144. Kelly Bremken, MSSW, VSW, CSWA 

Veterinary Social Work and Supporting Pet Professionals

Colleen (0:00): Welcome to Unleashed at Work and Home, the show dedicated to helping veterinarians, vet techs, dog trainers, shelter and rescue workers, pet sitters and all the other animal crazy pet professionals manage their stress and find more joy. I'm your host, Colleen Pelar, and I'm thrilled you're here with us today.

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Colleen: Welcome back to Unleashed at Work and Home. My guest today is Kelly Bremken, and she is a licensed veterinary social worker who works at the Oregon Humane Society. And I realized, just as I said that, that I misstated how your title goes. It's veterinary social worker or licensed clinical social worker. Like, that's how those break out the letters.

Kelly (1:20): Yeah. So here at the Oregon Humane Society, I'm listed as a veterinary social worker, and in the state of Oregon, I'm currently a clinical social work associate, so I'm working on my licensure. So the state of Oregon is one of the toughest ones for licensure. So I have all my hours, and I'm just getting ready to sit for my national board.

Colleen (1:41): Awesome. Good luck. When are you planning to do that? In the next week, in the next three weeks? How exciting, and you agreed to take time to talk to me? I am honored. Thank you so much.

What is a Veterinary Social Worker?

Colleen: Well, so as I stumbled over that, one of the reasons I did is because it's not that well known. I've interviewed a few veterinary social workers on my show, and I think it's such a needed thing. But first off, can you just start us off with, what does that mean? What is a veterinary social worker?

Kelly (2:11): That is a great question. I think that social work as a whole can sometimes be misunderstood. And I like to remind folks that social work is actually a protected title. So there are social workers. We are the largest professional group of mental health clinicians, and we work with different populations, and our goal is really to walk alongside folks and help them live the best, be the best them possible.

And so there are some social workers who would work with school aged children, or they work in human medicine, oncology or emergency medicine for people. And veterinary social work is just working with a population focused on the human animal bond.

For many of us, that can mean that we are working in an academic setting, where we're working with a college of vet med or a college of Social Work. We can be working in a veterinary emergency or specialty clinic, where we're working with the public on the bonds they have with their own pet, or we're supporting staff in the work.

Some of us work in a private setting, where we hang our little shingle out and we see the public and we talk about either the work they do that includes the human animal bond, or maybe we might be working on the bonds they have with their own pet, and a lot of times that's working through grief and loss.

And then some of us, just a handful, maybe just a couple dozen, are working in an animal shelter setting like I am, and that can be supporting the staff, because the weight and the pace of the work is really difficult, and also supporting the public through how they interact with an animal shelter.

Because an animal shelter is really the community's safety net for pets within that community, and that really can include a lot of folks within your community, because so many people interact with an animal shelter, or animal sheltering within your community. That can be everyone from "Do I need to access your services for a food pantry? Do I need to know the rules for how to have a pet, how to walk a pet? What are the rules to tethering a pet in the community? What are the rules to having access to food and water?"

There's so many ways you have to interact with a pet within your community that an animal shelter is the way that most people interact with those rules and the way that we have pets. There's lots of ways to be a social worker, and then there's lots of ways to be a veterinary social worker. And veterinary social work is still a newer way to be a social worker. So we're still sort of building the plane as we fly it, which can be so exciting and also exhausting for those of us who do it.

Career Journey

Colleen (5:22): Yeah, definitely can. And a question I like to ask all my guests is like, what did you think you were going to be when you were 10? Because odds are you didn't think you were going to be a veterinary social worker since not that many people have heard of it. So tell me when you were 10, what did 10 year old Kelly think she was gonna do?

Kelly (5:43): Man, that is a great question. I'm not sure 10 year old Kelly knew what she was gonna do. I'm from Omaha, Nebraska originally, and so I'm a Midwestern kid, and I think that we weren't very imaginative where I grew up, and we also didn't have a lot of resources. So I think that my school was like, "Hey, you could be doctors, nurses, lawyers and teachers," and we are from a pretty blue collar area, so I knew that I wanted to do something. I just wasn't really sure what.

And I had a lot of great resources in high school to say you can be anything, but I was a really indecisive kid, and I was like, "Oh no, I'm good at stuff, and I'm overwhelmed by choices." So I did the thing when people got into college, when I went to Nebraska, where I was like, "Oh, I wish that I would be like my friends who wanted to be nurses and teachers, because they got on this track, and they were like, when you graduate you're a nurse, or when you graduate you're a teacher." And I was like, "I'm gonna take classes in organizational communication." And my parents were like, "But what is that?" And I was like, "I don't know."

So I never really had a clear picture. I think that's one of the reasons I like shelter work because I don't know anybody working in a shelter who would like 10 year old me wanted to work in an animal shelter because I just didn't know anybody who did that work. So I like that idea that we maybe didn't know, and that how some of us end up here is that we knew we maybe wanted to help people or help pets, but we didn't know what that looked like, and I certainly didn't live or grow up in an area where people were veterinarians. That wasn't a realistic opportunity for me, based on how and where we grew up. So yeah, I didn't really know any social workers, and I didn't really know any veterinarians, so I didn't know this was a real thing.

Professional Evolution

Colleen (7:43): Take me through then. So you've got organizational communication. And was that your degree, or that was like an interest?

Kelly (7:59): That was my actual degree. So there you are with your newly minted degree. Then what?

And being from Nebraska, we have a couple really big companies in town, so I ended up working for ConAgra Foods, and I had a really great boss who was doing adult based education and training. So I really quickly fell into adult based education and training, like onboarding new staff and helping people learn their place in the organization. And I quickly realized, "Oh, I really love interacting with people, and I really love engaging with people, and I didn't know this was a job," and so I really loved it.

But then I bounced around a little bit because I wasn't sure what it could look like, and I tried to go back and get a master's degree, and I wasn't sure if I liked adult education and training. And then I had gotten married, and I moved to Arizona. I moved to Phoenix, and while I was married, it was lovely. I was married to someone who made more money, and I was like, "Oh, my money doesn't matter right now. So this is my chance to try to do something I want to do," and that was my first opportunity to not work a job that had to pay the bills.

And can we talk about how poverty really impacts the choices that you get to make in the jobs that you choose? And because when I have to pay the bill, that really limits the jobs I can take and the days I can work and the ways that I work.

So this was my chance to say, "Well, what do I really want to do?" And that was my first job at Arizona Humane Society.

Colleen (11:08): What did you do there?

Kelly: I was an adoption counselor, and I cleaned kennels and I walked dogs, and I'm sure my parents were like, "This new, this brand new college degree that you're using to clean kennels, walk dogs and place dogs into people's homes." But I loved it. I absolutely loved it. And I thought, "Oh, I want to work with pets." But a lot of the folks that I worked with only loved working with pets part of it, but I loved working with people as well, but there was no veterinary Social Work at that time to marry those two ideas. And I felt a little bit odd, like the odd man out, saying, "Oh, I also really love working with people."

[Content continues with Kelly's journey through PetSmart, Oregon Humane Society, Florida, University of Tennessee, and back to Oregon Humane Society...]

Applying Animal Training Principles to Human Stress

Kelly (17:56): I do this amazing exercise with our staff, where we sometimes will show a handout of Sophia Yin like, "Can you tell this animal is stressed?" Right? We also have these videos for new volunteers that show an animal obviously giving you signs of stress, and we often ask new volunteers and staff, "Would you enter that animal's kennel?"

So we show an animal like giving you the whale eye and stiff body and lip licking, and we will show that video and say to that new volunteer, "Would you leash that dog up for a walk, or would you pet that cat?" And a volunteer goes, "Well, no, right?" And we say to them, "Right, because you didn't know those signs of stress when you first started volunteering, but we taught those to you, because we can teach you that."

And then sometimes I will show staff a picture of a staff member in the break room having a snack. And I go, "Hey, would you go ask Dave? Would you go dump on Dave about your day?" And they're like, "What?" And I'm like, "Would you go dump on Dave about how crappy your day was?" And they're like, "Well, I don't know." And I'm like, "Well, look at Dave like he's tapping his leg really, really nervously. And he's like, chugging them out and..." And I'm like, "Those could also be signs of stress. Maybe we should teach you what the signs of stress are in yourself and in others."

So let's talk about what is an outside stressor? What are your physical reactions to the stress cycle? And it would be foolish for us to think that you would already know what those were, because you didn't know what those signs were in an animal before we taught you. Why would you know that in yourself?

Self-Compassion and Working in Isolation

Colleen (20:03): [Discussion about oxygen deprivation training analogy and recognizing personal stress signals]

Kelly (22:10): Absolutely and exactly. And we give the pets that we work with so much grace, and we explain away even when we think about how we view trauma, we are so quick to look at an animal that we know has experienced trauma, and we will say, "Okay, so this animal we know has been in an environment where they experienced trauma, and I'm just going to go ahead. If I don't know that dog's path, I'm just going to go ahead and lean in with curiosity and give some grace and assume that the dog probably has experienced trauma."

I wish we would give each other that much grace and lean in with that much curiosity, because the truth is, we're all coming to the table with our own set of experiences and intersectionality of who we are and experiences. And so if we could do that for ourselves in the same way, would just lend to so much more just grace for each other.

And we, just as caretakers, don't as a default. We don't turn that inward, and it's really difficult. We it's so hard to watch our own staff, especially in the shelter setting and in the vet med setting, it's so hard to watch them just be so hard on themselves.

Monthly Training Programs

Colleen (27:02): I saw a session you did for the International Association of Veterinary Social Workers Conference, and in that you said that you do monthly trainings for the team. So I'm curious. Can you tell me a little bit about why? And then, what is the benefit in having this kind of education available to all the people who work at Oregon Humane?

Kelly (27:02): How lucky am I? Right? Like, let me start off by saying thank you Oregon Humane Society for seeing the value in offering on paid time to staff an opportunity to take time out of your day to attend a session.

So we've got two campuses, one in Portland and one in Salem—we're about 45 minutes apart, so we offer one in Portland, one in Salem, like on different days of the week, and then we offer one virtually, because we have staff who work part time from home, just because, just like every other animal shelter, there's zero chance we have enough office space to house everybody. So we share offices, and people sometimes work from home.

So we offer one in Portland, one in Salem, one virtually. So three weeks out of the four week month, I'm doing one a week. It's the same topic for the every month it's one topic. April was neurodiversity on teams. But other months, we would do conflict like conflict style communication. We would do grief and loss in an animal shelter setting. We would talk about things like how to be present during grief and loss. How to also honor grief and loss within teams.

We also do a needs assessment every year for the staff, and that needs assessment is asking them questions like, "What do you find challenging about the work?" We ask demographic questions like, "How long you been here? What team are you on? What parts of our employee benefits packages are you using—the EAP? Do you use our insurance to see a therapist within our network, outside of our network? Are you using any of our benefits to use the gym?"

But we also ask them, "What are the challenging parts of your role? Which of these symptoms are you seeing in yourself—things like having trouble sleeping, I'm overeating, I'm not taking care of myself?" We're also asking on that same set of questions, "What are you seeing in your coworkers?"

We also don't want it to just be about "Can you tell me all the bad crap that's happening for you here?" We also say, "What are you doing for yourself that seems to be working to take care of yourself? What are the things outside of this work that are really giving you identity and bringing you joy?" We're also asking, "What maybe are you celebrating about this work?" Because we also want to ask, "What are the things that are working?"

The Importance of Practical Takeaways

Kelly (34:26): But the number one thing that I really feel strongly about is we want to be sure that people leave with some takeaway for the day, and whether that is a place to go look at something further, we want them to leave with maybe some sort of practical skill or application.

Because, I mean, I say this a lot, but when I was an animal shelter worker going to some sort of talk or training, especially about compassion satisfaction or how hard the work was, it was always really difficult for them to talk about how hard the work was, and then just to leave and no one say, "Here's how you could make it better, or do it better, or reflect on what we talked about." It just felt like they would be like, "Hey, are you feeling bad? And is this hard?" And I would be like, "Yeah, it is." And then they'd be like, "All right, we'll go back to work now." And I'd be like, "Whoa, whoa. You just told me that these are the signs of burnout and compassion, fatigue and depression, but you didn't tell me what to do."

And even if you're not saying you can make it better, I just share the space with me and say there are resources for you, or I see you and I hear you, and we are trying our best to help you, and or here's how we support you. We just need something.

Support and Recognition

Colleen (36:04): I think that's such a great way of summarizing it too. Like we want you to feel supported and we want to know what support looks like for you, because it is different for each of us.

Kelly (38:46): I think that for the teams that I support, just the idea of having me is very important—the idea that Oregon Humane Society cares enough about the mental health and well being of the team, and that they recognize that the work that we ask the staff to do does, in fact, cause trauma and harm to them because of the nature of the work, not because of how we do it right, recognizing that there is a weight and a pace to the work because of the nature of the work.

I think that's sometimes the most important thing, and I think that we allow them to access resources on paid time, and that some of the tools we offer them are paid tools.

But more importantly, I think that they would miss the idea that this place cares about them enough to invest in combating what this work does to them, because of how hard the work is.

Magic Wand Wish

Colleen (39:20): So if I could give you a magic wand and you're going to grant a wish, a blessing upon us all, what would you give us all? Pet professionals?

Kelly (39:20): Ooh, I think just a little more self compassion. I think that I would love for us to be able to turn the compassion that we offer the rest of the world towards ourselves, especially when we view the way that we view failure, the way that we call things a failure is really hard for me to sometimes watch even the way that we talk about leaving for the day, putting down boundaries, things that we would in abstract, consider healthy.

I think that if I pull aside any one person from these teams, and I talk about, "Let's talk about a healthy boundary," right? "Let's talk about this dog in abstract," we are able to really have a healthy conversation about it. But when I put you with a group of our peers, or I put you within an organization or within a team, and we also talk about it in the context of our work, we often have a hard time not we also we have a hard time showing compassion to ourselves, pulling ourselves out of kind of the spin of what we think.

Contact Information

Colleen (41:10): If people wanted to learn more about you and your work, Kelly, how could they do that?

Kelly (41:10): They can learn more about my work at the Oregon Humane Society's website, which is OregonHumane.org or they can find out more about the work I do with Second Growth at SecondGrowthCounseling.com. Those are great ways to learn about my work. Also, the International Association of Veterinary Social Work is a wonderful professional organization that highlights the work of myself and other social workers across the world for just the impact we're having on all types of work, including animal sheltering, which is near and dear to my heart.

Colleen (41:44): Thank you so much. Thank you for talking with me today, Kelly, this has been awesome.

Kelly (41:47): I'm so glad to be here. Thank you so much for inviting me.