Meet Miss Rosalina.
Hello.
My name is Rosalina and I am an 11 year old French Bulldog. I usually join for a therapy day once a week or so. I would love to meet you and keep you company during your therapy session. I am gentle, friendly, sometimes make weird noises, smells and love pats.
More about me.
I believe your therapy can be enhanced by my presence. I’m not as conceited as that sounds. It’s just that I get it. I was adopted after a troubled first home and I’ve been through some traumas of my own. Thankfully, with gentleness, unconditional love and support through a trusted secure attachment to my humans, I was able to heal and thrive. I have experienced this personally and I know that a similar approach can work with you too.
While I am not specifically a trained “therapy dog”, “support animal”, or “animal assistant”, I still feel like I have a lot to offer. Less is more sometimes, as I like to say.
If you don’t like dogs, have allergies or just aren’t in the mood, that’s ok. I won’t be offended. All you have to do is advise us beforehand when you inquire or book and we will make sure we adjust your appointments to a day when I’m not there.
Occasionally I make gurgles, snortels and a little smell (not often though). I don’t want to disrupt your flow so I will be conscious to be on my best behaviour. But occasionally you may need to keep it real with me.
I look forward to meeting you and offering you a cuddle if you’d like it.
Benefits of a furry friend.
Animal-assisted activities that involve animals helping humans, have been shown to improve a person’s emotional or physical health and wellbeing. Animal assisted therapy, or even the office dog, is increasingly known to be of benefit to a wide range of individuals for our everyday happiness.
Research suggests that the human-animal bond positively impacts on both people and animals. Research shows therapy dogs can reduce stress physiologically (cortisol levels) and increase attachment responses that trigger oxytocin – a hormone that increases trust in humans.
Dogs also react positively to animal-assisted activities. In response to the human-animal bond, dogs produce oxytocin and decrease their cortisol levels when connecting with their owner. Often dogs feel the same when engaging in animal assisted activities as if they were at home, depending on the environmental context.
Having a furry friend around can help us to slow down, develop empathy and interpersonal skills, be soothing, increase the ease of rapport between therapist and client, and improve an individual’s skills to pick up social cues imperative to human relationships. Therapists can process that information and use it to help clients see how their behaviour affects others.