Liz was at her wit’s end. The next stop for Miso, her beloved cat who would not stop urinating everywhere, was the animal shelter. Liz was not familiar with, and was very skeptical of, energetic healing. But after exhausting all the traditional routes, there was nothing left to lose.

Liz and Miso’s story is just one of the many cases that author and bioenergetic healer Tammy Billups relates in her book Beyond the Fur. Whether the issue is one of behavior or health, Billups has seen and treated it all in thousands of cases in more than a decade of therapy work with people and their pets.

After that first visit with Billups, Miso never urinated outside of the litter box again. The healing specialist figured out that Miso was responding to Liz’s deep-seated anger that she was projecting upon him as a function of her severe unhappiness at work. Thus, not only did Miso’s insufferable behavior disappear, but Liz started addressing her issues in more positive ways as well.

Beyond The Fur explores commonly accepted propositions—such as that pets have emotions, that physical issues are often a manifestation of emotional issues, that people have childhood wounds that need to be healed, and that others are in our lives for a reason —and moves beyond each of them: Pets not only have emotions, but they also mirror their owners’ emotions; they reflect what owners like and don’t like about themselves. People aren’t the only ones that carry core wounds that need healing; animals do, too. And there is a reason that specific animals and specific humans are in each other’s lives; there is a mutual calling between creatures with the same core wounds.

Billups contends that what makes healing possible, if not probable, is that there are predictable behaviors associated with each of the five core wounds: abandonment, betrayal, terror, invasiveness and being detached from oneself.

For example, Billups says that “the scared ones,” the animals who have the wound of terror, will usually avoid direct eye contact and “will frequently be loners when it comes to interaction with other animals in a house environment or rescue center.” Physically, they will have thin, weak-looking bodies. She counsels owners of these pets not to pull them out of their safe spaces to face their fears, but to be patient and steady to allow the animals to come out all on their own.

Because of the people-pet connection, Billups offers the observation that “working on your own inner healing is actually one of the fastest ways—if not the fastest way—to help your animals heal and suffer less,” just as Liz helped Miso by acknowledging her anger at her boss, and exorcised it in a manner other than projecting it onto her cat. Beyond The Fur’s ultimate message is one of greater spiritual consciousness and personal evolution: By recognizing that our beloved pets are in our lives because we call to them, and vice versa, we can expedite our own growth, as well as that of our pets.

For more information about Beyond the Fur or Tammy Billups, visit SundanceHealing.com.