Gifted people and pets

A zebra and a bulldog – absolute bliss!

Yes, we’re zebras! But what about other animals??? Our relationship to human beings, yes! But what’s our relationship, as a gifted person, to living beings in general?

It’s impossible to talk about me, my zebra life and my high potential without telling you about Léon, my French bulldog!

Léon, my best friend, one of the pillars of my life.

Léon, my little French bulldog, 13kg of muscles and love! The love of my life, my best friend, my confidant…

I often say that he’s my totem animal, basically he’s a bit like me but in dog form… 😀 I love him unconditionally, which is just enormous when you think about it! I’m aware that it’s just an animal, but to me it represents so much more than that. It’s weird to explain, we just have a crazy resonance. We’re totally fused, in fact my vet tells me it’s not possible, that I have to put some distance between us or he’ll think he’s my husband…

As much as I sometimes have trouble understanding human projections, I’m sure that my dog clearly doesn’t think he’s my husband ^^!

Even if, okay, my life without him is just unimaginable, but because he’s like an extension of myself, 4-legged and furry version! As a gifted person, I feel the emotions of both humans and animals, it’s completely crazy, but I think we’re all actually connected! #damenature

We’ve been living together for 5 years. A close friend had a black French bulldog. She made him small. Léon was a puppy from the litter. I saw it being born and I chose it. It was obvious from the start that it was him!

I waited 10 weeks before I could take him home, but I came to see him every week. I still remember the day I put him in the car to take him to our new flatmate together!

How did I deal with his arrival in my zebra life?

At first, I didn’t want a dog, because like many people, I was thinking about the constraints.

Like many gifted people, I don’t like constraints, I like to feel free. And I think that’s my nature, to feel autonomous and independent. I don’t like to do things in a hurry and above all I didn’t want to take on a dog to make him unhappy. And yes, the zebra and the guilt, the pressure of the World… And my own pressure too!

Even though I didn’t yet know I was High Potential I knew I’d have trouble staying in the same town, with the same job, the same interests… I like to change, to travel, to discover new adventures…

So getting a dog was out of the question if I wasn’t capable of taking care of it.

I refused for two months, but when he was born and I saw him, it was obvious that it was him. (Yes, I’ve already told you, but just to be sure!).

My work on myself and on emotional dependence thanks to him.

I had it trained. I don’t regret it, in the end, it’s more us that the trainer trains, not the dog :D! We were great friends right from the start… But that didn’t stop me from setting limits.

However, right from the start, I found it hard to leave. It’s always this tendency towards emotional dependence, which I think, like many gifted people, is sometimes problematic. I’ve worked on that since then, but I still find it hard to be away from him.

I tried not to make him feel the need to be with him all the time because I didn’t want to make him unhappy and dependent in turn.

High Potential and the relationship with a pet!

I love animals, I don’t even kill spiders anymore! For me, being gifted clearly makes me apprehend nature, life, animals and the planet in a different way. In a way, it makes me more aware and also more responsible…

With Léon I don’t want to fall into the cliché of he’s my child, but just like with my children, I want the best for him… And the fact that it’s an animal doesn’t change anything, it too has the right to a life of happiness!

Thanks to him, I’ve worked a lot on my feelings of guilt. I questioned myself a lot. In the beginning, I was always asking myself: am I doing the right thing, am I overdoing it?

And finally, I asked myself the right questions! I educated myself the first year. Little by little, I learned to leave him with other people, to have him looked after and, of course, to leave him alone in the apartment! Fortunately, because I had and still have a job…

The animal as a test of the emotional bond of the repressed gifted child that I was!

I discovered I was gifted very late in life! As a result, I’ve always felt that I had a problem with self-confidence, and I found it hard to validate myself, especially when it came to making certain decisions.

It has helped me enormously , especially with my fear of being a bad mother. I don’t know why I was afraid of that… Well, if I know anything… Being an undetected little zebra, I was afraid of certain sides of myself that I didn’t understand. I’m thinking in particular of the impulsiveness and impatience that were in fact linked to situations that I felt were unfair, and also because I was clearly overwhelmed by all these emotions that at the time I didn’t know how to manage .

Thanks to him, I know that what drives me crazy now is human stupidity… If you don’t sort your glass bottles or park in a disabled space, I don’t swear by anything anymore 😉

But I’ve become much more relaxed! 😀 I’ve been working, in particular through personal development which put me on the path to giftedness…
See my dedicated article on this tool🙂

Our gifted/animal totem relationship and our evolution together

It’s as if I became an adult at the same time as he did. When I took it, I was young, still naive and immature in my outlook on the world, on people, on life…

Today, I’ve matured, I’m an adult, utopian and idealistic, to be sure! But an adult nonetheless…
Today I know I’ll be a good mother, thanks to him but obviously also thanks to myself and the confidence I’ve built up over the last few years… A kind of serenity.

He was part of that confidence-building process. for example, I know that thanks to him, his little everyday nonsense sleeping on the couch, climbing on the car seat, not listening to me, taking a thousand years to relieve myself in the morning when I’m super late for work (entirely my fault, by the way)… All his little tricks that a child could totally do, #nepasecouter #prendresontempslematin ^^ 🙂 !

Well, today, clearly, I know I’ll never go crazy over it because I have a lot of patience in these situations… And also that I let him live! Even if we’re fused, he has his own rhythm, his own desires and he tests too… Strangely enough, this dog has made me more human and given me more hope than most of my fellow citizens:D.

I’m joking, I adore all of you, but I have to admit that was a lot less true 5 years ago, thank you Léon! 😉

As with any good relationship: communication, listening, caring!

So I’m very attentive to his needs and desires, without putting him before me either. We’ve found our balance.

Strangely enough, many of the people around me find my relationship with my dog completely crazy! In fact, I’m a zany person, so my relationship with my dog is bound to be a bit like me… #logical! 🙂

The relationship that unites us is just so strong because he’s a living being, he lives with me, and as I told you, I feel his positive “waves”, or I don’t really know what you’d call it, his karma lol.

I remember philosophy classes in high school and questions like, do animals have a conscience? I’m no great neuroscientist, but from experience I know that when I leave him with the nanny, he sometimes sulks…

We don’t need to talk… Just by looking at each other, we know. He knows when I’m sad and need him! He also lets me do my thing in the apartment, while he sleeps… I can also sense when he wants to be left alone… So is it consciousness, resonance, another kind of exchange?

Whatever the case it allows me to be on my own and still have someone with me every day. When you’re a zebra and sometimes everything is going on in your head, a presence is good for you. ! He’s a soothing dog.

Here, for example, he’s sulking!

The basis of exchange: reciprocity, quality, not quantity!

In fact, Léon helped me understand something about relationships with others. Whenever we interact with someone, what counts is the quality of our exchange. I don’t spend my days with him.

I have a job, friends, a social life! He doesn’t wait for me behind the door the whole time, he does his life; he sleeps, he drinks, he makes his bed (absolutely brilliant stuff), he barks when a neighbor passes in the garden!!!!

Léon and I share nothing but good times. Already, it puts a lot of things into perspective for me! Especially the hardware stuff… When he was 6 months old, I changed the pace of our lives because I changed jobs. I stopped coming home at lunchtime.

In the first week, he ate most of the furniture, including my oak coffee table and my Cuban sofa, which I’d bought 6 months before and loved…

I’ve talked to you before about patience, but in this case, calm and patience were the order of the day! But, above all, I realized that I loved him so much that I didn’t give a damn about the furniture!

What really mattered to me was why not seeing me at lunchtime was making him go crazy? And what could I do to make this change and transition easier for him… Léon was the beginning of my realization: what’s really important in my life?

A fine form of communication, perhaps, other than verbal!

Clearly, the more I write this article, the more I tell myself that I consider him a person in his own right, except that he doesn’t speak! But the fact that he doesn’t talk doesn’t stop us from communicating a lot…

Thanks to our resonance, our feeling and our non-verbal communication, I’m learning to understand and listen to him. and vice-versa… I’m convinced that my emotional intuitiveness plays a part in this, but I also believe that he has really helped me to develop this quality!

When I love people, I need to touch them, to be in contact with them. Léon and I share the same thing, we’re a couple of glue pots! We need to stick close to people we like, people we love, people we feel good with! And that presence is good…

I really appreciate this complicity, because as a zebra, I often have the impression that people don’t understand me, and that brings me back to a feeling of loneliness that can sometimes be very burdensome!

With him, I never have this problem, we understand each other all the time and he’s always there for me… It’s good to know that there’s always someone there for us! Although I confess, I often wonder about the domesticity of animals… but that’s another debate!

Léon is my greatest adventure. It’s like my apartment, a cocoon, a refuge, a pillar on which I lean every day and which contributes to my constant happiness!

He’s not the only one today, there’s also my wonderful wife, #J, with whom being gifted has never been so easy! And then my family, my friends, my work and you too, thanks to the blog!

Thank you all, I can say I’m a happy zebra! 😀

Now it’s your turn, if you liked my article, don’t hesitate to share it, give your opinion or click on the stars below!

You can also find more information, resources and tools on Giftedness in Mel POINAS‘ book. With a lot of humor, Mel tells the story of the discovery of her giftedness and the routines she put in place to finally find her place!

To go further, you can read

• Gifted, High Potential, learn to let go!
• Personal development for HPI
• What does happiness mean to you?
• Characteristics of High Potential in detail

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