Therapy Styles

For this assignment, I will be looking at the different therapy types that can help a person. This morning I went to my first face to face interview, which so far has been my best experience. We talk about how she thinks a person should talk about their problems but the best ways to gain their trust and how she goes every day putting her therapy in people. When I first walked in, it was colorful and creative and very well lit up, something with my original work with light therapy. She used that and the use of many different colors but divided lots of the house into other rooms to help with various problems. What I will be looking deeper into today in this assignment will be one of the most exciting and creative ways of therapy that she, indeed, herself used is the use of animals to make a person feel safe. She went on to say that she used her dog in her therapy to help people be able to open up more and feel at most peace with themselves. When I hear about this, I knew I had to look more into it as a person who volunteers at the SPCA wherever I can. I always knew dogs would help the mind but didn’t hear that you could bring your animal! She went on to say not only dogs have been to her office, but bunnies, cats, and funniest to me was a snake! I decided to lookup an article and read more about how animals can help a person’s state of mind and overall mental health. Only to find that animals help a person give off chemicals as we call them Oxytocin, which reduces stress naturally and helps lower blood pressure, thus reducing even more stress. I let kept reading the article Bauer 2 to find a whole list of animals and how they help “As pet and therapy animals, dogs and cats are most commonly utilized, but many other species also provide positive interaction In children with special needs (Pitts, 2005). Using dogs to assist in human therapy is called (dog) Canine-Assisted Therapy (CAT). At the same time, using cats is named (cat) Feline-Assisted therapy (FAT) and also mentioned EAT for (horse) Equine-Assisted Therapy and DAT for Dolphin-Assisted Therapy. Three other similar names, Pet-Facilitated Therapy (PFT), Animal-Assisted Intervention (AAI), and Animal-Assisted Literacy (AAL), are also used by some researchers and scholars. Some people with their personal, cultural, or religious beliefs or preferences might hesitate to accept certain types of animals for their therapy and activities. For this, they should be advised to make choices of their own out of a variety of pets such as cats, birds, rabbits, guinea pigs, a miniature horse, dogs, and fish.” (Min, Page 1). Therefore, I believed that this is such a fantastic way of therapy and isn’t just sitting in a dark room but bringing out the play and creativeness within everyone and decreasing your stress level more healthily. I will keep looking into this way and the many other therapy methods that I have come to find out about thanks to my interview