Recently I worked with an 11 year old Collie X Saluki, perhaps more Saluki in personality, called Sam.

His human, May, told me that Sam had been in a terrible state when first rescued 6 years before, and that although there had been a lot of improvements, he still had serious ongoing problems. 

The main issues were that Sam would refuse to walk past parked cars, he chased jeeps and, when they went out in the car, was terrified that May would drive off without him.  In the car, he would bark incessantly, and she no longer felt able to take him out on shopping trips or elsewhere, at all.  He had gelled with the family Yorkie, but seemed constantly paranoid the little dog would be taken away from him.

May employed her lifetime experience of living with dogs to build confidence, trust and rapport with Sam, and the positive changes in him since being rescued were significant.  However the anxiety-based residual problems, including his abject fear of cars, the jeep chasing, incessant barking and acute anxiety at any ‘leave taking’ moments were still a major problem.

Nowadays most of my sessions happen distantly, so now here I was, talking to Sam by focusing on his photo and seeing what he wanted to tell me, and finding out how I could help him feel better.

Sam's warm, intelligent and loving personality meant that he was acutely aware of how much May had helped him over the years. He was a thinker, a listener and very attentive to May's conversations with him.  When I asked him about the barking in the car, he said he saw his job as being to stop everybody else from coming into his space and also an interesting way to distract himself.  It was an “I’m in the car, so this is what I do” kind of feeling. 

He also gave me a lot of information about the family he’d lived with, their unpredictable, inconsistent energy, the threats of abandonment, and being continually told “he was lucky to have a roof over his head”.  But what I really wanted to deal with, at least initially, was his abject fear of walking past parked cars, which I intuitively felt was connected with this all.  So, using a combination of communication and muscle testing, I began to create a picture of the scene he was starting to relate.

Sam related a scene where he was walking along a pavement on the left hand side of the road alongside a beach promenade, and there was a wall between the right hand side of the road and the view of the sea.  He was filled with fear and dread, connected with a previous threat of “being got rid of”. 

He was made to get into the boot of what looked like a dark green 4x4 Discovery-type vehicle.  There was a small child’s tricycle that had been dropped or left on the road behind the car, and the car reversed over it and Sam heard the crunch.  There were small children in the 4x4 crying and the man was driving away, sounding angry and impatient. 

These were Sam's last memories with this family.  The man drove him out of this town to a rural road not far away, where Sam was dumped out of the car and stood there watching in bewilderment as the 4x4 drive off. 

At this point, on a 1-10 scale where 10 was the worst and 0 or 1 were relaxed, Sam's feelings rated at 10/10.  So I did EFT on some of the feelings and thoughts that came up with these images, including loss, betrayal, loss of trust, confusion, pain, bewilderment, hopelessness, helplessness.