C.H.O.I.C.E.S. Play-Right Players and Poets Project H.A.L.T Peaceful Posse
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An Innovative Program for Health and Healing |
Pet Pals is an animal assisted therapy which utilizes pets or animals as a medium for therapeutic change and growth. This unique modality is process oriented and experiential in nature and explores such topics as:
- Health vs. destructive relationships
- Grief resolution
- Touch deprivation
- Isolation and disability
- Abuse and trauma
- Structure and responsibility
- General health, esteem and well-being
Three common threads evident throughout these issues are trust, power and control, and boundary issues.
Pet Pals combines traditional oriented psychotherapy with holistic models (Freldenkrais based tequniques, Gestalt Therapy). It is an outgrowth of the ideas from the Delta Society which promotes animal assisted activities and therapy programs nationally.
The program utilizes volunteers, professionals and approved animals from families and rescue leagues. It draws upon the energies and wisdom's of youth and adults. This intergenerational collaboration of learning and teaching forms a model for successful and healthy relationship dynamics, often reflected in the animals themselves with the ultimate goal being partnership and cooperation.
Key to Pet Pals Success
Because Pet Pals is mostly a mobile service, it has the ability to match personalities with preferences. This method of intervention can be used in almost any setting with almost any population. A key to its success is its ability to combine unconditional love, therapeutic touch, open dialogue, attention and humor. Since it works on so many levels, using all of the senses simultaneously, the learning and healing process is often doubled or tripled in time and depth. These learned skills are transferable across different levels of experience and easily applied in other settings with more safety and confidence.
"Pets are both an aid to and a sign of the re-humanization of society. They are an aid in that they help to fill needs which are not being met in other, perhaps better ways, because society makes inadequate provision for meeting them." -Boris Levinson
Benefits of Pet Assisted Therapy:
- Overcoming fear, shyness and hypervigilence
- Learning mutual love, affection and empathy for others
- Developing trust
- Learning assertiveness versus passivity or aggression
- Experiencing uninhibited play / joy
- Sharing humor or ophisical and emotional pain
- Overall stress reduction
- Learning partner and/or parenting skills
- Self discipline and responsibility
- Improves health