Applications for Camelidynamics, with or without camelids!

Hi all,

I just wanted to share some thoughts about parallels between what we learn in Camelidynamics, and the process of learning it, that have been rattling around in my head for a bit (welcome to the mind of a therapist! LOL).

For several years I worked by putting mental health clients together with alpacas and llamas as a form of "animal assisted therapy." Of course Bob, Woody and Pablo (the camelids) were the ones who did the real work while I functioned as the assistant: their work was to be their sensitive, independent, mind-reading, adorable little selves, refusing to tolerate rude behaviors from my teen and adolescent clients, while mine was to make sure animals and people all stayed safe while they had their interactions. I believe it is the interaction between animal and person that is transformative, not any verbal therapist-y blahdeblah I might want to do with it. If kiddos wanted to get closer to the animals, they had to learn how to modulate their own emotions, to stop trying to find shortcuts or bully their way into the animals' good graces, and to tune in to what the animals needed. My work, at that point, was basically to teach them Camelidynamics. I even wrote an article back then: "Camelidynamics as a Metaphor for Therapy", having had so much fun reading "Llamas and Alpacas as a Metaphor for Life"!

These days I'm thinking that I want to remove the 2nd, 3rd and 4th words from my title and think about "Camelidynamics as Therapy". It's hard to imagine anyone learning this way of interacting with camelids particularly well and not finding that it has impacted their other relationships as well. We are motivated to learn to get close to our enchanting alpacas and llamas, and along the way we learn, almost accidentally, to recognize our own patterns, our triggers and areas where we may struggle to hear what others have to say or to control what they do. Like much that we do in psychotherapy, that work isn't easy: it demands something of us, and our success is limited at least partly by our willingness to allow the work, or the animals, to CHANGE us. But then as a therapist I have little to offer a client who comes to me wanting me to find a way for them to get different results by continuing to do all the same old stuff - the "problem" is their spouse or their parents or their kids, not their own.

None of this is new stuff, I just wanted to offer my support as you all continue with YOUR work, whatever that may look like, and the hope that opportunities for work with Camelidynamics as Therapy, particularly promising in terms of trauma, will develop out of this time of so much unrest, devastation, and anxiety.

I think about the aftermath of this time in our history, about the inability of the mental health community to ever, ever meet the needs of so many, and I dream of COVID-19 safe groups, including medical and other front line professionals, out in pastures with camelids...

Cheers,
PK