The term ‘whisperer’ originated in the world of horses.  Most horse people use a combination of control and coercion to train and work with their horses.  Horse whisperers do this differently—they strive to use a deep, functional understanding of how horses understand and experience the world and each other to gain the care, respect, and trust needed to create cooperation with them.  This demands that whisperers see and understand the world through the horse’s eyes instead of only through their own.  This different, more symbiotic approach gives whisperers a unique way of understanding why issues and problems occur, and what to do with them to help them change.

In this culture, people tend to think of whisperers as having special powers because they can come into situations that people have often been struggling with for a while and create positive change in a short period of time.  People like Pat Parelli (horses) and Cesar Millan (dogs) shared this process with television shows you can watch on YouTube.  The change these whisperers can create takes little time because the problems they’re dealing with are mostly behavioral.  This means the animals are generally healthy and whole emotionally, which means they don’t need to heal through any trauma to change.  They just need to be met in different, more attuned ways so they’re given what they need from humans—i.e. giving them calm, assertive energy—so their issues and problems can change.

I never used to think of myself as an emotional whisperer because I primarily deal with healing instead of purely being oriented towards behavioral change.  Core healing does allow my clients to change their behavior because core emotion drives a lot of how we act, especially under pressure.  But core healing takes some time, which means I can’t immediately create the dramatic results whisperers do with horses and dogs. 

I’m writing about whisperers in this first post because my work is so foreign and outside the box.  I’ve learned folks that are curious about my work need to be able to relate it to a model that they know to make sense of it.  The whisperer model that’s grounded in attunement is the closest model I’ve ever found in this culture to match up with what I do.  It’s not fair to call me a human whisperer because I don’t solely focus on behavioral change.  But it is accurate to call me an emotional whisperer.  This means I’m able to attune to and to help the state of a person’s emotional system transform in ways that very few can.  I do this by way of cooperating with the natural drives of this system instead of needing to control or coerce it.

One of the things that makes me so unique as a practitioner is that I have been able to figure out how the emotional system is structured and functions both when it’s healthy and whole, and when it’s torn up and healing.  150 of the 600 pages of my 3 Client Manuals lays out all of these mechanics.  This hands-on knowledge—which I’ve never found any other practitioner to have—has allowed me to have a practical understanding of what goes into the creation of my client’s issues and problems, and what’s needed to overcome them. 

What people find so challenging about the way emotions work is their intangibility.  If you have a problem with something tangible like your heart, you expect practitioners to understand the mechanics that goes into a healthy heart, one that’s not working, and what they need to do to help the situation change.  We all understand that emotions have a cause-and-effect logic to them—gain makes us feel happy, loss makes us feel sad.  But how do you figure out the inner workings of a system that’s a part of our organic human software to the point where you can help it when it’s not functioning properly?

All software is intangible when compared with hardware, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t grounded in logical, cause-and-effect mechanics.  Computer software—like the Microsoft Word program I’m using to write this post—is a tool grounded in intangible mechanics (code) that drives it to function reliably.  Although emotions are organic instead of being lifeless and robotic, their function is also grounded in their own type of code that gives them structure and function.  If you don’t know how these mechanics fit and work together, you’ll never be able to deal with the complexities that go into core healing.  My ability to attune to and impact these mechanics are what sit at the heart of what I do as an emotional whisperer.

 

Horse whisperers are born with a natural affinity towards the way horses exist, communicate, and live their lives.  They then spend a lifetime living with and learning from horses as they also learn about themselves so they can gain the ability to do what they do.  I was born with a natural ability to both understand how things work—to understand mechanics—and to be able to connect to the softer, energetic side of life—where our emotions exist.  This gave me the talent I needed, but an emotional whisperer has to do more than just spend a lifetime learning from emotional systems because he has to gain the ability to help them heal.  Unfortunately, the only way to really do this is to struggle with great depth so you can learn how to heal by doing it yourself first.