There’s nothing more concerning than when our kids go through troubled times, be it anxiety, depression, friendship fires, home life struggles or ill health. But could one remedy for this be right under our nose… the family pet? Or even a trip to a local farm for some equine assisted therapy. Host Amelia Phillips and therapist Lara Cook discuss how animal assisted therapy can be a powerful tool for children and the best ways to use the therapy with the family pet or in a specialised farm.
About the guest:
Lara holds a Qualifications in Counselling, Community Services Work, Early childhood education, and Dog Psychology and obedience. Lara has worked in child protection fields, specialising in Out of Home care programs; crisis care, early intervention, and case management for at-risk homeless youth.
Through Equine and Canine Assisted Therapy, Lara provides support to a wide variety of individuals with a broad range of challenges.
SYDNEY EQUINE ASSISTED LEARNING – Home (horseshelp.net.au): http://www.horseshelp.net.au/
Blue Mountains Animal Assisted Therapy: https://www.bluemountainsanimalassistedtherapy.com.au/
Blue Mountains Animal Assisted Therapy | Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bluemountainsanimalassistedtherapy/
https://www.instagram.com/b_m_animal_assisted_therapy/
Below is an unedited transcript of the podcast episode:
We call our dog Diesel, our Love baro. He picks up on some vibration that the rest of us don’t consciously recognize. Like if Tim and I are ever having a serious discussion, even if we’re just talking quietly, but it’s very serious. Ds will get up and he will slink out of the room and go into one of the kids’ rooms, are there, DS goes, We, we say.
Barometer has just dropped below zero. We also say he knows which kids need cuddles because he will pick different kids’ beds to go and lie on, depending on different moods. And for the record, he’s not meant to be on the bed, but we’re kind of given up at 12 years old. We’ve just given up and let him go for it.
But there is this intuition he has or a vibration that animals have that I know that my kids also have it. I definitely don’t have it anymore, I don’t think, but I’d love to understand what that vibration or that energy is and learn how to harness it when the kids are struggling.
Al.
This is healthy her with Amelia Phillips, there’s nothing more concerning than when our kids go through troubled times, be it anxiety, depression, friendship, fires, home life struggles or ill health. But could one remedy for this be right under a nose, the family pet, or even a trip to the local farm for some equine assisted therapy?
In a Relationships Australia survey of over 1500 people finding showed that animal assisted therapy brings joy, improves mental wellbeing, reduces loneliness, and promotes an ethic of care and responsibility. Sounds pretty good to me to help discuss this. I’m joined by Lara Cook, qualified experienced counselor who operates out of Sydney, Equine assisted learning and her private practice, Blue Mountain’s Animal Assisted.
Laura holds qualifications in counseling community services work, early childhood education, and dog psychology and obedience. Laura has worked in child protection fields specializing in out of home care programs, crisis care. Early intervention and case management for at risk homeless youth. Wow. What an amazing career.
Laura, thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you so much, Amelia, for having me on your podcast. I’m really excited to be here. I am so. Interested to talk today because animals have been a big part of my life, but I’m really afraid to say that I’m very new to Animal Assisted Therapy. So let’s start by telling our audience what made you pursue this path of animal assisted therapy.
Yeah, so for me, I have always worked in, you know, really crisis. High, you know, energetic workplaces and stressful. I mean, I, I read your bio and I’m just thinking, Girlfriend, how are you not in the fetal position sucking your thumb? . I was frontline for a very long time and it kind of, after 15 years of working in that, I decided, I wanted to make a difference on the other end.
I really wanted to step into the therapy side after seeing and being a part of broken down areas within our communities and our society, and wanted to be in a more neutral and nurturing space. I guess you were in the red zone in that period of crisis, and there’s probably that crisis management, but I imagine.
You felt like you had so much to offer, whether it be in preventative or in posttraumatic as well, where you can really make a massive, massive difference. Yeah. It was actually really interesting. I had taken my little Maple, who is one of my therapy dogs. We were doing a sort of outreach, so out on the street and meeting homeless kids out there, and she wasn’t a therapy dog at that point.
She was she, She’s your pet. She was my pet. What sort of dog is she? She’s a spoodle, so a couple spaniel, cross poodle, and she was a puppy. And I was like, You know what? You know I can’t really leave you at home. You can come along with us. And she came along with me and I just seen this change in the kids immediately.
It was instead of being faced with a young person that is struggling out there on the street who are generally really apprehensive with engaging with adults, they’re always. Distrusting. Yeah, definitely. However, when she was in the space, that connection just was just so much stronger and the trust was there instantly by just having her there.
And that kind of made me start to move towards the, the therapy side and looking into how do I get onto that side so that the impact that I’m making can be much greater. And so after that, did you then you go and do some courses, do you? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I became a qualified and registered counselor being a therapy dog.
She was qualified and registered, so a lot of training went into her. And then I connected with the EC line assisted psychotherapy as well. So that’s pretty much been my changeover. And did you grow up around horses or was it a really big change to suddenly stand face to face? 600 kilos of hot heart beating flesh.
That’s right. Look, no, I had some pos in my life as a child, but never had I worked along with horses, so it was a big change. And I predominantly had always worked with dogs. I’d always been around dogs. I’d always enjoyed training dogs and. The change and the, and the different psychology around a dog and a horse are very, very vast.
So having to learn how to connect and build that relationship with a horse was, was very different for me. Well, I mean, horses are incredibly intuitive creatures, and I’ve ridden my whole life and I can say that horses. Saved me on many, many occasions as a troubled teenager crying into the main, as my heart got broken.
Or , it might be. They hold that space, don’t they? They just do that for you. Oh, just they just know dogs are the same. I’m sure you know, everyone’s smiling and listening, nodding, Understanding how the cattle or the dog or the pet knows when you’ve had a bad time. But it still blows me away how horses pick up on your energy.
The same horse can behave so differently around different people. I volunteered at the Riding for the Disabled, the RDA for many years, and we would have these horses that you would have children that were wheelchair bound. Mm-hmm. , and the horse would just be this gentle lamb. And then at the end of the session, the coach would say, Look, Amelia, can you just hop on and just, you know, school the horse a little bit.
And he’d buck like a madman for me. Yeah. Yeah. As soon as I Oh, woohoo. All right. We’re gonna have some fun. Explain how equine assisted therapy actually works. Let me introduce to you what equine assisted therapy is. We use the a gala model here. It is a team approach that includes myself, a mental health professional, and a qualified specialist in equine and a horse.
And we do it together and we do it with a client. It could be a herd of horses. It’s not. It depends on what the client is up for in that day. All the work is done on the ground with the horse front and center, deliberately unhindered and never ridden and allowed to interact and be at liberty. So to freely move around without being hindered by humans in that way where we’re, we’ve got them under Holter.
This creates the space for the client with the support of us to reflect, project and make that deep connect. Areas that this style of therapy when applied can show really great improvements, allowing the person to have a deeper understanding of their own emotions, confidence, trust, and emotional responses and regulation.
So horses read our intentions, right? They can feel our energy, they can hear our heartbeat from like four meters away. So they already know what we’re coming in with. And not only that, like with a horse, they’re a prey. They, you know, have learn how to evade predators. They have evolved into being extremely sensitive to their environment.
They instinctively analyze and react to our own body language. And often we always say here at the farm, like, you might be able to lie to us. But you can’t like, can’t blame. Yeah. Yeah. They pick it up and they tell you when there’s a discrepancy and whether it be like you are coming in and you’re like, No, I’m not scared of horses.
But inside you’re like, Oh my goodness. I’m think I’ve got a teenage boy in my mind here, like a bit of a, you know, tough guy with this cap turn backwards, uh, kicking the dirt as he comes in. And then the horse would be like, Buddy, I got you squared up . That’s exactly right. Happens and it’s funny, we often work with a lot of young men here because when we’re looking at therapy, The clinical approach sitting down face to face to someone, and here you go.
Let’s just spill the beans. What’s wrong? Let’s do this. It often doesn’t work for our young people. Course not. They can’t put number one. It’s confrontational in some ways into your earlier point about mistrust of adults. Yeah. Number two, these kids often don’t have that human to human connection and ability to communicate.
Number three, I can’t even put my thoughts into words half the time. How are we expect a child that’s undergone a lot of trauma to , clearly articulate it, of course. Or even just sitting still in a chair for an hour. Exactly Like, you know, I’m a mother of six. Whoa, . Stop. Rewind. Oh my goodness. Yeah. Wow. I have six sons.
So six sons. Yeah. So to think, just even the thought of going into a therapy office of counselor or even somewhere even fun, it’s, it’s like, holy crap, my child is about to be stuck in a room. I’m apologizing before we even enter that, where this style of therapy, We’re outside. We’re outside, we’re on acres.
We have the animals. It’s, it’s that different environmental stimulation that we are getting and it’s amazing to see how grounded. Young kids get when they’re around the horses. When we’re coming into session, it’s important that we’re doing breathing work. Before walking in, we explain, you know, the horses pick up on our energy.
So if we’re gonna go in there guns blazing and yelling and running around, what do you reckon’s gonna happen? And most children go, That’ll scare the horse. I’m like, Yeah, that might make the horse really scared. How do you think we should go up? Oh, I’m feeling a little bit scared myself. You know, before we’re going in, I’m like, Well, what?
What do you think will make you feel better? Let’s just do it quietly. All right, let’s do it quietly. And you can see that process. It’s that natural connection that children have to animals. It’s this beautiful understanding that we can’t have with each other as humans. And to see it evolve within the therapy space is absolutely in.
So I’d love to hear a real life example. Yeah. Can you talk us through, a client obviously changed their name for confidentiality purposes. Sure. Talk me through a real life example success story that you’ve experienced. I know there’d be lots, but one. We do have lots because I work with both equine and canine, so I I do have a couple for you.
Okay. Let’s hear them. Within our equine assisted psychotherapy, we work with a lot of young children. Particularly this nine year old boy, he’s currently living in an outta home care placement due to experiencing trauma and neglect and having really difficult behaviors. When you say out of home, it’s essentially foster care and he’s foster care.
A fa, he may have been with a couple of different families. It’s not like it’s a permanent foster care. Definitely, yes. Okay. Yes, that’s right. And you know, anger and aggress. In, in this young person was one of the reasons why his placements continually broke down. When we first started working with this child, he was very hesitant with engaging in counselors because he had done therapy, he had done therapy before.
All that he knew didn’t work and he did not like it. So we took it really slow with him, and once he was here, he had this instant connect. With the horses and all the other animals. Having the animals involved in the sessions provided him with a soft entry point to the therapy. Uh, it allowed for rapid rapport building and the focus wasn’t on him.
The focus was on the horses. And because of that, instead of. His own internal feelings being projected outwardly. We made sure that he felt safe to share them with the horses. He was able to step outside of his anger and show the horse affection, to show the horse empathy, as well as provide care for the horse.
And this is massive, massive for a young person who is. From an out of home care placement where he’s often been told what he has to do, how he does it, and this is what’s happening to you. Here we are. And giving him this opportunity to do it for the horses. So initially he was unable to extend the same emotional responses with humans with.
Empathy and kindness. It was really difficult for him, but through the work we had done with the horses, he gradually got a little bit, it got a little bit easier within school. Since beginning the program, he had significantly grown in his confidence and to share feelings and thoughts. He can now effectively communicate about his emotions because we were able to externalize those emotion.
To the horses. So for example, going, you know, Hey Ma, like what do you reckon one of our horses is called Mister. Like, what do you reckon Mister’s thinking right now? And Mr could be just walking around the field and he’s like, Maybe he’s lonely, he can’t find his friend. I’m like, Maybe he’s lonely. Oh, ok.
What do you reckon that feels like for. And then he starts unpacking his own emotions and it’s that beautiful connection by utilizing the animals within the space. And or if he’d go up to one of the other horses, Danny and go to Pat and Danny’s like, Oh no, no, thank you. And start moving away. Be like, ah, Hey mate, what do you reckon is happening to Danny right now?
He’s like, Oh, maybe it’s my energy. Maybe I need to ground a little bit, cuz I’m really excited. Oh my gosh, that is profound because you can imagine that Danny, the horse is a handful of kids playing handball in the playground at recess, ands, this boy really wants to connect, so he does what he thinks is the right thing to do, which is puff himself up and put on.
Macho pants, and then he scares the kids away the way he scares the horse away. That’s exactly right. Are these the kind of pennies that drop for them? It is, and it’s done in such a way that we are not unpacking everything sitting in front of him and trying to get him to understand he’s doing it in motion.
He’s actively working on his therapy with this horse and learning these new skills to make that relationship with the horse, and then can transfer those into the playground or with the humans or into other areas of his life, whether it be learning how to self-regulate because he wants to do something, or how his energy affects others.
And I suppose basically you can replace the horse with the dog or the rabbit or the cat, and you can replace the anger with anxiety. Or depression or self-esteem? Most definitely. The other little one I, I had been working with, it was actually really beautiful. His mom had wrote this for me, so I just really wanted to give an understanding of not only do we work with the young person, the client or or the child, the effects.
Happen around them, especially when we’re parents. We’re always working, trying to get things for our children, but when our children get it, how that makes it so much better within the family unit. Oh, you always say you’re only as happy as your least happy child . That’s right. That’s right. So this little fell well, he’s 12, He is ASD level two, so autism spectrum disorder level two with high anxiety and ooc d.
And when I first met this young fellow, so many things were challenging for him. Whether it is just getting up in the morning and going to school, getting ready, and the stress that was involved in just what you would think would be a normal task. But it isn’t. It is hard. I get stressed. Yes, Be worry. We all get stressed even when we don’t have asd.
Yeah, that’s right. And in the last year, his father had moved out of the family. We were hit with covid and big lockdowns, one of his beloved pets had died. You know, there were so many things going on for this young person to process, and through open and nurturing and gentle approaches with therapy, by utilizing my dog Maple, or when we were in the lockdown in Covid and we couldn’t physically connect, it was, okay, go grab your cat.
We’re gonna use your cat in today’s session. Wow. Over Zoom. Over Zoom. That’s right. Oh my goodness. And so I was able to run sessions that way, and the report I get back from the mom, I see changes, I see the outcomes being succeeded. But when I hear it from moms or dads about that, she reports that her child’s anxiety has significantly improved at home and at school using the techniques that he had learned within now session.
To self-regulate and communicate his worries. Clearly his independency to seek comfort from his own pet cat has now been a new skill he’s developed. And even with reaching meltdowns and a way that we were able to process that was get him to recognize what does his meltdown look like? For his pet. What does he see his pet respond to?
His meltdowns. And he was like, Oh, he’s scared. He doesn’t want anything to do with me. He’s running away. And I’m like, Hold on. Do you think he’s running away or do you think he’s feeling what you are feeling? And he’s not quite sure what to do with it. And he gets really scared and he’s like, Oh yeah, maybe that’s right.
And I said, Well, hold on. Maybe you might need to be the one to go up and make sure he’s feeling. Maybe when you are feeling that feeling inside you before your cat runs away, go, Hey, I’m gonna be here for you and together we’re gonna get through this. And that was the shift. That is such a paradigm shift because children are inherently by their nature, self-centered beings.
That’s what they need to be. That’s right. From evolution. So that transition for children to. Start to nurture and care for others around them is something that, you know, as parents, we’re constantly trying to teach, but there is that empathy towards animals and that love for animals. If we’re lucky to have kids that really connect with them Yeah.
That can teach so, so much. That’s exactly right. For a parent listening today who maybe isn’t ready to enroll in a animal assisted therapy program, but they’d like. Use the family pet. What are some tips you might have to help us go from Lucky? Have you fed the dog and the dog being the bottom of the ladder to just helping connect a bit more and maybe even that support network.
Most definitely look a reason why, you know, children work so well in animal assisted therapy. They have a natural affinity to animals, to the point where I even remember when my boys were babies and they’re sitting there on the bouncer and my dog just decides to lay right next to them, just be there.
They have that connection that. Is there ways we can facilitate this connection with challenging behaviors or just even growing their relationship is often our family pet will already show signs of distress before we even realize, like you were saying about your dog. My love barometer . Yeah, that’s right.
So is parents learning. For these subtle signs with their animals, such as, you know, the dog yearning to release energy because they’re feeling the stress, the pet wanting to find a safe area, or not making eye contact or looking away when time is needed to ground. It’s about seeing that behavior within the animal and going to your child like, Hey, did you just notice maple’s, yawn?
And I don’t think she’s tired. What do you think’s happening inside there? For her, it’s about externalizing that for her or for them, and throughout my work with all the children that I’ve worked with, learning to connect their words to their feelings, to be effectively able to express themselves. Often young children don’t know how to do this.
They know when they’re happy and they know when they’re sad. It’s all the in between that we miss out. It’s actually a really interesting exercise at the dinner tables to ask your kids label some emotions. Happy, sad, angry. Yeah, but then they run out. Even the older kids run out pretty quickly, don’t they?
A way to develop this is developing that clear language around the feelings. This is associate that with your family pet. For example, we might be walking to school with Maple, the dog, and a really loud track comes roaring by. And Maple gets a bit fearful. And so I would say to my children, I would acknowledge this and I would go, It’s okay, Maple.
That big truck was really loud. I saw you get really scared. That must have made you frightened. So it’s about unpacking those feelings. Or if my dogs are playing out the back with a ball and one gets the ball before the other and I would turn to my children and be. Huh? What do you reckon Maple’s feeling about that?
Does that, does she look like she’s frustrated or is she happy to share that book? And we wait for them to have that response, and then we build from that so that they learn the different languages around these emotions and are able to then effectively communicate. Between anger and frustration, they’re very different emotions and they are very different feelings.
Yeah. And it’s great for a child to differentiate between those, so that frustration doesn’t then boil over into anger. But when we started today, I was imagining that this was about taking the kind of energy of the animal and absorbing that into the human. But what I’m seeing now is like one of the big paradigm shifts in this animal assisted therapy is actually teaching the child to bring out that empathetic, nurturing side of them.
Definitely, definitely. And you are right, like yes, we wanna absorb energies from each other, but we are in a relationship. I want to just bring up with the dogs. Like dogs are sentient animals with their own meaningful and rich lives. They are very in sync with our human emotions, to the point where studies have actually found the biological responses of cortisol increases within the dog when the human is under stress, right?
Oh God. Poor diesel. I’m just thinking of him now. Other studies have shown that our heart. Can actually go into sync with each other when that connection is formed. And we are both in a calm state. Oh, I get that. Totally. Our animals are facilitators also. They’re a part of the family. And like you said, often dogs sit at the bottom of the food chain within the home, and that’s totally normal.
Yes, that’s totally okay. But it’s understanding that, Hold on. They actually have richer, meaningful lives themself. Not only do we get stuff from them, they actually get it from us also. We’re in this reciprocal relationship with them. They get it and we get it, and together that’s how we thrive. I’d love to understand like energetically or neurologically, how that works.
It’s so fascinating to me. Even my example at the start, how diesel just picks up even though we’re speaking quietly and he can’t understand what we’re saying. Yeah. Not only do they have amazing senses of smell and hearing, that’s how they’re receiving the information. They can smell those stress hormones changing within our body.
They can hear the heart rate increasing. They know things about us before we even know about them, and that’s my role within the therapy dog work is looking at my dog’s communication. Whether it be she’s wagging her tail from the left, or she’s wagging her tail from the right, what does wagging the tail does not mean that we’re always happy.
She’s communicating, she’s telling me what it is, and knowing the language of your animal is so important, and that just comes from taking time to spend with them and take out of your mind that they’re there just to be a dog. They’re there because they’re a part of your family. So let’s say you’ve got a daughter who comes home from school and her cup is empty and something’s happened at school.
She’s not ready to articulate it yet. She’s emotional. She’s showing anxiety symptoms. Yeah. How would you facilitate with the family pet? What would you encourage as a mom to facilitate. Yeah, so with the horses, for example, we would do a beautiful breathing exercise where we place one hand on our horse’s chest and one hand on the horse’s belly, and together we begin to match our breath with the horses.
Just taking that time to ground, just taking that time to become in sync with that animal. With the dogs, I would do something like, Let’s just sit down and do a brushing exercise. And often when we are working with our animals, I’m on the ground. I like to be grounded. It’s this mutual respectable place for you and the dog.
Yeah. Okay. So you get down on the ground or sit in their bed with them? Yeah. And. I would lift up as a parent. So if, if she had come home and she was like that, you know, let’s sit down. Let’s just share time here with Maple. Here’s her brushes, and just get her going through these mindfulness exercise, whether it would be, what does her coat feel like today?
Oh, it feels soft. Can you find any areas where her coat. Is more curly than right there, or where is her most curly area of her body? Or what does it feel like when you are patting her? Can you feel her heartbeat? Can you feel her breath? You know, just lifting up little bits and things around her to start shifting the mindset into a more grounded position and working through that with her.
often we don’t need to speak. It’s not about verbal communication. It could be she sits down and she’s not really interested with padding maple, but Maple still wants to be close to her, and that’s a real sign that, yeah, she really needs that. It’s okay just to be. And I tell you, that would be music to many kids’ ears where, Oh, it’s not about talking.
It’s, I don’t have to sit there. And how did that make you feel? And then what happened? And then what happens? It’s like a lot of the time animals equal fun as well. So it’s about that mindset shift. Yeah. Oh, I love that. If someone listening is thinking, You know what, Actually I do need to take that step and go and have some animal assisted therapy sessions.
Mm-hmm. , is that what they Google? Do you just Google Animal assisted therapy sent an me or something? Yeah, look, you can, There’s a beautiful website called The Animal Therapy Limited and a. Okay. I’ll pop that in the show notes. Yeah. Wonderful. They have all different services around Australia that are within their website so that you can find it there.
Oh, fantastic. That’s a really great resource. Even if you drive 45 minutes to a farm. What’s gonna end up happening is as they develop their own little community with the fun, there might be some wood that needs to be chopped, or there might be a tractor doing the rounds that you can jump on the back of, or a couple of wheelbarrows that need to be emptied and filled with poo and
You know, it’s amazing. You are a horse person, right? You know about the, there’s always wheelbarrows of poo to be dealt with. Even for me as a child, the sense of freedom when I was allowed to go dog walking and I’d meet up with my local girlfriends and we each had a dog, and we’d get up to all sorts of mischief going, dog walking in the afternoon.
It’s those kinds of, I don’t even wanna call it therapy, but it’s not just, What you are talking about here, which is so powerful and intense as well. It’s just making those animals a part of your life and opening up all those other avenues of resilience building that I just think is so, so powerful. Yeah, I agree.
Finally, Laura, I could talk to you all day, but I just wanted to finish off with, if we’re thinking about a parent who’s really struggling with their emotional. What would one final suggestion you have around animal assisted therapy be for them? What’s one kind of step that they could take today? I think really learning about your own.
Pet, what they like and what they don’t like, and understanding them a little bit better so that you can support your child to be able to access that relationship. It might be just lifting up what you are seeing around the animal. Maple’s really happy right now. Look at her excited and can you see how wide her eyes are?
Wow. What do you reckon about? Or, Oh wow. Look at how calm maple is over there, just laying down. I wonder what that would feel like and just really lifting up that conversation to connect with a child, to understand that this animal has feelings, has thoughts, has needs, and how we can evolve our relationship with the animal into our.
In a more rich and love dense area. Oh my gosh. Get to know your pet better and get really into the inner world of your pet, and watch how that helps your own inner world. Definitely. So beautiful. Laura, thank you so much for today. My absolute pleasure.
Recent Comments