Are You Insecurely Attached to Your Pup? How to Restore Trust in Your Heart Connection
By Shannon Cutts.
“Does my dog know how much I love him?”
“Is there anything my dog needs that I’m not giving her?”
“Is my dog happy that he chose me?”
“What is the best way I can support my dog?”
These are the questions I ask your pets every single day.
Truthfully, these are the most vulnerable and honest questions – the questions we are only brave enough to ask when we deeply love somebody.
However, these are also the types of questions we only think to ask when there is a core insecurity within the bond itself.
One aspect of this disconnect is a societal insecurity.
The other aspect of this disconnect is a conversational insecurity.
In this article we will unpack each and identify the powerful secret ingredient to restore trust in the bond you share with your dog.
Societal insecurity (or why we modern humans are insecurely attached to our dogs)
Unless you happen to live off-grid in an internet dead zone, you are likely exposed to multiple dog-related marketing messages each day.
If you take time to study these messages, you will quickly notice how every whine, sniff, scratch and glance our dog makes is neatly framed as a canine problem we have missed that we urgently need to solve.
Another way to say this is – the global $500 billion-a-year pet products industry doesn’t exactly run itself.
This culture of treating our bonds with our canines as problems in need of fixing relies on instilling and perpetuating a relationship style psychologists term “insecure attachment.”
When we are insecurely attached to someone we love (regardless of species), we tend to ask questions like these….
“Am I doing enough?”
“Are you happy being with me?”
“Do you love me?”
“Do you want to stay with me?”
Notice how similar these questions are to the questions my pet parent clients ask me to ask their dogs every day!
Now, we aren’t necessarily going to be able to flick a switch and turn off the pet products industry’s relentlessly negative messaging.
But we can begin to recognize how these recurring problem-solution messages may hijack our trust in our bond with our dog by triggering our thinking mind’s worries that we aren’t doing enough or doing well enough as pet parents.
Conversational insecurity (or what our brain does when we don’t feel connected)
Like Canis lupus familiaris, we Homo sapiens are a social species. Even the most introverted amongst us mostly harbors some level of primal craving for connection and companionship.
The trouble arises when we convince ourselves we can’t directly connect with our dog because we don’t share a common language.
Our risk-averse left-brain mind interprets this perceived inability to initiate and engage in meaningful conversation with our canine companions as a relational disconnect.
No conversation equals no connection. No connection equals no trust.
And no big mystery here why there is such a growing demand for the work I do as an animal communicator!
What fixes insecure attachment between you and your dog
Every year we navigate an ever-shifting carousel of holidays, gotcha days, birthdays and other special days, each with its own associated pressure of gift giving and receiving.
As mentioned previously, this works out to the tune of around $500 billion in pet products industry sales each year – an unstoppable marketing machine operating on a global scale.
But what if we already possess what our dog wants most, and it is also the secret ingredient to restore enduring trust in our pet parenting capabilities and in our bond?
Because we do.
You do.
However, you won’t find this gift in your left-brain thinking mind, with its endless stream of insecurities, worries and fears.
Rather, you will find it in your connective right brain mind, where you and your dog share a suite of feelings, emotions, energy in motion, that can serve as its own handy interspecies conversational system.
In other words, we can’t think our way to a deeper bond of trust with our dog.
But we can easily feel our way there.
It is not complicated and it doesn’t take long to learn how to use this system to deepen your bond with your dog. In fact, it is the same felt, sensed system you yourself relied on to communicate with your caregivers before you learned your first verbal words!
By taking time to just be with your dog, sitting quietly, feeling whatever feelings arise and recognizing these as shared e-motions, a type of energetic conversation, you can begin to sense and feel into the areas where all is well and also any areas where something may actually be amiss.
A step-by-step method to use your emotions to connect with your dog
This is a simple practice you can do daily and even hourly as needed.
- Begin with a round of what I call parasympathetic breathing to move your attention into your right brain mind. Exhale fully. Then take a deep inbreath. Exhale and extend the length of your exhalation past the length of your inhalation. Do that two more times.
- Draw your attention to your heart area and feel, sense, imagine or visualize a stream of warm light connecting your heart chakra with your dog’s heart chakra. Continue until you feel pure love for your dog arise within you, which is your signal that you are successfully connected.
- As you sit quietly, simply notice whatever energy in motion, or e-motion, arises next. Consider this emotion a message from your dog to you.
- If the emotion is positive or uplifting in some way, continue allowing the emotion to move through you and enjoy sharing it with your dog.
- If the emotion is one that feels concerning to you, do another three rounds of parasympathetic breathing (step #1).
- Then – quickly and out loud – say “(Dog’s name) is telling me…..” and speak out loud whatever words come without stopping or censoring yourself. This neatly bypasses your thinking left-brain mind and allows your heart to speak on your dog’s behalf.
Shannon Cutts is a professional animal sensitive and intuitive, Reiki Master and animal communication teacher with Animal Love Languages. One of her favorite gifts to offer pet parents is the chance to enroll in her popular free Intuitive Development for Pet Parents webinar. Get notified of upcoming webinar dates by joining Shannon’s weekly Love Letters community here: https://www.animallovelanguages.com/loveletter
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