From Burnout to Breakthrough: Using Animal Assisted Therapy in Speech Therapy with Sharlet Lee Jensen

Mar 5

There's a child on Sharlet Jensen's caseload who had been fired by other therapists. His anxiety was so severe, his mom was bracing for a placement in a classroom for kids with emotional and behavioral disorders. For months, Sharlet worked with him. She's stubborn, she'll tell you that herself, and she wasn't ready to pass him off to someone else.

Then she brought her dog.

He walked in excited. He sat on the floor. The dog put her head in his lap. And for the first time, Sharlet got to have a calm conversation with him. That moment changed everything, not just for that child, but for the direction Sharlet's entire career would take.

I sat down with Sharlet on a recent episode of The ScaleSmart Podcast, and what unfolded was one of the most honest conversations I've had about burnout, reinvention, and what it actually looks like to turn a clinical passion into a body of work you're genuinely proud of.

From Burnout to Breakthrough

Sharlet is a speech-language pathologist with a solo private practice. About six years ago, she started incorporating therapy dogs into her sessions. She'll be the first to admit she jumped in without really knowing what she was doing. She made mistakes. She put her dog in situations she shouldn't have. And then she got curious enough to go deep on animal psychology, stress signals, and how to actually do this safely.

What she found on the other side wasn't just a new clinical tool. It was joy. The burnout that had been quietly building started to lift. The kids who were hardest to reach started showing up differently. And Sharlet realized that this work, animal assisted speech-language pathology, was something most therapists had never even considered as a possibility.

So she decided to change that.

Writing the Book Nobody Else Would Write

When Sharlet started looking for resources to share with other SLPs interested in animal assisted therapy, she found that the information was fragmented and hard to find. Everyone doing this work was essentially their own island, figuring things out alone. She reached out to others in the space who said, yeah, somebody should write a book about this. But nobody wanted to do it.

So she did.

She sent her manuscript to eight publishers. All eight said no. Some rejections were thoughtful. One clearly hadn't even read the proposal. The sticking point for most was the evidence base, animal assisted therapy doesn't exist as a standalone intervention, it layers on top of traditional techniques, and the specific research in speech-language pathology is still growing. Sharlet kept going anyway.

When she stumbled across ASHA Press, a relatively new offshoot of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, she sent her manuscript and got back a response so full of feedback she thought it was a rejection. She set it aside. A month later, the editor emailed her asking why she hadn't responded. They were interested.

The book that came out of that process, Paws for Progress, is something Sharlet is genuinely proud of. Working with editors from ASHA meant the manuscript went through layers of scrutiny she never could have replicated on her own, including a multicultural considerations section she hadn't thought to include, ethics review, and an SLP going through the content line by line. By the end, they were having full discussions about whether to use gender pronouns for her dogs.

Knowing everything she knows now, would she do it again? Absolutely, she said.

What It Actually Takes to Bring a Therapy Animal Into Your Practice

A question I get from clinicians who hear about this work is some version of: can I just bring my dog in? The honest answer is that it depends, and there's a lot to consider before you do.

Sharlet says the most important starting point is really knowing your animal. Not just whether your dog is friendly, but how they communicate when they're stressed, what their body language looks like when they need a break, and whether they genuinely thrive in those interactions or are simply tolerating them. There's no such thing as a dog that won't bite if you push them hard enough. Knowing your animal's signals isn't optional.

Beyond that, she talks about the importance of informed consent with families, starting with clients who are able to follow directions before introducing the animal, and making sure your environment gives the animal a way to disengage if they want to. The Association of Animal Assisted Intervention Professionals is a resource she recommends, both for education and for the liability insurance pathways it opens up.

And if you don't have an appropriate animal to bring in, that doesn't close the door. Sharlet describes what she calls the diamond model, where a certified volunteer therapy animal handler team comes in alongside you. Alternatively, animal related engagement, using photos, materials, or even homework built around the client's own pets, can create that same connection without any animal physically present in the room.

From Book to Course to YouTube: Building Something That Lasts

When Sharlet came into my world a couple of years ago, she had a book in progress with a publisher, zero social media presence, no website, and no idea how to create a YouTube channel. She's an extreme introvert by her own description, which, as she put it, goes a long way toward explaining why she'd avoided an online presence for so long.

What followed was a lot of persistence, a lot of note-taking when something finally worked, and a willingness to sit with the discomfort of learning things that didn't come naturally. She's now past 50 articles on her blog, has a YouTube channel, and recently completed a seven and a half hour signature course called Talk to the Paw.

Her decision to build a comprehensive course rather than starting small was deliberate. For this particular topic, she felt strongly that people needed to understand the full picture, including the foundational safety information, before stepping into the work. She set a public deadline for herself and built it anyway, even through the moments when she was sure she wouldn't finish.

The results she sees from that course are the kind you hope for. Therapists who come in uncertain leave with the knowledge and confidence to actually try something new in their practice.

What This Has to Do With You

Not everyone is going to bring a dog to work. But Sharlet's story isn't really about therapy animals. It's about what happens when a clinician stops accepting the limits of how things have always been done and gets curious about something different.

She found an approach that made her job more joyful. She built a way to share it with others. She sat with eight rejections, a steep technology learning curve, and the very real discomfort of putting herself out there in a field where no one had really gone before. And she kept going.

That kind of persistence is something every private practice owner understands. The circumstances look different for all of us, but the feeling of being on the edge of something that matters, and not being totally sure how to get there, is familiar territory.