This is as much a post about listening carefully to people as it is about listening to cats.
My friend Amanda and her cat Cloud had a problem. They live in the tiny home Amanda and her husband JD built behind my garage. When Amanda comes to visit me, Cloud follows after her. If she lets him inside, he bullies my cat, Mortimer. If she leaves him outside, her heart breaks listening to him meow just outside the door, his sad face visible through the glass.
This has been a problem for quite a while. I saw it as their problem however and so, selfcenterdly, didn’t bother thinking about finding a solution for it. Or rather I was smugly content with what my solution would have been if I had been in Amanda’s shoes which would have been to simply ignore Cloud’s cries. In other words, I felt that the problem wasn’t in the situation but rather in Amanda’s attitude. If she just didn’t care, there wouldn’t be a problem.
And then….The last time we had our double sleepover date* I offered to give her a mini about how difficult it is to hear Cloud cry. A mini is a short, five minute, co-counseling session. As the counselor, I am require to give Amanda my full loving attention. In other words, for those five minutes I had to listen, really listen to what she was sharing about the situation.
And that’s all it took. Though she had shared similar thoughts, feelings and observations (perhaps even exactly the same ones) in the past, this time I actually heard what she was saying. The solution was obvious!
Cloud thinks that my house is his home. Why wouldn’t he? Why wouldn’t he then want to follow Amanda in (even if JD is sitting back at their house with an available lap)? Why wouldn’t he consider Mortimer fair game for bullying (just as he is in the garden or in the tiny home: other areas within his domain)? Why wouldn’t he, in other words, behave exactly as he was behaving?
The question then was why Cloud wouldn’t know that it is my house, not Amanda’s? The answer to this question was that Amanda had always the one to open the door for him, the one to set Mortimer’s food dish up on the printer (the nearest horizontal surface), the one to scold him if he harassed Mortimer. In other words, Amanda was, in Cloud’s world, acting like she owned the place.
So, the next time Amanda came for a visit and Cloud followed her over, I was the one who got up to let him in. The minute he saw me coming, he dashed away across the yard. Over the next ten minutes, he came meowing at the door a few more times with the same response response each time I appeared to invite him in. After that we didn’t see him again for the remainder of Amanda’s visit.
After a few weeks of experiencing this new state of affairs, Cloud accepted my invitation to come inside for the first time. I welcomed him in and, when he headed directly for Mortimer’s food, was the one to lift it up off the floor. When he came over to pester Mortimer (who was sitting between me and Amanda on the couch), I was the one to scold him. He stopped immediately, calmly walked away and settled in quite contentedly in Mortimer’s bed under the piano.
Et voilà: Problem solved.
* a post about these is forthcoming
Thoughts and Such 