On Becoming an Adoption Therapist: Why I Work With a Dog

My first experience with using an animal in my work was years ago, in an institutional orphanage in the outskirts of Beijing. I was merely a teaching assistant, tasked with preparing a few children for the upcoming adoptions to America. My supervisor wished for us to focus on their English skills, but I was captivated by the children’s future emotional health. I tried to picture these kids with the families in the photographs we had been gifted by the agency. Most of the pictures featured a large family with smiling beautiful kids and parents, as well as, inevitably, a giant dog.

I knew that preparing these children for the world of experiences that lay ahead of them was well outside my competency. But I knew I could prepare them for living with a dog.

You see, the orphanage was walled off from the outside. The children, and especially children with disabilities, rarely left the premises. No animals ever came inside the facility.

I started with a bunny. I confidently brought in the cage and plopped it in the corner of the orphanage schoolroom. Realization of a foreign being rippled through the room. While a handful of children charged the cage, most retreated in a panic as far away as they could get in that one-room classroom. Some couldn’t walk without assistance, so they scrambled haphazardly on the floor to get away. I will never forget the terror I accidently inflicted on those students. I was stunned and humbled. I took the bunny outside while the Chinese staff shot me disapproving looks and tried to reestablish calm in their classroom.

I had not yet learned the concept of systematic desensitization. Later, when I had the honor of working as an in-house therapist in a large foster home in Shanghai, I was armed with a graduate degree and a searing memory of the bunny incident. This time, I had a plan.

On my third day of work, I showed up with the fuzziest, quietest, most docile animal I find to rescue in Shanghai. This dog, Xiao Mi (little grain of rice), was the 8th dog I had “interviewed” from the expats that picked up street dogs and tried to find them homes. I left Xiao Mi in his cage outside the window of the orphanage.

The children, who had already accepted me as their new “teacher,” eagerly gaped through the barred windows at the dog behind his own metal slates. They were a bit scared, but they felt safe enough. We spent the day like this, moving on to other things. Every once in a while, the children would ask, “Is the dog still outside?” “Yes,” I would reply, “He will always be with me. Tomorrow he will be in the doorway.”

And so it was. One day at a time, I moved the dog closer to the kids. We systematically built up their tolerance for his presence and managed their phobias. We never moved Xiao Mi closer until all the children felt safe enough. After Xiao mi (with the patience of a true emotional support animal) had spent a full workweek inching towards the therapy playroom, some kids were sticking their fingers inside the cage to kisses. It was time to let him out.

We still had some tears and screams during this methodical process, but Xiao Mi eventually became a mainstay in the foster home. In fact, when I repatriated to America the following summer, many of the kids bluntly told me they would miss the dog the most.

Besides helping the children conquer their phobias of animals, Xiao Mi was a soft surface for comfort, a calming energy, and a welcome distraction from a therapist trying to get them to talk about their darkest feelings. One child traced under Xiao Mi’s eyes and told me we couldn’t talk anymore because Xiao Mi was crying. “When you are crying, you need to stop talking,” she told me. Non-verbal children used Xiao Mi for sensory stimulation, while the verbal kids often looked into his eyes while they shared rather than mine.

A year later, when I was already working back in the States, I visited one of the foster home’s former residents in the children’s hospital. She looked up at my face with only vague recognition. I was going to reintroduce myself when she suddenly smiled and demanded, “Xiaomi zai nar?” Where is Xiao Mi?

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