What happened: I took Tori to put her in the cage walker. She refused. Many. Times. I took her to do a send and receive and Sue ran over yelling that I can’t work her that hard or she’ll get too stressed and lose the baby. I took her to hose her off and walk her to cool her down. She kept walking faster than I did. I got a chain shank and we did showmanship until she started stopping when I did.
What I made it mean: Tori wouldn’t get in the cage walker because she didn’t trust me enough because I’m not a good enough trainer. I responded to her “misbehaving” with more poor trainering and I’m never going to be a good trainer because I never do anything right. I probably already made her lose her baby anyway, so I’ve ruined that. I’m just always surrounded by people who know what they’re doing because they’ve been doing this so much longer than I have, so I can never be right. And even the showmanship that I did wasn’t good, it was all higglty pigglty. Tori keeps overrunning me, but she’s perfectly happy to have me just push her back over and over, and since she’s doing that without a fuss I can’t escalate, I just do it all over and over and I never seem to get it right. Even when I finally do put her away I feel like I was just saying she was ‘good enough’ so that I could go have dinner and be done with my day.
And now I release what happened, and what I made it mean. It’s in the past and has no effect on me anymore.
