What are the basic principles of the Trust Technique®?
- Sophie Fukutome
- 7 days ago
- 4 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
Hello! Welcome to my first Trust Technique® blog!
If you are here, it means something must have excited your curiosity. In this blog, I would like to share my insights about the Trust Technique®. I have been a Trust Technique® Practitioner for Large and Domestic Animals since November 2023, and I am part of the Trust Technique® Public Practice Community.
Keep in mind that the Trust Technique® is dynamic. It evolves. And that my words reflect my understanding at the time of writing. I expect my understanding too to be dynamic and to evolve.
These insights are my personal interpretation, for which I take full responsibility. See https://trust-technique.com/product/messages-of-trust/tt/187/ for a thorough introduction to the Trust Technique® by James French himself, who developed the technique with Shelley Slingo.
This is my first blog, so I'll just go through the basic principles of the Trust Technique®:
Practical empathy towards animals #PracticalEmpathy
Like most animal owners or carers, you must have experienced the loneliness and helplessness of not being heard by your animal when it's upset. The Trust Technique® can help you reach your animal. James French calls it #mindfulness for people with their animals. I think you could call it a practical and active form of empathy (#PracticalEmpathy): a method to listen to your animal that you can practice and improve. Because of its basically simple concept, it is versatile, and can be integrated in many aspects of the life you share with your animal.
Since I’ve started practicing the Trust Technique® with my hypersensitive dog Lucky, she gets upset less often, less intensely, and if she does get upset, we can restore communication sooner. Here are the basic principles of the Trust Technique®.
Shared Feelings #SharedFeelings
The fundamental assumption of the Trust Technique® is that living beings share feelings. For instance, if you feel frustrated, it is likely that your animal feels frustrated too. As a scientist, I would like to understand how this works. But this requires answering two questions: what a feeling is for an animal, and how it is transmitted. Neither of these questions will be solved in the near future. Fortunately, the answers are irrelevant to understanding how to carry out the Trust Technique®, and how to use it. The sharing of feelings (#SharedFeelings) is an excellent working hypothesis, and the Trust Technique® works.
Also, you and I have plenty of anecdotal evidence that something is being transmitted. If you’ve had a bad day at the office, your animals will tend to be uncooperative when you get home, just when you would need them to listen to you. If a situation makes you nervous, your animal gets agitated. One agitated schoolchild can make an entire classroom restless… And many more. So, if agitation can be transmitted, how about calm?
Thinking Levels #ThinkingLevels
We may not have access to our animals’ feelings, but how those feelings affect them is plain for our eyes to see. A peaceful animal is physically relaxed; it calmly lets its senses capture the cues in the environment. An agitated or excited animal shows signs of physical tension, or an irresistible need to move; its perception is narrowed.
Thus, without knowing what exactly they feel inside, we can tell how busy their mind is. James French calls this level of activity Thinking Levels (#ThinkingLevels). On a scale from 0 to 10, your animal would be in total panic at a 10 and in deep sleep at a 1. At a 0, it would be in REM sleep (Rapid Eye Movement sleep). Generally, above a 7, your animal does not hear you anymore.
So, what does the Trust Technique® do?
With the Trust Technique®, you use #SharedFeelings to help your animal’s mind climb down the ladder of Thinking Levels. This happens in a sort of dialogue between you and your animal (#DialogueWithYourAnimal) that requires quite some discipline and concentration on your side. But little by little, your animal can let go, and becomes drowsy. Repeating this exercise regularly has several effects. Your animal practices letting go, in particular with your guidance, but not only. It learns that it’s okay to let go. And something changes for you too! You acquire a finer perception of your animal’s Thinking Levels. You also learn patience. Not just waiting. Real patience. The type of patience that allows you to listen to your animal’s rising and falling Thinking Levels as an event with its own timing, as an event worth listening to.
A little sense of humor
More next time...
In subsequent posts, I would like to cover several themes. For instance I would like to show you a typical session. Or take a closer look at Thinking Levels. Or talk about the Trust Technique® and sleep. See you there!
And if you can't wait that long: check my website trust-and-regard.com, book a consultation, or find a few interested friends or relatives, and book a free webinar at info@trust-and-regard.com.
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