The Wolf You Are
For all those who are just getting into the community and are thinking that they’ll need to make contact with their “wolf side” or “spirit animal”, you are terribly misinformed about what it means to be a shapeshifter, or worse yet, what it means to identify as and be a werewolf, or hold any other animal or “other” identity. Whatever you identify as, if you identify as is, it’s you, and you are it. There is no communication between the two sides of your identity, in much the same way there isn’t communication between your hand and your eyes, or your eye color and you. It doesn’t make sense to talk to yourself in this manner, and it can have consequences. Now, there may be a tiny amount of separation between your shifted form and you, in a cognitive/logical sense. It doesn’t make sense to be thinking as yourself as that form if you have other things to focus on, and to a certain degree the physical reality of your body at the time might take center stage. But there shouldn’t be such a huge gap that your shifted form is talking to you, and has it’s own identity. What can happen, if you’re not prepared for it? Well, eventually your identity splits artificially into two parts, and they start acting on their own. This can lead to a dominance battle, or in some cases simply injury from each part acting on their own without any sort of cohesion. Even if in the best case scenario you manage to deal with all of these issues, there’s still the fact that you would no longer have a “shifted form”-it would be an independent form separate from you, and depending on the separation, you’d either be an animal, and possibly unable to do basic things like understand English, or otherwise communicate and manage yourself in the world, or a regular, non-shifter human in identity, possibly eschewing the animal side of yourself further.
So, if you’re creating this gap artificially, by talking to your animal side, considering your animal side a separate part of you, you need to stop that. Speaking to your animal side is not possible, and if you are truly experiencing such a thing, its not a shifter-specific thing. If it’s uncontrolled, even with times when you lose control/are not in control, or dissociation, you need to look into other topics such as plurality or spirit guides. This is not innate to shifters, nor is it something that should be encouraged to form with an identified shifter form if not already there.