When an animal has a negative experience, he will use any positive and negative information learned from this event to form specific beliefs, thoughts and feelings about himself, his world and the people and animals around him.
This is an instinctive response in all animals, including humans. If it didn't happen, we would never remember not to touch a hot kettle after burning ourselves on it the first time.
However, when that negative experience has been overwhelming or traumatic, the negative effects of it are likely to be acute, long-lasting and damaging, and the animal will instinctively create negative thoughts and beliefs about himself, the world, and the animals and people around him (such as fear, insecurity, depression, lack of trust, and anger).
In AIT, cognitive behavioural therapy is about looking at the animal's learned, negative thoughts, emotions and behaviours as a connected whole, and helping him to recognise them and change them to more positive ones. Usually, once an animal realises that it is just his learned thoughts and feelings that are making him feel bad, he is keen to be helped to replace them.
In reality, I find CBT works better alongside other psychotherapeutic techniques (such as regression and EMDR), because while CBT works at the conscious, rational level, it is more effective when the underlying (and often unconscious) memories and associated trauma have been resolved and released.
Photo Carriage Horses (c) Silva Dymakova
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