Therapy dogs can be more than our best friends; they can also help reduce clients’ stress and provide the emotional safety needed to process traumatic and painful life events.
Tag: animal assisted therapy
With animals included in therapeutic interactions, counselors have an additional model of empathy-like responses to present to clients. Animals in animal-assisted therapy settings can supplement traditional therapeutic interactions by demonstrating positive behaviors with humans who are experiencing negative emotions.
Having kids and young adults train rescue dogs isn’t technically animal assisted therapy, but for the kids—and dogs—involved in the Teacher’s Pet program, the result has definitely been therapeutic. The youth —with the help of professional animal trainers— use positive reward-based training to increase local rescue dogs’ chances of being
Licensed professional counselor (LPC) Hallie Sheade can’t remember a time when she didn’t love horses. She has been told that her equine passion started when she was 2 and begged to be allowed to ride a carnival pony without her mother holding her hand. Sheade, an American Counseling Association member,
“Once there was a tree … and she loved a little boy” — from The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein ***** I recently returned from a wonderful week in Nova Scotia featuring painted clapboard cottages against blue skies and a seascape of majestic hills and swirling tides. With
Animal-assisted therapy involves much more than helping professionals bringing a pet to work with them or having an “office mascot,” says Amy Johnson, a contributor to the new Animal-Assisted Therapy in Counseling Competencies. The competencies were developed in collaboration with the American Counseling Association’s Animal-Assisted Therapy in Mental Health Interest
The responsibility of providing documentation that would allow individuals to have an emotional support animal live with them should not be taken lightly.
As counselors know, the ethical and legal requirement of the “duty to warn” has been adopted as a standard of care across many helping professions. It probably represents one of the most universal elements of counseling ethics regardless of cultural or national identity. Based on the Hippocratic notion of “first,
Animal-assisted therapy (AAT) taps into the “instinctive bond” humans have with other living things, says Michigan counselor Amy Johnson. The practice can also build trust and strengthen the therapeutic relationship between a counselor and a client, she says. However, simply having a dog in the room during a counseling session
Animal-assisted therapy (AAT) in counseling continues to be a topic of much confusion and curiosity among professional counselors, clinical supervisors and counselor educators, mainly because the concept of animal-assisted mental health is only marginally understood. For many who have experienced the power of the human–animal connection, the rationale behind incorporating a