Recently, a child expressed the idea that it’s good to be a cat, you don’t have to go to school, wash dishes, clean the house, eat, sleep and play. And I wondered whether the life of pet sitters is so good, or whether their burden is heavy. In this regard, I remembered a case from practice. When I worked with a young couple with a request to improve family relationships. During the work, it became clear that communication in the family was disrupted. In connection with this, tension increased and, unconsciously, to reduce it, the couple alternately triangulated, now their mother-in-law, now their friends, girlfriends and even colleagues. But the most brutal merciless triangulation was when a dog was brought in for this. Poor animal: the husband took out on her the aggression that had accumulated on his wife. The wife, trying to somehow get her husband’s attention (albeit negative, but at least some kind of reaction), fed the animal from the table, which extremely irritated her husband. He lost his temper and beat the dog. And a little later he asked his wife for forgiveness because she began to cry. And so, the wife received her long-awaited attention. And the animal, from constant stress, as a result of the fear and beatings it had experienced, began to go out of its way to relieve itself in the wrong place. As a result, they decided to get rid of him and threw him out onto the street. By the way, the wife really resisted this, since the husband was very irritated by the specific smell in the apartment. And these are additional scandals, secondary benefits in subsequent reconciliations. And thanks to this problem, she had the opportunity to receive an additional emotional reaction from her detached, cold, accustomed to hiding emotions, husband. And this was not the first animal (there were cats) that was triangulated in this couple, but the outcome is always the same. By the way, the initiator of getting rid of animals was always the mother-in-law. Since the animal lived with the couple for a short time, the services of the mother-in-law were rarely resorted to. But as soon as the animal was thrown out, it was triangulated again, i.e. the previous close relationship with her, which she desperately needed, was renewed. But that’s another story. PS Think about it, why do you keep your animal? What function does it serve in your family? How often vertical irritation - grandparents, parents, children - is vented on an animal that cannot fight back the Two-Legged Gods…