Timmy has come a long way, and is now sharing something new…
I wanted to share today a couple of videos, one from 31st May 2022 when I was having to protect myself with a rope whenever I tried to get peaceful with Timmy, and one from this morning (09 August 2022), which shows how much more peaceful Timmy is. He is not yet at peace with the cribbing triggers which I will go into below, but his reactions are so much calmer and the nicotine patch is working too as we progress.
Sometimes when you wonder if you are getting anywhere with helping a cribber, you have to stand back and look at how far he has come, how much he has achieved. He is so much more peaceful than he was. And this peace is very different to the shutdown, catatonic type look and feel of Timmy before we started working together to relieve the cribbing reaction. He is talking now, and he has shared with me a number of things over the last couple of weeks while we have just persisted patiently in going through the cycle of regarding the reactions to peace, and intellectualising the feelings for my own and others human understanding.
Over the last three weeks we have spent a number of mornings just learning to be peaceful with not cribbing. It hasn’t stopped the habit, but it has allowed us to come to a place where we are at a level of communication that allows a sharing of the underlying causes. He has shared bits and pieces of these feelings and sensations with me before but today it all came together. This is what I felt:
There is a nervous feeling that comes up in Timmy when he is eating. It is as though the act of eating creates a level of anxiety. This is something I have not considered before. It is not something I would have ever considered feeling about a horse. Horses naturally need to graze and eat all the time. What would have caused him to be nervous with eating? I could feel this nervousness in my own stomach. Then after a little while of sensing into this feeling of nervousness Timmy was sharing, I got a heartburn sensation. So the nervousness is creating an acid reflex. When the the heartburn sensation came up Timmy went to crib so it was the heartburn feeling that was causing him to crib to relieve it. I also had this need to burp and when I did I then felt a sensation of relief and could breath out again. That was the windsucking feeling.
Where do we go from here? Well we acknowledged and shared a lot today. He has come a long way from releasing the trauma, releasing his frustrations and anger with humans, and starting to be peaceful with not cribbing when I ask him. He has shared his nervousness. We can give that all time to process. The next step will be to address the nervous feeling when eating (and this also explains why he cribs in the pasture). We will need to ask him why. Why is he nervous while he eats? We will need to then make peace with that. Onwards……….
I just wanted to thank the universe for sending me Timmy. What he is sharing is phenomenal, and as we discover all the levels and layers of emotions related to cribbing we can only ask that other guardians of cribbers start to consider the emotions underlying the cribbing reaction.