ridden a horse, but I can tell just how much Buck understands the finer parts of life.

Growing up most of my life I have been around animals from dogs, cats to chickens, sheep, and pigs.  My college undergraduate degree is in Animal Science and at one time I wanted to be a veterinarian.  Due to grades not being quite high enough in my undergraduate and financial limitations, I did not pursue this area.  However, I spent considerable time working on and managing big farms.

To this day I still love the animals, although I don't live in a situation where I can be close to them.  There is nothing more rewarding and joyful than to have hundreds of animals that can't wait to come up and greet you.  There has never been an animal that I was afraid of or could not be around.  Somehow I always found a way to make friends with them and do things that most people could not do.

Buck The Movie

I finally got a chance to see a movie that had been recommended to me.  The movie documentary, Buck, is an excellent one to see.  Essentially Buck Brannaman, the horse whisperer is able to get horses to do things that most people could never dream of getting them to do.  It is a story about his life growing up in some very difficult circumstances and ending up living a life that makes him feel fulfilled.

In the movie, it shows how Buck is able communicate with horses and observe the smallest things in them that most people do not observe.  Through his closeness and ability to understand the horse, he is able to be one of them and accomplish so much. I am seeing the same thing in Unified Therapy that I have experienced and am using to learn to heal others.  It is those subtle moments that most people do not see, but if you can notice them and work with that, you will find a way to unlock so much trauma in a person and release it.  It is life changing, just like what Buck does with horses.

Father's Touch, Part 2

This is part 2 of a series in reviewing the impact of the book, Father's Touch, by Donald D'haene. Please see PART 1 for the beginning of the review.

Here are the links to all three parts of this book review.

Part One
Part Two
Part Three

In this part of the book review, I'm going to pull out various passages that stood out to me and connected deeply within me. I'll try to share how they impacted my mind at the time I read them.

1) Blew them to smithereens

“Mother told us to tell her if it happened again, but she couldn’t stop the game from happening. Father kept a shotgun in the pantry. On several occasions, he blew our favorite pets to smithereens. We knew enough not to get papa angry.” (page 99)

Wow, this hit me like a ton of bricks dropped from the world's tallest building. If you know anything about my own story, you know that I witnessed my cats being killed. I am haunted by their screams to this day and if anyone dares to hurt an animal, you have no place in this world in my eyes. Even my dog that I had was shot at and to the day she died, the Veternarian that spent the final hours with her could still see the buckshot lodged in her legs. There were other stories that involved one of our sheep, my brother's little dog, a cat I had while I was gone to college and probably too many more that I cannot even keep track of. In all cases, my father either got mad at the animals or thought they were getting too much of our affection or just wanted to teach us a lesson. You see, animals to me were always sacred and seeing something I truly loved and that loved me in return be hurt or killed made me into a believer that if I did something to upset my father, it may be me that was hurt or killed. As a child, I dreamed of a day when the pets would rise up against the humans and go kick some serious butt! In those moments, I knew my father would be one of the first to get his butt kicked.


2) Block them out of my mind

"Fellow Christians believed in placing negative experiences behind them through the practice of prayer and positive thinking. Putting my path behind me seemed far easier than dealing with the dysfunction within my family. We certainly had troubles and I wanted to make them disappear. I did have bad memories, but they only showed up in the reels that played in my mind. New experiences were added to that memory bank daily. The only way I could feel better was to make believe each situation was non-existent. Each would be assigned a fresh reel." (page 140)

This part gets me on a couple different sides. In church we were just supposed to forgive and forget and be happy people in Jesus. While I know many people find solace in that, it is hard to be happy in Jesus when your father is abusing you and telling you that this is what God wants him to do. It seemed like those that wanted to abuse me could do whatever they wanted and then go pray and ask forgiveness for it. In addition to the church and the people who just turned their heads and closed their eyes, my dad was into the Norman Vincent Peale books that basically you were just supposed to think happy. I'll tell you, it is hard to be truly happy when your life is being ripped apart fiber by fiber. The only thing I could do during this time was escape into a world that I would hardly remember and act as if nothing was going on. I became a good actor in life. For if I didn't hide all that was going on, you can sure as bet, father's rage would be waiting for you.


3) Am I really going to charge him?

"In my bed this night, the peace of sleep eludes me. Am I really going to charge my father with something that isn't real to me? Life with Daniel seemed to last an eternity, but I can't remember my father's face, how he felt, or the sound of his voice. I wanted to force him out of my mind, and I did. However, why are the home-movie reels so vivid? How do I conjure up such images and yet feel nothing? It happened to my other self. I know it did." (page 156)

Even though I know what happened and even though I have indisputable evidence of these events, my mind loves to play tricks with me. My mind likes to minimize all that I went through and say, this really wasn't that bad. Being raped isn't such a bad thing after all. And yet, most people would cringe at hearing these words and in reality for most of my life, this was normal. I have had to stand on my own in what I remember and in the failings of my mind to piece my life back together. I remember one attorney that really wanted to me to take my father to court but at the time, I did not want to endure the torture that it would put me through. Now, I'm at a different point and the thought of taking him to court has crossed my mind more than once. I'm not the weak little boy that he once knew and he is no longer the big mean monster that I always hid from in fear.


4) Touch makes my skin crawl

"I can't stand being touched by men or women. Especially if someone comes from behind and touches me before I know who it is. Oooh! It makes my skin crawl - I don't know why. Is that stupid or what? The fact that I don't like being touched is kind of sad to me. But just talking about it helps." (page 195)

For a long time, if anyone got close to me, let alone tried to touch me my skin would crawl like ants running up and down my body. That may sound gross but for a long time in life, I would constantly check my skin to see if there were bugs on it. It took a great deal of courage and strength for me to go to massage school and learn to be touched. It was agonizing at first but now after the deep healing work I have done on my body, touch is something I welcome. Of course, my body is very sensitive to touch and so what some may consider extremely light body work is indeed very deep work to me. It does not take much for me to get a tremendous amount from just a light touch. My body was taught to fear and avoid touch but since I have been reclaiming that part of me, I'm finding there is a world that is so healing and so beautiful and full of compassion.


5) Healing has no graduation class

"The truth is that the path I chose is one of the reasons that I am alive today. I found my way of surviving. I want to continue my journey of self discovery, but there is no graduation class, no point where the past means nothing. My experiences and choices have molded and shaped a character that is truly unique. I believe that if every victim were to experience the awakening I have, he would find the world is not such a bad place to inhabit. I have an awareness, a sixth sense that cannont be bought, taught, or taken away from me." (page 288)

I so love this part of Donald's book because I find it so true. To many times I have been told by others that they hope I get to the point where I have moved on. I've heard this in so many ways from so many and while it is a nice thought, my life is about going further into discovery and awareness. I want to reclaim all parts of myself no matter how difficult it is. I want to become more aware and more conscious of who I am. In my view, healing from trauma or child sexual abuse does not have an end point or as Donald says, "graduation class." It is a journey and while the journey may put time and space between the events and where an individual is at in their life, future consciousness is what matters. The more we become aware of all parts of ourself, the more we are human. Often these journeys of recovery occur over many years and they come and go as tides crashing on to a short. There may be periods of rest and then there may be periods of hard work but all of it is connected to each other. The more I journey into the land of the unknown and fear, the more I discover parts of myself that I never knew existed. That to me is the greatest single joy which can never be taken away from me.



Please come back tomorrow for part 3 of the book review of "Father's Touch" by Donald D'haene.

Click here to Purchase the book on Amazon, Father's Touch.



(c) 11/9/10 by Don Shetterly - use by permission only

Joy From Sorrow

Losing someone you love or were fond of is never easy. It is much harder if you never got the chance to say goodbye. Whether it is through an unexpected event in life or just not finding out until later, one can never be prepared.

All too often it touches on the nerves that are connected to other losses. The pains we felt of saying goodbye to someone or something we loved are unearthed. It is like a connection or a bridge to previous encounters of letting someone pass away from life.

Death is never easy no matter how you look at it or frame it. Loving someone or something gives us so much joy in our life. Saying goodbye in death, feels like that joy which has become a part of us was ripped out from our bodies. It often feels like the end of the world after someone has died and that nothing will ever take the pain away.

I've lost far too many people and pets in my life. For a long time, I never allowed myself to grieve for them. Grieving was not easy for me because it involved allowing myself to feel many emotions. Early on in life, I was just shown that I was to move on and not allow myself to feel the emotions. However, I have learned that grieving and allowing these emotions is a necessary part of life. it is what helps us find the joy we shared with what we lost.

At times the process of grief seemed long and as if it would never end. There were times that I did not feel as if I could make it. At times, tears flowed as easily as I took a breath. However, with time, life began to balance out and the pain I experienced in loss, once again became joy for my life.

When the joy emerged from the sorrow, I was able to remember so much of what I shared with the person or the pet. It was almost like I had to travel through the tears to see the beauty.

Each person or pet that we love gives us so much. Through our connection with them, we give much back as well. The beautiful moments of what we shared will stay with us for a lifetime. We will realize one day through the tears, all that we received from those we were closely connected to. Through loving gratitude, we will celebrate so much and the pain will diminish.

We will observe that our life is much stronger, better and more full for having these special connections. There may even be things that will take us time to recognize. Deep down, these connections will share a very important part of our life.

Even though we are not able to talk to these people and pets who have passed on, in the same sense we once could, I believe we can talk to them at any time. I believe they are around us and they hear us. They, of course, remain in our hearts and our minds as we think about them through the eyes of love.


Above image taken from memorial website "When Tomorrow Starts Without Me"


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The Emotion Of Triggers

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Emotional triggers, for many people, are part of everyday life it seems. These triggers seem to always hang around and make their presence known whenever they feel like it. Sometimes emotional triggers appear not only when we least expect them, but at some of the worst moments. I know this too well because it seems like I own a goldmine of emotional triggers. While I don’t actively try to harvest these things, they just seem to find their way to the surface.

Emotion tends to guide many things we do, even if we are not fully aware that it does. Most of these emotions are not necessarily conscious, but they show up in a conscious manner. Often the person displaying these emotions is not necessarily aware of it or how they are truly coming across to the observer on the outside.

So what is a trigger? That might be a good question to answer because they are many, and I would say each person has something that triggers them. A trigger is some event in your present moment that connects you in a very deep, automatic and quick way to something that you have experienced in your past. It could be a sight, smell, sound, touch, taste or it could be a word, phrase, piece of music, color or just about anything that you observe and interact with in a day. Watching a TV program may invoke connections to memory places in your brain, as can hearing some song or even feeling the touch of someone around you. What you pick up does not necessarily have to be something horrible, and it may not necessarily be something that is directly related to the past event.

When something in your present moment invokes an automatic reaction deep within you, it is connecting in the brain and in the body with some moment of emotional charge from your past. It is an extremely quick, unconscious connection that can play out within a matter of seconds. What sets it off has no limits, no boundaries and often no warning. If you are able to identify what sets the triggers off, then you will be ahead of the curve, but often they are silent lurkers waiting to pounce as a lion would wait to pounce upon its prey.

This connection to the past is an emotional trigger. There was some past experience that had such an emotional charge to it, that the current moment is connecting that brain synapse. Often the triggers hit us in such a way that it knocks us for a loop in life but sometimes the triggers could be connected to something very beautiful in our life. For instance, if you smell a Christmas tree and it triggers your mind back to some fun early childhood memory of Christmas, it would be a very beautiful thing in this instance.

However if you take the same scenario and have another person influenced by the smell of a Christmas tree, it could take them back to a moment of horror, pain and sadness because of some event they experienced. So while we often see triggers in a negative manner, they can be positive as well, bringing out our life’s experiences and memories that we treasure and cherish. A person is able to have both positive and negative triggers.

Take, for example, emotional blasts to the past that I cherish. I have some very beautiful hymns and choruses from church that I just love to play on the piano. It takes me back to the days where I was learning how to play the piano and would spend hours creating the beautiful music. At the same time, there were many agonizing moments taking place in our house, and it was usually filled with a lot of stress, anger, yelling and strong displays of emotion. So often those songs, while they were played with beauty, were also a part of something I was trying to escape from. Now I find that in an instant, I am taken back to both sides of those experiences from my childhood. They are one and the same. The trigger could be positive and it is in many ways, but it is also negative and invokes a sense of sadness, horror and pain which still resides in my body to this day.

Another trigger I have struggled with is one that took many years for me to begin to understand. As I was sitting at a traffic light, there was this car that pulled up beside me with a stereo blasting, and the bass sound was pounding the pavement extremely hard. No matter what I did, I could not get myself to let go of the bass sound coming from that car. I began to notice that I was becoming extremely angry. Fortunately I had my windows up and AC running, because I was screaming every obscenity at the person that I could get out of my mouth. I hated them at that moment and wanted them to die. If I would have had a gun, there’s a chance that I would have used it and that is one reason I will not own a gun. I started honking my horn and waiting for the light to change in what seemed like an eternity in slow speed. I’m sure people were wondering what my problem was, and I had only a couple of things on my mind. Either I wanted to flee the sound and the situation as quickly as I could, or I wanted to do anything to get this to stop. My heart was racing, my head was pounding, my muscles in my arms and legs had grown tense and all the time, the AC was not working fast enough to even being cooling me down. Finally the light turned green and I was able to escape from the loud bass sound coming from this car, but I was left wondering why I got so angry and almost out of control for something like this. After all, it didn’t seem to bother others around me.

As time went, I began to be impacted less and less by the bass sound around me but it still made life pretty difficult. Then one day long after this, my cat began just meowing very loudly each day shortly after we moved to a new home. It was like she wanted attention but expected me to come to where she was, and she wouldn’t be quiet until I did so. The sound was excruciating and no matter what, I could not get my cat to stop making the loud meow. Finally one day I broke down in tears as I connected the trigger of the bass sound to my cat making the loud meow.

You see, when I was a child, I always loved having cats. We moved a lot so it was difficult but somehow I always managed to get a cat. My parents seemed to love animals but for some reason the cats were always afraid of my father and I never knew why. One night as a child doing dishes, I was standing on a kitchen chair because I wasn’t big enough to quite reach the sink, and had myself propped up while washing the dishes. I had to be very careful to get each and every dish very clean because if I did not, I would be in big trouble. So it was with fear and trepidation that I would wash the dishes to help my mom. On this night, there were very loud sounds coming from outside. I knew my father and mother had gone outside to the basement cellar for something, but wasn’t sure exactly what it was. We had one of those basement cellars that had the door right outside the kitchen window and back porch, which opened up out of the ground. That’s where my kittens stayed during the night, and since there were ways into the basement that the kittens knew about, it was a great place for them. There was the little gray charcoal colored kitten, Charcoal; the black kitten I named Blacky; and the grey colored one that I called Smokey, that I would sing the song “On Top of Old Smokey” to. They meant so much to me and were my companions in a world filled with turmoil.

On that night though, I heard a very loud noise of screams coming from many different things. It was horrible and I remember being horrified at what was going on outside, knowing that it was something to do with my cats. Of course I had been warned not to venture outside no matter what, and I knew that at the risk of losing my own life, I would not do this. But I listened to the screams of my kittens begging for life and begging to just let them go, as I heard the old heavy wooden cellar door slam and then slam again and again. After the final slam of the door, there was silence. No kittens could be heard. Not a single kitten left to make a sound. After what seemed like an eternity to me, my parents came back in through the back porch of the house, and you could tell my mom had been in tears and was struggling to look me in the eye. I knew she didn’t want to do what she was forced to partake in with my father. I’m sure it was horrible for her as well. My father seemed to have that cold stare in his eyes that I had seen before, and announced to me that the kittens had been playing around the door and got caught as the door was trying to close. My little brain wanted to accept the reasoning he gave me, but deep down it just didn’t add up. My eyes wanted to cry but I was warned to not be a baby about it, and it was just an unavoidable accident that had happened. After all, as I was told, crying about it would do no good and I just needed to act mature. So without tears, I finished washing the dishes that night, staring out into the night sky knowing that I would never see Charcoal, Blacky or Smokey again.

So as I sat there in traffic that day with the bass sound coming from the other car, I didn’t initially realize how the awful noise was connecting me back to a day as a child when I so wanted to stop my father from killing the kittens. Yet I was powerless to do anything or to stop it. Then when my cat began her loud meows, the sounds connected me back to that frightful night. To this day, it is very difficult to even think about this, let alone write about it, and yet it was not the first nor would it be the last time this experience would be all in a day’s activities for me.

You see, these emotional triggers stay with us until we find a way to discharge the emotional energy that is locked up within them. For if energy is trapped in a moment, it will continue searching for ways to exit and complete the direction it was going. Whether this is through something that one does physically to themselves or others, or through some type of health and disease condition or whatever way it is, the trapped energy spends its days looking for a way out. There is some point within the body where it resides, that once tapped into, yields the event as if it were playing out in the present moment. Many of us go through our lives with these things residing within us, but we never find the way to completely release them from our innermost selves. Sure we find ways to rationalize them, and make sense of them, all the time harboring the potential energy that they encase.

You may be able to go for years without ever dealing with many of these things, and in fact it is quite possible for one to go to their grave avoiding them. However at some point, the trapped energy of these moments will play out in some manner. Avoiding them keeps us operating at less than we were meant to be, and keeps us from becoming more human with potential beyond our wildest imaginations.

If you’re fortunate like I was to begin putting the pieces together, that is a good first step in recovering the energy and the trauma that the triggers hold. However, it may take years for all of this to happen, or it could happen quickly. I have many more examples of my own experiences in this as I am sure each person does. But finding the point in the body where these experiences and triggers surface is the key to having the opportunity to let them go. Once this connection to the body is made, the potential is so great. After all, the trapped energy is potential energy, and by taking the power back from it, you gain so much in your life in so many ways: from pure awareness, joy and an easier life, to less health issues and a more wholesome body to live in. No, it isn’t easy going through the triggers and reclaiming this but it isn’t as hard as one may think it is. The rewards are great, especially if you are able to do this with someone that understands how to guide you through this process and has undergone the process of healing in their own life. For truly someone that has already walked the road, can be one of the best people to help other travelers find their way through the maze of emotional triggers we suffer in life.

May you be awakened to a new thought as you have read this, realizing that there is much more than you may currently have in your life. Know that the aches and pains, health conditions, and all those discomforts you feel in your life are there for a reason. They are not to be gotten rid, of but experienced to the point of reclaiming your power over them. For when you reclaim the power of these discomforts and pains in your life, you truly are discovering what it is like to live in your body. Living in your body and enjoying it can be one of the greatest gifts we can give ourselves. The potential has no boundaries and the rewards are without limits. My hope is that you will not focus upon the pain I endured in the example, but that you will use what you have read as a catalyst for searching in your own life.