By Dr. Jon Deam, Aveo Wellness
Hi Jon,
Quint is my dog, and honestly? He might be the most emotionally healthy being in my household. No baggage, no walls, no complicated history getting in the way of how he shows up in the world. Every person he meets is a potential best friend. Every dog at the park is an adventure waiting to happen. He bounds toward life with his whole chest — tail going, eyes bright, completely and utterly open.
And I’ll be honest with you. Sometimes I watch him and think: he’s got something figured out that a lot of us are still working on.
The Wall We Build
Here’s the thing about walls. We don’t build them for no reason. Every brick in that wall was placed there by someone who hurt us, disappointed us, or let us down when we needed them most. The wall feels like protection. And for a while, maybe it is.
But walls don’t discriminate. They keep out the people who might hurt us again — and every wonderful person who was never going to hurt us in the first place. You can’t selectively block the bad and let in the good. When the wall goes up, it goes up for everyone.
And slowly, quietly, the world gets smaller.
It Takes Courage to Be Quint
Make no mistake — openness isn’t naivety. It isn’t throwing caution to the wind or pretending people can’t disappoint you. They can. They will. That’s just being human.
Openness is the decision to assume the best anyway. It’s walking into a room and leading with warmth instead of armor. It’s extending trust before someone has technically earned it, because you understand that’s the only way trust ever gets built. It takes real courage — more, I’d argue, than keeping everyone at arm’s length ever does.
Think about what it costs us when we don’t. If we’re the dog that stays in the corner, hackles up, barking at everyone who gets too close — what happens? People back away. Connections never form. And we’re left alone, convinced the world was never safe to begin with, when really we just never gave it the chance to show us otherwise.
We rob ourselves. That’s the quiet tragedy of a closed heart. Not that others fail us — but that we fail ourselves first.
What Quint Would Tell You
Quint has been hurt before. He’s had rough moments, uncertain ones. But he doesn’t carry them into the next greeting. He bounces back, shakes it off, and trots toward the next person with the same wide-open energy as the last.
That resilience — that willingness to stay soft in a world that can be hard — is not weakness. It is the whole ballgame.
So today, take a page from Quint’s playbook. Drop the hackles. Wag the tail. Let someone in.
The world gets so much bigger when you do.
Sincerely,
Dr. Jon Deam
Aveo Wellness