Life & Therapy

The other day, our dog Maude was walking around with a rawhide clenched in her teeth.  She walked over to her water bowl, and clearly wanted a drink, but was unwilling to drop the rawhide to get the drink.  She was holding on to it out of fear of losing it; a fear that comes from the days when we had two dogs.  Our other dog, Liver, was a bully and a bit of a hog, and she died fairly recently.  Maude hasn’t fully adjusted to the reality that no one will ever beat her up over a rawhide again. When I gently took it from her mouth, she immediately ran to her water bowl and eagerly drank up the water.  If I hadn’t intervened, eventually the price of her thirst would have outweighed the fear of losing her rawhide to a resurrected Liver, and she would have opted to take the risk, so that she could drink.

Often, we hold on to old patterns that protected us in the past from something or someone scary, long after the fact.  These old patterns or behaviors may now hold us back from what we want, but we hang on to them so that we feel safe.  At some point, the price we pay to hold on to safety becomes higher than the price of facing our fears.  Perhaps we learned to be stoic because we got hurt in the past, and we gripped our feelings inside a clenched heart.  If we want to have connection with another person, eventually we need to unclench our hearts and let some difficult feelings out.  It may be scary, and it shouldn’t be rushed, but when we do so, we can drink in the love of another.