Image by Srikant Sahu

In this Article:

• How does domestication stifle emotional growth in both humans and animals?
• Why is domestication tied to control and emotional stagnation?
• What role does codependency play in domestication?
• The hidden costs of domestication.
• How individuals can break free from the emotional toll of domestication.

The True Cost of Domestication Is on the Domesticator

by Ren Hurst.

Domestication is more than controlling another’s body. It involves controlling so much of another’s inner experience that it literally alters who they are by stifling emotional processes that would otherwise connect them to greater wisdom. There is no such thing as an emotionally mature domesticated animal, including human animals. The very nature of domestication involves overruling someone’s natural responses in order to control them or shape them into some lesser, tamer version of themselves.

Wild animals are hard to tame not because of their biology; they are hard to tame because they are emotionally aware and able to respond accordingly to threat. No one who knows real freedom would be interested in stealing the freedom of another, and there is a reason that slavery is mostly nonexistent in the wilderness. The wild knows that the true cost of domestication is actually incurred by those who do the domesticating. It is the trading of authentic power for a false sense of control, which is never sustainable long term.

Exploitation, Control, and Abuse of Power

There are multiple ways one individual can exploit another, but from what I can tell, they all lead back to an underlying motivation to feel something other than what needs to be felt. In other words, all forms of exploitation are carried out in order for the one abusing power to either feel something they want to feel or avoid feeling something they do not.

Emotionally aware, mature, autonomous beings do not exploit others, nor can they be easily exploited. They would have no reason or desire to avoid emotion, because the full range of emotions is entirely useful to them. Once we can relate to all emotion as information and process it accordingly, we are invited to step into a space where we can truly be masters of our experience and of creation.

For example, fear, when experienced as a naturally occurring emotion in the body, keeps someone alive. It is not suffering, but rather, a valuable, temporary impulse or instinct to avoid imminent danger. The fear most humans are attempting to avoid through exploitation is psychological, or created from thought, as opposed to the instinctive fear that is necessary for survival.

Psychological fear is a very painful, confusing experience because it generates intense emotion from a usually fabricated source of threat. Instead of allowing authentic fear to be a natural guide to keep us out of danger, we create fear from thought that we then try to run away from, further disconnecting ourselves from the truth. This kind of insanity can only be present in one who is no longer wild, and it unfortunately seems to be the most common determinant of human behavior for our time.

Domestication and the Controlling of Anger

Anger is your body’s natural call to action to protect and create boundaries, and expressions of anger are likely to be suppressed during the process of domestication. When young animals are not taught healthy expressions of anger, or allowed them, it means that the care-giver has determined that their own conditioned beliefs are more important than the dependent’s authentic experience.

If expressions of anger are not permitted during the process of domestication, a form of abuse, the abuser will then have added challenges in attempting to control the individual they seek to domesticate. This is especially true if the abuser cares about the individual they are domesticating.

Domestication through Abuse of Power

I hesitate to use the word “abuse” because of how triggering it is to otherwise kind and caring individuals, but allow me to repeat that domestication only happens through abuse and can only be maintained through such. The simplest definition of abuse is the misuse of something, and all use of anyone is misuse.

We have all abused animals; we have all been abused. This is the nature of domestication. It does not make anyone wrong or bad. It is simply the result of our original separation.

One cannot control another being’s emotional experience without engaging in an abuse of power, so even when you care a great deal about the individual being controlled, abuse is still occurring in the form of emotionally stunting those you are responsible for.

Disruption of the Emotional Maturation Process

Training someone to not feel what they are feeling is the first step in disrupting their emotional maturation process and ability to self-regulate. It is also the main source of lingering trauma for just about everyone on the planet. Systems of reward and punishment modify the behavior of young animals without understanding the natural emotions that inform us of our needs.

We do not actually have emotional needs. That’s a concept based on a domesticated perspective. The only need we have concerning emotions is the need to feel them so we can be informed by them from a place beyond conditioned thought.

Domestication is a Vicious Cycle

We only domesticate others to tend to the emotional wounds of our own trauma, which is often our own domestication. The dependent in a domesticated relationship is the most obvious victim of the experience, but the real cost, often hidden, is to the one doing the domesticating. When we engage in the domestication of another being, we give up our ability to access our potential.

We can achieve a great many things through exploitation. Just take a look around—most human advances have been made at someone else’s expense. Exploitation is not sustainable, and the real hidden cost of domestication will only be revealed when it’s too late for us to turn things around.

Domestication robs all parties in the relationship of their authentic power and creative potential. Neither side is able to achieve emotional autonomy, nor the fullness of who they are, due to the codependency created within such a relationship.

The Codependency of Domestication

The codependency of domestication then evolves into dependency on external factors for emotional regulation, and this is where it gets even more complex. When someone is easily able to emotionally regulate due to privilege, it becomes nearly impossible to see the harm in domestication.

I have had the great fortune of knowing some exceptional humans, especially in the past decade. Overwhelmingly, these people have had two things in common: first, none of them were heavily involved with animals, and second, they were all very privileged individuals.

Interestingly, those who were able to achieve great outside success as a result of their privilege, but still struggled internally, had pets. Some of the most famous and successful people I know have relied on codependent relationships with animals and other humans to be able to do what they have done.

I, too, can relate, as now I fully understand that I never would have been able to write Riding on the Power of Others without the functionally codependent partnership I was in at the time. I’m sure my emotionally enmeshed relationship with my dog Spur contributed a great deal as well. My emotional regulation at that time was still deeply dependent on external support, and I had no idea that was even a thing to be looking at.

Emotional Privilege and Material Privilege

The word “privilege” gets thrown around a lot, especially today, but how I am using it here can be defined as “the amount of access someone has to external forms of emotional regulation.” Therefore, privilege can be anything as obvious as skin color and the amount of money someone has to how emotionally supported they are in their relationships and everything in between.

Privilege is not good or bad; it just is what it is. Some forms of privilege involve abuses of power, such as pet ownership, and some do not, such as having healthy friendships. What matters here is how much dependency we have on our privilege to do the things we do and behave as who we believe ourselves to be.

There was no way for me to understand how much privilege I had before I began applying this work to dogs. When only focused on horses, I tapped into the core essence of where it all leads and found an anchor there, but everything changed when I shifted my focus to the main animal no one wants to get honest about: “man’s best friend.”

The result was losing most of my friends, my partner, my home, the support I had for my developing sanctuary, all my money, and my nonprofit. Of course, my own trauma and lack of understanding around emotion and healing contributed, but I was having one hell of a time getting anyone to want to look at what I now believe to be the core wound of our species.

A lot of people could get behind not riding horses, especially when they themselves had no emotional attachment to those animals, but not having emotionally enmeshed relationships with dogs? Get outta here! So I did.

I moved back to the desert and found myself mostly alone for a few years with not enough support to care for nearly 30 animals. Somehow we got through, but not without bumps and bruises along the way. To call it “a painful time” is inadequate. I lived in extreme circumstances, caring for many others when I was barely learning how to care deeply for myself, and it broke me—wide open.

I thought I had already been broken open, but the layers of privilege are many, and having taught this work to many people over the years now, one thing I can say for certain is that unearned privilege may be the biggest obstacle to overcoming one’s own domestication. The more one has, the less likely one is to lean into emotional pain. It is just far too easy to reach for something soothing.

Getting Uncomfortable

Are you ready to get really uncomfortable? It just gets more painful from here. If you are abundantly resourced, it will require enormous courage to choose pain when you don’t have to. However, you’re already in some amount of pain or you wouldn’t be here, reading these pages.

I can tell you from experience that the pain is worth it, and even more so, it becomes a friend once you realize that there is nothing to fear about it. The result is you get to love yourself. Hell, you get to actually like yourself, too. No one can stop you from becoming all you want to be or from living the life you want to live except you. No one.

Being Wildly Human

To be wildly human is to create. We are literally God expressing itself through human form, and the separation from that knowing, that divine experience, is the real hidden cost of domestication. To come here and not create your reality through your own deliberate thoughts, words, and actions is a waste of the miracle of what it is to be human.

Your body is the doorway to freedom; your emotions your truest intelligence. That is the greatest gift the animals have to offer us: to remind us beings how to be in our bodies, guided by soul intelligence rather than conditioned beliefs. The only thing that sets us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom is that we get to be magicians with the knowing. Are you ready to access your magic?

Copyright ©2024. All Rights Reserved.
Adapted with permission.

Article Source: The Wisdom of Wildness

The Wisdom of Wildness: Healing the Trauma of Domestication
by Ren Hurst.

How can we reclaim our wild soul and approach life with authenticity and emotional maturity? Looking deeply into the nature of domestication and humanity’s relationship to other animals, Ren Hurst finds our own domestication—and our resultant disconnection from nature—to be the root trauma for much of the human experience, which we seem to perpetuate by domesticating others.

Ren offers another path: she reverse-engineered the conditioning process that leads to domestication and discovered a practical road map for deprogramming and undomesticating yourself in order to heal, restore connection, and reclaim the innate wisdom of wildness within.

Click here for more info and/or to order this paperback book. Also available as an Audiobook and as a Kindle edition.

About the Author

Ren Hurst is an author, mentor, tracker, and guide helping people address the trauma of domestication. After 20 years of being a professional horsewoman, Ren produced a body of work called Sanctuary13 to help people restore connection to their most authentic, wild human animal nature. This work is now available and offered through the non- profit, Wild Wisdom, Inc. as part of their mission to address the trauma of domestication. 

To support Wild Wisdom, Inc. and access more Sanctuary13™, please visit www.undomesticate.me 

Visit Ren's website: RenderMeWild.com/

Article Recap:

Domestication goes beyond controlling physical behavior; it involves stifling emotional processes, leading to codependency and emotional stagnation. This article looks into the hidden cost of domestication, highlighting its impact on emotional growth, creativity, and autonomy. By disconnecting individuals from their natural emotions, domestication fosters long-term consequences for emotional maturity. The article also addresses how those who domesticate others ultimately sacrifice their own potential for authentic power and creative freedom.

More Books by the author.