Centering Thought: If I choose, I can have a coactive relationship with animals. As we care for each other through a balanced, healthy dynamic, I learn skills that I can apply to other parts of my life.
Day-to-day chores, personal hygiene, physical self-care, even navigating the world can be challenges to us when our mental health is compromised. And each of these can be accomplished successfully with assistance from animal companions.
There are many local, regional and national programs that train animals to help people in daily life——for reasons that run the gamut from physical disabilities to PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder, or living with severe unresolved trauma, such as war veterans and refugees experience). If we are animal lovers, pet ownership alone can be a form of animal therapy: The loyalty, bonding and even friendship we experience with having one or more animals as life companions can help us to feel significant in even our most distressing times. Just the act of stroking a pet’s soft fur or gazing into its eyes can be enough to soothe and calm us to make us more secure.
Rescuing animals can be its own form of therapy, too. The act of caring for another living creature (even goldfish or plants) can help give us purpose and activate the mirror neurons we require to connect to others and therefore to ourselves.
When pet care stops being productive, such as in animal hoarding or neglect, we are using something positive to the extreme and to our own (and the animals’) detriment. If we are prone to such tendencies, we can set up safety markers to help us be more balanced and respectful in our animal relationships——like limiting our animal ownership to our city’s legal number.
If we personally find animals more threatening or frightening than soothing, we can even use animal therapy to safely expose ourselves to the many aspects of animals, in order to find a balance to our earned anxiety. Caring for horses, for example, can be done safely through programs that rescue these large animals and teach people ways to interact with cautious care for all involved.