🐼❤️ I’ve decided to share my fearful rescue dog’s story a little more widely, after a few people told me that our experience might help others too. This is Panda. She came to me from a rescue in Ukraine, frightened of a world she was somehow supposed to learn was safe. Our journey hasn’t looked like the rescue story I imagined. Progress has sometimes been incredibly small, and I’ve had to learn to see achievements that other people might not even notice. I started writing about our experience mainly to make sense of what we were going through. But somewhere along the way, I realised that while I was trying to help Panda heal, the experience was changing me too. I know there are people in this group living with fearful and traumatised rescue dogs, and that’s one of the reasons I wanted to share our story here. Sometimes it helps simply to know that somebody else is going through something similar. But I also hope our story can help people understand these dogs a little better. When you live with a deeply fearful dog, you quickly realise how easily their behaviour can be misunderstood — why they can’t “just” do the things other dogs do, or why something that looks so simple from the outside can be enormous for them. I think there’s value in talking about that too. ❤️ We’re still very much in the middle of our journey — I’m writing it as we live it. 🐾 Parts 1 and 2 of Panda’s Healing Journey are now published on Substack, and you can read them both here: 👉 https://substack.com/@rimapanda I’d love to hear from anyone whose rescue journey has looked nothing like they expected. ❤️