Thursday 10 August 2017

Making changes when our pet dies

When a pet dies it can stir up a lot of painful emotions - loss, grief and sometimes guilt and regret about not having treated them as well as we would have liked. This pain can motivate us to treat our remaining pets better - spending more time with them, playing with them more etc. We can become acutely aware of the fragility and brevity of life and the need to make the most of the time our pets are with us. But when our actions are motivated by this pain and we give extra attention to our pets as a way to alleviate that pain, then the changes we make don't last. When the emotional pain of our pet's death passes, as it naturally does eventually, then we lose the motivation that was driving us and fall back into our old ways.

I speak from experience here - every time a pet dies I wonder why I didn't learn from my last pet. I think the answer lies in the purpose of our change in behaviour towards our other pets. Whether deliberately or not, the purpose might be to avoid some of that emotional pain - the guilt and regret about our past actions. Treating our other pets differently can help us to feel better. But if we're doing it to feel better then we can't have lasting change because once the feelings of regret dissipate so does our motivation. There's no need to take action that makes us feel better if we're feeling ok again.

So how do we make the lasting change that's in our heart when we lose a much loved pet? We need to start by opening up to the feelings we are having, turn towards them and be willing to feel them, not all the time if not possible, but when it feels safe enough to do so. We may need to set ourselves some time out of our busy schedules to do this - to sit quietly and think. Next, we need to explore and reflect on our feelings of regret or guilt or self-blame; ask ourselves why we feel this way and what we would have liked to have done differently. When we do this self reflection we can easily fall into the trap of overly focusing on what we should have done and get wrapped up in self-blame and anger towards ourselves. Try to hold these feelings lightly, acknowledge that they are there and then refocus on what these feelings are suggesting that you should do differently in the future. I'm sorry to say that no matter how much we want to, we can't change what we have done in the past but the beautiful thing is that we can learn from it and we have every opportunity to act differently in the future. I don't think there is any greater way to honour our lost companions than learning from our lives together - both the good and the bad - and taking that lesson forwards into the rest of our lives.

With that in mind, we finally need to find out what our underlying value is - the direction we want our actions to head towards in the future, the kind of person we want to be in regards to our role as a pet owner. The value we find may turn out to guide the exact same behaviour towards your other pets as you would have done to avoid your feelings, but this time you are left with a value which can guide your actions in the future even when your grief fades away. Write it down if you need to, you might need a reminder in the future of what truly matters to you.

For example, I wished I had spent more time with my rabbit rather than just fleetingly seeing her as I let her out and put her back away everyday. From this I realised that I value spending time with my pets. Since my rabbit died I have used this value to guide me to pause more often and stroke my cats when they approach me and to spending a few more minutes with my surviving rabbit everyday. Notice that I have not gone extreme with my changes, I have not forced a rule upon myself that I must spend as much time as possible with my pets. Values are much gentler - they don't demand that you must act in a certain way, they are there to guide you, making every moment an opportunity to do something that takes you towards those values. I intend to use this value to continue spending little bits of extra time with my pets, to help me choose to prioritise them when I can, so that even when my grief fades I will continue to properly honour my rabbit's memory.


In loving memory of my rabbit - you were a grumpy old fluffball but I loved you dearly.

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