172. Jamie Thompson, LCSW 

Colleen Pelar (0:05): Welcome to Unleashed at Work and Home. I'm Colleen Pelar, and this is where pet professionals come for honest conversations about what it really takes to show up for yourself while serving the animals you love. If you've ever felt caught between compassion and exhaustion, you're in the right place. Here we explore what it means to reconnect with your inner wisdom and rediscover the joy that brought you to this work. Make sure to join my email community at colleenpelar.com for gentle, practical insights designed specifically for pet professionals. Now, let's dive in. Welcome back to Unleashed at Work and Home. My guest today is Jamie Thompson, and she's the owner of Grow and Connect Therapy. Welcome, Jamie.

Jamie Thompson (0:05): Hi. Thank you so much for having me, Colleen. I really appreciate it.

Colleen Pelar (0:05): So, Jamie's a therapist, and I include her in my definition of pet professional, because among her many specialties, she also has one niche that really captured my interest, which is she helps high need pet owners, pet owners who have the privilege of loving a behaviorally or medically needy animal, and it is a privilege, and also it's hard, and there really often isn't support for people who are are coping with that kind of situation with loving an animal deeply, and also struggling with their needs. So, wow, cool niche. Tell me just a little bit about that niche.

Jamie Thompson (1:38): Yeah, I so I've been a social worker for a little over 14 years at this point, and I have worked in several different settings with several different populations. And I tend to go, I tend to work with like the hardest populations wherever I am, and so it's not shocking to me that I also gravitated towards this specialty with with pets as well, and people who love them. I actually came into this because I, my partner and I, had a dog that had been through a lot. He had been through the ringer. We knew this when we got him. He was kind of picked for us by a trainer friend that I have in a different state where I had grown up, and they held on to this dog. His name was Cash. Before my partner and I bought a house and had a yard and had space that we could bring him to us, and Cash fit into our family perfectly. We had a second dog that he got along great with. It was wonderful, and Cash didn't love the outside world outside of our house as much as other animals might. He really struggled with the vet. He then started struggling with just strangers in general and other animals, and it was a level of reactivity that we had anticipated things might be a little bit rough, just given his background, but not that it would be to the degree that it was. And so, you know, he was a reactive dog in an aggressive way. Not all reactivity is aggression, but for Cash, it was, and he it it was definitely like a spectrum of loving him so intensely and struggling so much to get him that care and make sure that his needs were met and to get him out of the house sometimes at all and so I I just experienced my partner and I did loving an animal with very complicated needs, and eventually making the choice for him that we weren't going to ask him to live in this world anymore. He started showing like neurological signs and and some stuff that we couldn't treat with him needing to be fully sedated at the vet. We couldn't even really assess that stuff in an easy way, and that coupled with the other medical complications we had, we chose to euthanize. And that process for me with Cash was such a huge learning curve. I've had dogs my whole life. I've I've had animals my whole life, and he was the first one that really could be considered reactive or shown really aggression and like the isolation and loneliness. Even though my partner was living in the same house with me and like experiencing in theory all these same things with me, I was the one that was with Cash when he had the bites that he had, and when we had to go to the vet, and he lashed out, like it. I was the one physically seeing those things, and so I was experiencing this parallel of like loving this animal so much and being so anxious about and for him, and hyper vigilant about the circumstances around him and feeling so much responsibility to keep him and everybody else safe, but still give him a good quality of life. Like it was torturous to some degree, and not I. I would go back and choose it all again. I loved him and love him still, and he's still very much a part of our life and our family, and we talk about him, and he's been gone for over a year now, but being a mental health professional, and my own therapist supported me significantly through this whole process. She is an animal lover, but not an animal professional to any degree, and so knowing the benefit that I got just from having her support, and knowing like I have now experienced this intimately, I would love to provide that support to other people. And doing research since getting into this field on like caregiver burden and how it is the same for somebody who is caregiving for a pet, the impact is the same. The isolation is the same. The anticipatory grief is the same. It is a very similar experience if caretaking for a a complicated animal and a complicated human. So people are out there needing support, and they need resources, and they need help, and sometimes they just need to know they're not alone in these experiences. And I am very lucky to be able to do that and be in a position to provide the support and I don't know resources that I needed and used when I was going through this as well.

Colleen Pelar (6:41): Thank you. Yeah, that was beautifully described, and it it actually made me think of a question I had wanted to ask you about your business name, Grow and Connect, and that feeling of being so alone, and why it matters so much to us to not feel so alone when we're going through something. So, was that an intentional choice in your in your? It

Jamie Thompson (7:06): absolutely was. Yeah, I my whole life, even even before becoming a social worker, I have been super aware of community and how important that is, and that that community for me has taken taken form in different ways throughout the course of my life, as I think a lot of people do. Their community looks different as they grow and age and develop, and with the internet community can also look so much different. And I think that's one thing that, yes, with my business name and that choice, I wanted people to know that my values include relationship with other people and awareness of your relationship with the world around you, the animals in your home, your neighbors, everybody. Like I, I want people to be aware of their connection to others, and that was very much why I chose, yeah, that business.

Colleen Pelar (8:03): I think it's, I think it's one of the things that is just so woven through everything, but often not pointed out and spelled out of how much we do need community and connection, and how when it's missing, that can actually be the most painful piece of of difficult situations. It's it's sort of so obvious that we don't say it, and then when we do say it, we're like, "Oh, didn't know. How do we not know? And yet we do sometimes.

Jamie Thompson (8:35): Yeah, I feel like it's also a little bit, and I'm not trying to get political necessarily, but I also can't help it. I think it's also very much woven into how we are socialized as Americans. Like we're not, we don't grow up being told figure out who your community is, invest in the people around you. Like we are very much encouraged to be individuals and self sufficient and to not need other people and and those things are glorified in our society in a large way, and so I feel like the connection and the understanding that people are starting to have, especially right now, about how important community is and the people around you, whether or not you are exactly the same, but still, these are your neighbors in your community. It's it's starting to become more important. It almost feels like an underground thing right now. That that if you are connecting to your community and trying to grow and and invest in your community, that is somehow like woke or liberal or like it's a it's been it's like it's politicized when in reality it's just what we are as people we are relational animals are also relational and we are animals like it's not shocking I think or it shouldn't be that we need those things

Colleen Pelar (9:58): yeah it's not shocking. Or it shouldn't be is the important piece there. Yes, but I mean it is how we evolved to be. And if you look back over time, you know, if you if you lived in a small town, there were people you liked and people you didn't like, but they were all your community. Like you dealt with the butcher, whether you liked the butcher or not.

Jamie Thompson (10:18): Yeah,

Colleen Pelar (10:19): you know there was there was a situation where we were all in this together.

Jamie Thompson (10:24): Yeah,

Colleen Pelar (10:25): a million years ago, my husband and I had a conversation about whether life was about competition or collaboration, and he strongly was in the competition camp. And I was like, nobody gets anywhere without other people's support. Like, I mean, we drive on paved roads. I didn't pave them, you know. Like, it's all supporting each other and doing things. And it was so interesting to have that spot where we were we were just kind of looking at each other, like, "Who are you, and what are you talking about? Like,

[FLAG: The transcript attributes the next few words to "Speaker 1," "Speaker 2," and "Speaker 3" in rapid succession ("we" / "both" / "thought"), which then resolves back to Colleen. This reads as a single continuous sentence — most likely Colleen's — broken up by Otter, possibly due to overlapping speech or laughter. Reproduced here as it appears in the source rather than reassigned.]

Speaker 1 (10:58): we

Speaker 2 (10:59): both

Speaker 3 (10:59): thought

Colleen Pelar (11:00): so so strongly that the other one's opinion was kind of off the wall.

Jamie Thompson (11:04): Yeah,

Colleen Pelar (11:05): and it's probably 20 years ago now. I bet we haven't shifted that much. Yeah, certainly I haven't shifted. And if anything, I've gone more into my camp of collaboration and working together. He may have shifted a little my way, but I don't think we want to ask him because he he might want to just go back to his strong stance because he does love a good strong stance. So one question I love to ask everybody is like, when you were 10, what did you think you were going to be doing as an adult? A

Jamie Thompson (11:38): therapist was one of the things on my list, which is sometimes wild to think about, I'm 42 now, and to think that, like, literally three decades ago, this was one of the possibilities that I saw. I also had like create very creative things, like florist and photographer. That even at 10 years old in the '90s, I was like, I can't make a career out of that. Not realizing that therapist is not really that far ahead of artist or photographer in terms of pay scale. Yeah, but this was one of the things I think I've always wanted to work with people in some capacity, regardless of what I had considered, and and I most social workers come to this field because of experiences we have had growing up. Whether it is a desire to take care of ourselves as children or a desire to change experiences we had, whatever that is, and I am no different. I absolutely wanted to be working with and helping and supporting people in whatever career I have kind of looked at. When I went to school, when I first went to college and and grad school, I actually was gonna be I was going to be a pastor. I had gone to seminary and did my undergrad in religious and philosophical studies, and partway through seminary, realized that one just practically, I couldn't hold a part time job and go to school full time. Like the hours just didn't work, and I had kind of gotten disillusioned at seminary with like how not practical the people around me were. Like I want to practically help people, not just pray for them. And I was even in a very practical denomination when I was in seminary, and still I struggled with this. And so I ended up dropping out. I went to school in Wichita, Kansas, for my master's degree in social work. After kind of puttering around for about a year or so, after dropping out of seminary and trying to figure out, like, okay, what am I going to do now? And interestingly, the work that I do on a regular basis doesn't feel any different than what I had planned when I was in seminary. Like, I am doing the work that I wanted to do, regardless of what the like approach

Speaker 4 (14:06): is.

Jamie Thompson (14:07): Yeah, yeah, and so this doesn't

Colleen Pelar (14:08): put on it.

Jamie Thompson (14:09): Yes, yep. So this doesn't really feel that different from what I had anticipated at 10.

Colleen Pelar (14:15): That's so cool. That's so cool. I'm always interested in how some people kind of feel it and go in a relatively straight route, and other people have all sorts of crazy loopy loops, and and it turns out, and just fascinating to me. Yeah, which actually kind of leads well into that. I asked everybody to share words that matter to them, and the words you shared are the past no longer is the future is not yet here. There is only one moment in which life is available, and that is the present moment. And it's a quote from Thich Nhat Hanh. I believe I'm saying that name right? Yes. Yeah. Okay. And so tell me a little bit about that quote, what it means to you, and like when it came into your awareness, and and why you held it.

Jamie Thompson (15:08): Yeah. I. So I sent you that quote, feeling a little bit weird about sending you what I really wanted to send you.

Colleen Pelar (15:19): Oh, interesting. Now I need both,

Jamie Thompson (15:22): right? Obviously, so that is a little bit like like that quote from Thich Nhat Hanh is certainly connected to what has been on my mind a lot lately, and what I have been thinking a lot about lately is Thich Nhat Hanh's translation of the five remembrances from the Buddha within Buddhism, and these are-I actually have them saved on my phone to reference because the language is a little weird, and I want to make sure I get it right. There's so there's five, the five remembrances. The first is that I am of the nature to grow old. There is nothing I can do to escape growing old. The second is I am of the nature to have ill health, or sometimes that's that's translated as suffering. There is no way to escape having ill health or suffering. The third is I am of the nature to die, and there is no way to escape death. The fourth is all that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature to change, and there is no way to escape being separated from them, and then the fifth is my actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions, and my actions are the ground upon which I stand. So, kind of a lot. The part that has really been on my mind lately are the two that say I am of a nature to grow old, and I am of a nature of the nature to die. My this seems kind of silly, but my dog Juniper about a month and a half ago injured herself a little bit, and we weren't sure if she had a CCL tear or like a bruise on her bone or whatever. And so we've been in the process of restriction, going to PT, doing her exercises, trying to get her mobility back up to where it should be, and I have a lot of dog anxiety, which might surprise you, or not actually. And so it has been difficult for me, like struggling with trying to be hyper vigilant about her, worrying about her a lot, wanting to check on her frequently, all of these behaviors that clinically they're just reassurance seeking behaviors, and they serve to increase my anxiety. They don't make me feel any better because that's what reassurance seeking behavior does. And so I've been trying to meditate on those five remembrances rather than spend my time being anxious about her and worrying about her. And I can't say that it's stuff that necessarily makes me feel good. It isn't. It right. You don't get happy or comfortable feelings necessarily meditating on the fact that all creatures are of a nature to grow old and die, but there is something about that that it is true for all of us. It is one thing that highlights our common humanity from person to person, or from creature to creature. Even that this is something we will all experience, and it's if not helpful, it is not anxiety that I'm feeling when I'm thinking about that. Like there's a grief there that is more real and more accurate to reality than the anxiety that I feel otherwise, and that's that has been kind of what's on my mind lately. I my first foray into being a primary like therapist and having a private practice caseload and not working at an agency, I was in a DBT comprehensive clinic, and that means that we offered mostly weekly therapy. We also did groups where we taught skills, and we did phone coaching. So, so people had access to like the way DBT is supposed to be done, and it was hard work. And it was again, you know, people who come to comprehensive DBT often their lives are in crisis. They're not in a great place. It's not something that you can just ease into, really. And so much of the mindfulness aspect of DBT is really built on Buddhism. And I think Marsha Linehan did a good job of secularizing the approach to it and and not making it like you have to accept this these religious ideas to be able to practice this, and so like the present moment really connects to those five remembrances in that yes she will grow old and yes, she, she, my dog will die, and she will suffer. But in this exact moment, she is okay, and we like we are here together. And I do things too, like I there are mindfulness activities that I practice with my pets that are really helpful. And sometimes I do that stuff with her when these things are on my mind, and I'm feeling really heavy about them because it's also a way to kind of motivate yourself. If you are a person who experiences anxiety about your pet or a lot of anticipatory grief, particularly if you have a complicated medically, medically or behaviorally complicated pet, anticipatory grief is like your bread and butter. It's all over the place, and so being able to not get rid of that grief, not deny that grief, but to set that aside for a moment and be able to sit with your pet in this moment where everything is okay gives you a little bit of breathing room, hopefully, or like, kind of the gift of the present. I think about it; it helps you not squander the time that you have. Also, without putting a lot of pressure on yourself to do that, because it's super easy to do that and to make yourself feel bad about the things you've missed, as opposed to just being in the present moment. Because those moments you've missed, you can't get back. And fretting over those, and worrying over those, and feeling guilty over those is not going to be helpful. Nor do you know how much time you really do have left. And trying to bank on that or trying to figure out what that is is not going to be helpful either. All you have is a present moment where you are there with the creature you love, and in whatever context that is. But those present moments always exist.

Colleen Pelar (21:51): Yeah, present moments are so important.

Jamie Thompson (21:54): Yeah, and it's hard.

Colleen Pelar (21:56): So the present moment piece is something that comes up in coaching calls a lot. Yeah, to really like have this awareness of that things can be hard right now, and also there's still some good here. There's still something of value. There's something here, and I was sort of caught when you said that that using these two, the growing old and the dying, allows you to be a little bit more in the grief, which I think you said was more real and more accurate, and that also gave you less anxiety. I think that's really, really powerful because we run from grief, and yet it's always here. There's there's grief in so many things, so many things. It's a normal part of experience, but we kind of stick our toe in and go, "Whoa, no! Yeah, and so tell me a little bit about that. I mean, grief is something that obviously it's a part of the work that I have with with the

Jamie Thompson (23:00): clients that I work with, both individually and any kind of work, I partner with Sam Griffin of Wise Whiskers Training, and we often do like lunch and learns and trainings for vet practices and things like that. And this even comes up within those trainings that grief is going like if you have not experienced that yet, you are going to. It is another thing that we. It's part of the suffering that we all experience. It is, and I think that there is. I again, I'm. My context is mental health, and so this might look a little different for different people. I feel like currently we are at a really great place where we are talking more about grief and acknowledging that more often, and acknowledging that grief exists for more than just death. That I am a person that lives with multiple chronic illnesses. You better believe I have experienced some grief in my life of what I expected 42 to look like versus what it does look like now. And I know I am not alone in that particular experience of grief. I think that a lot of us are looking at the world around us in general right now and grieving what we had hoped for—our lives, or our children's lives, or our pets' lives, or whatever. This is not what we had hoped for at this time, and and I think that the experience of grief with regards to pet ownership and guardianship and caretaking is almost always it almost always presents exactly the same with the people that I work with, individual clients that I see because I I have like long term therapy clients that I see for a consistent period of time, but then I also will often see clients for maybe one or two sessions post euthanasia to give just a little bit of support to help them transition, and those conversations are almost always entirely about grief because it's so new and people aren't sure what to do with it, but they also can't set it aside because it's too fresh, and and it's hard that the answer to this is really just that you have to feel it, you have to let yourself hurt and let yourself be profoundly sad, and to feel the loneliness, and to feel the sadness, and and to know that that isn't going to kill you, and to know that it won't always feel this acute necessarily. But the interesting thing to me is that the way this guilt and this this grief really manifests after a pet's death. When I'm working with somebody across the board, guilt and shame thoughts show up exactly the same. People worry that they didn't do enough. They worry that they gave up too soon. They worry that, or they worry that they gave up too late. There's could still concerns about timing, right? They worry that if they had just waited another three days, maybe the medication would have kicked in and things could have been different. All of these things consistently, regardless of circumstances around the pet's death, regardless of circumstances around the decision making, regardless of if this person has employed three different vets—a behavior consultant and a trainer—versus who didn't have the financial capacity to do all that, the grief still and guilt still manifests as the same, and I think that it it often I visibly see people relax often whenever we're talking about this right after their pet has died, and they're sharing these things, and I'm able to say to them, one every person who I've spoken to in your situation has shared the exact same thoughts. What do you think the likelihood is that every single person I've seen has failed their pet and has not done enough and has struggled in these like so? There is some amount of like everybody has experienced this, but that also then goes back to the common humanity in all of us, right? We all worry about the same things, and the love and the grief we carry manifests as this guilt and this shame. And in reality, I would say none, none of the clients that I have worked with have guilt thoughts or shame thoughts that I think fit the situation or or are accurate. That like, no, you really didn't try hard enough, or no, you really didn't do enough, or like, oh, you really did wait too long. Never are those thoughts accurate with the people that I'm working with. But it's it is helpful to know every person who has been on the other side of my screen has felt the same way, and that you are not alone in those worry thoughts, and that over time, those worry thoughts will fade, and you you will not grief won't show up with guilt and shame forever. Eventually, grief will be just grief, and it still sucks, and it's still hard, and it still isn't enjoyable. But the grief can just represent the purity of love that you had in that relationship, and yeah, I think that that's so helpful and so important, but like so profound that everybody it manifests the same in everybody I've worked with.

Colleen Pelar (28:46): It's very very interesting. Thank you. I'm wondering, can you go back to the the five

Jamie Thompson (28:53): remembrances?

Colleen Pelar (28:54): Remembrances. I would even the word remembrance. I can't remember remembrance. Could you read number four again.

Jamie Thompson (29:02): Yes, number four is about change. All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature to change, and there is no way to escape being separated from them.

Colleen Pelar (29:19): Bingo, right there. That's what you were just talking about. That whole piece of the anticipatory grief goes there. The guilt and the shame afterwards falls in. Like it's all in there. Yeah. And

Jamie Thompson (29:38): these things are not. These things are remembrances because they are universal, right? These are these are very much universal experiences, and I have a friend who told me, I think this is a song quote that I just don't know, but she had told me that once you have experienced one grief, you have experienced all grief, and there's something about that that also very much shows up in my work. And this is also a metaphor we use in dialectical behavior therapy too: that emotions are like a filing cabinet. That once you are experiencing an emotion, anxiety, grief, sadness, whatever your brain opens this filing cabinet drawer and starts looking through all the other times you felt that emotion. It's the emotion that connects these memories, and so if you are, I will sometimes see pictures of Cash in my kitchen, or have a memory, or find the list that I made on my phone of all of the silly things he did that I couldn't get pictures of before he died. I'll find these things, and I'll I'll be sad, and I'll be in the middle of grief, and then I am thinking about my grandmother and my partner's parents who have already passed, and all of this other grief that I have experienced, and if you don't know that that's how your brain works—that emotion connects these memories—you might be very surprised by that, or really confused about why can't I just be sad about my dog? Why can't I just be sad about my cat? Why am I? Why does it have to be all of this? And it's like that because it's all the same emotion. It's all the same grief, and I also like to use that to help people understand that it is not just a dog or just a cat that you have lost. Often, if you feel more upset about the loss of your cat than you did about your parent, there are reasons for that. There's like actual behavioral reasons for that. That cat was a part of your everyday life. You saw them constantly. The relationship you had with them was probably not nearly as conflicted as the one that you had with your mom. Like there are clear reasons that aren't you just loved your cat more, or you didn't care about your mom, or you're somehow broken as a person. Like those are not the reasons. The reasons are behaviorally it makes sense, and you know that's what that

Colleen Pelar (32:11): is. I I put a little bit about that. I wrote a book a million years ago called Living with Kids and Dogs, and there was there was a chapter about you know when the dog is no longer part of your family, and that could either be for rehoming reasons or for end of life reasons.

Jamie Thompson (32:39): Yeah,

Colleen Pelar (32:39): and that your child may experience the grief of losing this pet for all those exact reasons, as you know, more profound as some of the people reasons.

Jamie Thompson (32:39): Yeah,

Colleen Pelar (32:39): some of the people losses and your child may not have experienced any people losses.

Jamie Thompson (32:46): Yeah,

Colleen Pelar (32:47): so that this may be the first encounter with death.

Jamie Thompson (32:46): Yeah,

Colleen Pelar (32:47): and it's really interesting just how we sometimes miss the role that animals can play in that in that day to day normalness. I mean, I I went through a period this year without a dog that was awful, and I told my husband like, like I just don't know what to do because the dog had always provided such structure my day. Yeah, now you're supposed to walk. Now you're supposed to go outside. Now you're supposed to feed somebody. Now you're supposed to, you know, you can't just lay in bed because somebody's waiting to go out. Yep, like oh, nobody's waiting to go out. Oh, oh, yep.

Jamie Thompson (33:24): You

Colleen Pelar (33:24): know all those things. Like I didn't take as good care of me.

Jamie Thompson (33:30): Yes,

Colleen Pelar (33:30): because I wasn't taking care of someone else. Yeah, which does not mean I fell apart and didn't take care of myself at all. But it was really interesting to see how much I structured my life

Jamie Thompson (33:43): around caring. Yeah,

Colleen Pelar (33:44): and and recently I have dogs again, and I it just it feels better. Like I wake up thinking like, oh, I have to get up quick because need to get the dogs out. I have to do this because I need to. Yeah, that's a

Speaker 5 (33:58): there's

Colleen Pelar (33:58): an element right there.

Jamie Thompson (34:00): Yes, the relationship is important to you, and just the structure required is helpful for people's mental health as well. Yeah, one of the first things I one of the things I tell people usually in the first session that I have post passing of their pet is create a new routine for yourself as quickly as you can, even if it looks completely different than what the old one did, that's fine. You don't have a pet now demanding to be fed twice a day, like you. All the things that you just described, you're going to be laying in bed and think, I don't need to get up for another two hours. Maybe I'll just lay here and doom scroll for two hours. And like, if you can create a structure for yourself post loss, that can be so helpful, and it is so hard to do. It's it feels often like you're pulling yourself through mud to be able to do this, and yeah, asking somebody who is in the midst of grief to like create this. For yourself is rough, but it is useful.

Colleen Pelar (35:03): Yeah,

Jamie Thompson (35:04): yeah. I

Colleen Pelar (35:04): want to change tracks here for a minute because I just remembered that you said that the Thich Nhat Hanh quote was your second choice quote. So, what was the one that you thought about sharing and then didn't?

Jamie Thompson (35:19): Oh, it was the five remembrances, and it's pretty. I I worry about throwing out there when nobody knows anything else about me, and all they see is like, "Here's this therapist who's saying everybody is going to grow old and die and suffer.

Colleen Pelar (35:33): Okay,

Speaker 6 (35:34): like it just seems she has no fun at

Colleen Pelar (35:35): all. She's just dark, dark, dark.

Jamie Thompson (35:38): Yeah. Okay. Yeah, that I I feel like that unless you're a Buddhist, I feel like that it helps to have a little bit of context around the five remembrances. Fair,

Colleen Pelar (35:53): fair. Okay. So, if I had a magic wand and you could use it to give all pet professionals a wish or a blessing or something that you are going to to magically change for us. What what would you be giving?

Jamie Thompson (36:12): And there's no limit to what this magic wand can do. No, it's magic. I think I would impart the knowledge and understanding and belief that human welfare and animal welfare are intricately tied together. To all vets, people, professionals, pet pro professionals, everybody gets that belief and knowledge that that is the case. Because frankly, that would solve a lot of problems, or at least it would put people in a place to solve them. It would it would give people the understanding that there are even problems to be solved that I think a lot of of folks don't see now or don't understand that those things are very much tied together.

Colleen Pelar (37:01): Those are very much tied together. Yeah, yeah. I've been running support groups the past year and a half for animal welfare professionals and and volunteers. And one of the ideas that was brought up in one of the groups that really stuck with me is that we don't consider animal welfare workers as first responders, and yet so often they're part of a first responder team.

Jamie Thompson (37:26): Yes,

Colleen Pelar (37:27): and and yeah, like

Speaker 2 (37:29): like

Colleen Pelar (37:29): I hadn't I hadn't thought specifically about that until it was brought up, and then when the people were talking about that, it becomes a real issue for the people who are doing the work. Yes, when

Jamie Thompson (37:40): yeah when

Colleen Pelar (37:41): they aren't considered that, yeah. Even though they're being asked to do everything, first responders being asked to do, they don't have the the finances, the support, the recognition, all of the things that make their jobs a little bit easier.

Jamie Thompson (37:54): Yeah. And let's even recognize that not all human first responders working with humans get acceptable recognition, or like, like I think of EMS workers and how little they're paid and how hard they work and stuff like that. But again, it's tied together. Where when we can't even appropriately honor human first responders, we're clearly not going to give animal first responders or like that kind of work, the proper do that it deserves. One of the things I talk about with the work that Sam and I do in vet clinics, I always refer to them as like medical workers. You the the stuff you do in a clinic, I've worked in hospitals, like I've seen what this looks like. It looks exactly like a human hospital. Like you are dealing with crises, you are dealing with emergencies, and with all of the emotions that

Colleen Pelar (38:46): go with it,

Jamie Thompson (38:47): right? And with patients that communicate with you, so or at least not in a super clear way. They can't tell you where they hurt. They can't tell you what's wrong with them. No, the things that that vet techs and veterinarians, and I'm sure also within shelters are it's the same experience. Like absolutely, you are daily exposed to some kind of trauma, and you don't get really any recognition of that or support for that or training to deal with that.

Colleen Pelar (38:46): Yeah,

Jamie Thompson (38:46): or training with how to deal with that, yeah. It's it's like there's a little bit of understanding. There is a recognition that suicide rates are high with vets, with veterinarians, and we should do something about that. Okay, that doesn't include like vet techs that frankly make so little money they also don't have access to mental health support because they don't make enough to pay for it, and all of the people who, like the admin that work in those buildings that are still exposed to some of these same things that also don't get that support. Like, yeah, it's Sam and I have done a lot of work around training, with regards to trauma versus like PTSD and post traumatic stress disorder, because people can experience trauma and have behavioral changes as a result of that trauma, all of which are are too low level to be considered like an actual mental health diagnosis, and you can still have significant difficulties and impacts on your life, while still not feeling like you need to access necessarily a therapist or a psychiatrist or anything. And yeah, that this stuff for animal welfare workers largely goes unnoticed. And I, again, it's a human welfare and an animal welfare thing that a lot of folks in these positions can't access the mental health support they need, or they're like a lot of the support they get is peer support with other folks who are doing the same work that they are, who are just as burnout and have exactly the same problems. And yeah, it that kind of support is necessary and helpful, and if that's the only kind of support you get, man, it's easy to be hopeless really quick. And burnout is, of course, a problem in these positions. Yeah, it's it to me is equivalent work. When I've been in a hospital versus an animal clinic, man, it's the same level of crisis. It's the same level of difficulty and emotions, and yeah, you as an animal professional of some kind never got training on how to deal with humans' intense emotions. Never got trained on what that means or how to respond or like how to deescalate any of that, and that kind of stuff comes up just as much, probably more, in a vet's office than it does within a hospital. And yeah, it's

Colleen Pelar (41:49): yeah, and I think in in all of the pet pro areas. So if you're trying to leave your pet under the care of a pet sitter, yeah, like this is one of my most valuable relationships.

Jamie Thompson (42:02): Yeah,

Colleen Pelar (42:04): don't do anything wrong. Don't do anything wrong.

Jamie Thompson (42:07): Yeah,

Colleen Pelar (42:07): and I don't know what that means exactly, but I'll know if there are effects. You know, like so that whole level of that, and for trainers too, that people are are calling, just so worried.

Jamie Thompson (42:19): Yeah,

Colleen Pelar (42:19): and wanting to be able to support their animal, but not knowing how. And then the trainer is like the animal piece. I I know how to work with, and the

Jamie Thompson (42:28): yeah the

Colleen Pelar (42:30): your anxiety piece I don't know how to address it quite as much, or any of those pieces. Like it ripples all the way through all of the professions, and so yeah, you know the the animal welfare and the veterinary sides of it are super important, but it's everywhere. It's it's all over the place.

Jamie Thompson (42:47): Yeah.

Colleen Pelar (42:47): And anyone who's doing any of these roles knows. I mean, they're all

Jamie Thompson (42:51): yeah

Colleen Pelar (42:51): like yeah. Well,

Jamie Thompson (42:52): they're living it. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Colleen Pelar (42:55): So just want to kind of circle back to that piece because I don't want anyone to think that we're leaving them out because oh,

Jamie Thompson (43:00): absolutely not! No,

Colleen Pelar (43:01): not

Jamie Thompson (43:02): yeah, yeah,

Colleen Pelar (43:03): definitely not.

Jamie Thompson (43:04): Yeah, these are the things I I talk about and mention are things that I have seen face to face or like actually been involved in. But certainly, this includes anybody in any kind of like I had a trainer one time who mentioned to me since I've been specializing in this, that like part of how I, as a mental health professional, can be helpful to trainers or to vets or to behavior consultants or to dog walkers or anybody pet sitters is helping them be able to have more intentional and positive communication with the humans in the situation because it's kind of like business training. Whenever you suddenly are trying to start your own business, most people who are doing this work didn't get trained on how to interact with humans and didn't get trained on how to like assess what's going on with them. And man, you're still very much your work is impacted by it. It's so I I had a trainer once kind of recount to me not the specific situation, but just how awkward it can be to like be in a training situation where you're maybe working with a couple owner of an animal, and there's disagreement or conflict between those two, and like you are, you can feel it because you're there and you're a person, so you notice it. But you are not trained in how to respond to that, not trained in how to navigate yourself out of that situation, not trained in how to figure out if we can come together and move forward, or if this is like the end of it. None of that stuff is stuff that anybody gets taught how to do that is put in that situation, and there are people who are naturally skilled at it. That's great, but if you're not one of those people, man, that has a significant impact. And it isn't really about you or the pet that you're supposed to be training or working with or babysitting or whatever.

Colleen Pelar (45:00): Yeah, yeah, it's amazingly tricky, and

Jamie Thompson (45:05): I think I keep coming back to like knowledge in general is what I would impart with a magic wand is just the knowledge and understanding of anything that pet professionals need to do their job better. Okay,

Colleen Pelar (45:18): we'll take it. So, if people wanted to learn more about you and your work, Jamie, how could they do that?

Jamie Thompson (45:23): I have a website. It's growandconnecttherapy.com, and I talk a little bit about the other specializations that I have. But I certainly have a little bit of information about my my niche with behavioral and medically complex pets. You can reach out through there. I have a contact page on there. I have a Facebook and an Instagram that are both Grow and Connect Therapy. My name is Jamie L. Thompson, is the professional name that I work under, and so they could find me on Instagram or Facebook there. I don't really do a whole lot on social media. I don't have a lot of personal social media, so don't expect to see a ton there. So, just those are my socials,

Colleen Pelar (46:07): and I will link up everything in the show notes so that people can just click on the links and and go from there. It has been such a pleasure talking with you today, Jamie.

Jamie Thompson (46:16): Yeah, it's such a great time talking to you as well. It's been wonderful to meet you.

Colleen Pelar (46:20): That's our conversation for today. If something we talked about resonated, I invite you to sit with it. Notice what feels true and what you want to explore further. You don't have to have it all figured out to start moving toward what matters. Whatever showed up for you today—clarity, questions, even resistance—trust that it's pointing you towards something important. For more support, join my weekly notes at colleenpelar.com. And until next time, remember, you are enough, always, just as you are.