I often get questions like this:

My cat came back (from the vet/from being lost/from staying with someone else) and now it’s like the poor cat’s gone crazy. How do I get my old cat back?

Dear Readers,

They may have been to the vet/lost/with that person before, even many times. But this time, something was too much.

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Cats are bright animals, but the conceptual leap required to understand exactly what happened is beyond them. So then a cat needs to find a stress target. This big mess of sad and frightened feelings arrives back home; and their survival instincts urge them to find what has changed that has brought this upon them.

In their natural habitat, cats would be right. Something attacked them, or made them sick, and they should either avoid it, or drive it out of their territory. But in our homes, this instinct can be distorted into a cat targeting someone or something which had nothing to do with it! We can help our cat de-stress by trying these strategies:

Burn up their excess energy. Stress pumps up the cat’s feelings and leaves them a bundle of nerves. So let’s try playing them into the ground more often. A tired cat is then a relaxed cat, which leads to a cat getting enough deep sleep. This will get our cat feeling more like their old happy self.

Defend the helpless. Whether the cat is targeting living or non-living objects to let out their distress, we need to redirect that energy. The poor target is sure not to like their situation, and then they become another source of stress. Remind our traumatized cat that They like Mister Whiskers! and That chair didn’t do anything to you! Use our distress or happiness to steer our cat away from pointless acting out.

Express distress the right way. We must show them something that actually works. Misbehaving de-stresses the cat for a little while (at least I’m not thinking about how upset I am!) but not for long.

We often fuss over the cat after a bad experience. There’s nothing wrong with that. But we must not be too different from our usual self, either.

What the cat needs is their previous routine.

That means our cat has to be held to the standard of their previous behavior.

We can feel sorry for the cat. We are glad when the cat is affectionate with us, and grateful they don’t seem to blame us. So we are even less likely than usual to step in and make the cat stop the new, bad, things they are doing.

When that is exactly what we have to do.

When we act like we used to, we encourage the cat to act like they used to. When the cat is feeling less stressed, and more like their own selves; they will stop trying to act out all their stress.

We reverse the downward spiral; how their apprehension makes them harass other cats, and get harassed back, which makes their fear worse.

We let our cat know we still love them, and that nothing has changed.

This is the path to getting our cat back.

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There’s more ways to get our cat to be affectionate in The Way of Cats than the article you are reading now. See all of my CAT AFFECTION posts.