Kelly Decker

I have to say that it's really two-part. One is I have always been absolutely curious about the world. My curiosity has led me to this degree, which I call my encore career, because I'm just about to turn 53 in May. I'm endlessly curious about the world - my education starts with my undergraduate degree in Anthropology and East Asian Studies with a minor in Japanese, I'm fluent in Japanese and lived in Japan for many years, I worked at the Embassy of Japan in Washington, D.C. I think that curiosity creates pathways for success. But curiosity unharnessed can be a little bit problematic, so the thing that I've also been able to do is learn something and apply myself to something, and I have a beginning and kind of an end, and I really do go through each step. That's why I have multiple degrees, because I'm endlessly curious. I start, I finish what I start. And I think that just that curiosity and that ability to finish things, but also see how they coalesce and sort of work together, is where I'm at. Having worked in the space of environmental education and multicultural landscape like Los Angeles, and understanding people from different cultures, and then now understanding the mental health needs of our society, it really helps bridge that and create a space where we can address all of those things together.

The most important advice and mentorship I've had came from my mentor, Ruth Beaglehole, who passed about 2 years ago. She taught me the process and the language called Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg, which is a movement of the way we learn and communicate feelings and needs to each other. I learned from her when I was an executive director, before I formally trained to become a therapist, and that experience also had something to do with why I became a therapist. She taught me the language of empathy to use within my career, with my staff, with our participants, and to really see that where people struggle is in direct relationship to unmet needs. By taking that language of empathy and applying it both to my own career and into my personal life, I've really been able to understand that when I'm struggling, it's usually about an unmet need, and I now have the tools and language to be able to see what that's about, to get curious about that, and reserve judgment. I've learned to observe and not have judgments and not have stories about things. It's surprising how much judgment we hold, even in our words and in the ways that we speak to ourselves. Learning how to be empathetic and taking it at face value, that everybody's pretty much doing the best they can with the tools that they have. When you have a staff person falling short, we don't think of it as 'hey, you're falling short.' We think, 'hmm, do you have an unmet need? Let me get curious about this. Let me remove judgment.' Being able to be empathetic and understand that if this person might have a different tool, they might be in a different situation, so it's really about everybody doing the best they can with the tools that they have.

I really can't emphasize enough how important it is to learn Nonviolent Communication. I have a whole program in my practice that's around teaching and learning nonviolent communication. I really think that that is one of the most important skills. For anybody wanting to get into this space of conservation, mental health, environmental education, stewardship, and ecopsychology, it's really starting with learning that empathy-based language. It's really incredible and can be applied across a lot of different industries.

There are really two main challenges in my field right now. The first is that everybody thinks they understand emotional support animals, but there's actually three categories: social support animals, therapy animals, and service animals, which are mostly dogs. People really don't understand this, and I'm actually considered among my peers as a subject matter expert in this landscape. I'm constantly educating people around the pitfalls that therapists can unknowingly get themselves into with very serious legal consequences if they write ESA letters. I recommend that people go to actual medical doctors who have bigger liability policies than we do. That's a big challenge in the space of ecotherapy and using animals in therapy - getting people to understand the nuances around service animals, emotional support animals, and therapy animals. The second challenge is that there really aren't any spaces using farm animals for therapy. There's maybe one in New Hampshire, one in North Carolina. The equine-assisted therapy space is pretty well established with research to support it, but horses can be intimidating to some people. Where does that leave you if you don't want to work with horses but you would love to sit with chickens? Chickens can be amazingly therapeutic. Doing ecotherapy and animal-assisted programs with animals other than horses and dogs really hasn't been done yet, and that includes research. We have to start opening up the research into that sphere. I have a degree in zoology, and there's really not many therapists who have both a degree in zoology and are licensed clinical counselors.

One of the biggest values is learning how to be more gentle with yourself and others. The world will do enough of that stuff for you - you don't need to do it to yourself. Understanding where you need care and nurturing, and being able to accurately describe your feelings, which a lot of people don't really know how to do. We need help figuring that out because we don't spend enough time on that in this society. Being able to accurately describe what you're feeling, how you're feeling, and not just in your mind and your emotions, but your body too. And then being able to ascribe what you need as a result, and then being able to get that need. That's a really big value. Another important value is being able to give back and create access - it's more than just giving back, it's about creating access. That's something that's really important. I've always been a volunteer when I can.