Buffalo a Metaphor For Emotional Resilience

by Dan Oakes MEd LPC

Why There's a Buffalo on My Desk

People notice them pretty quickly.

There's a large one behind me when I'm on video calls. A few smaller ones around the office — a statue here, an image there. And eventually, almost everyone asks. What's with all the buffalos, Dan?

I always pause a little before I answer. Not because it's a secret. Because it's personal in a way that still catches me off guard sometimes.  (see my video on this topic) 

My dad used to call me Buffalo.

I was a short, round kid — no neck to speak of — and my dad was six-four with hands like a polar bear. We'd wrestle and rough house constantly, and I could never win. Couldn't even make a dent. Until one day I figured out that if I lowered my head and drove it straight into his chest, I could knock the wind out of him.

He'd grab me, laughing, catching his breath, and say — you're such a buffalo. You're such a buffalo.

And it stuck. All the way into my adult years, he'd put his arm around me and say, Hey Buffalo. How you doing. What started as a nickname became something else entirely. A term of endearment. A language between us.

I even have a small stone buffalo I take with me when I have to give a big presentation — something that makes me nervous. Having it in my pocket feels a little like having him in the room.

My dad was a blue collar guy his whole life. Electrician work for the power company. Rough around the edges in some ways, but he knew how to love. He really did.

I remember one time when I was a kid, the neighbor boys were over — the boys were, playing with my older brothers. My dad came in and said, You neighbor boys, get home. And they scattered. Then he turned to me. You. Neighbor boy. Get home.

And I said, No — I'm an Oakes. I live here.

No you dont. Get home. He said.

He'd push it just far enough. I'd work myself into a frenzy, right up to the edge of tears, ready to bubble over — and then that big hand would reach out and pull me in close and he said, to my great relief, "I know who you are. You belong to me."  And then he just hugged me and held me.

Nine kids. A lifetime of hard work. And he still found a way to make each of us feel known.

That's the emotional story behind the buffalos. But there's a clinical one too.

There's an old story — I've heard it described as Native American in origin — about how buffalos respond to a storm differently than cattle do.

A cow, sensing a storm coming, runs away from it. Which sounds reasonable. Except the storm moves too, and the cow ends up running alongside it, caught in it longer, exhausted by it.

A buffalo does something different. A buffalo turns and runs into the storm. Straight through it. And because of that, the buffalo minimizes the time spent in the worst of it.

I love that image. I've thought about it a lot over the years, both personally and clinically.

Because the research is actually very clear on this. Avoidance — running from what's hard, what's painful, what's uncomfortable — tends to increase anxiety and depression over time. It makes the storm bigger. It makes it last longer. What we run from has a way of following us.

Engagement — turning toward the difficulty, pushing through rather than around — does something different in us. It builds something. A kind of earned confidence that you can't get any other way. The knowledge, in your body and not just your head, that you've been in hard places before and you're still here.

That's what we try to build at Arizona Family Institute. Not a life without difficulty — that's not available to any of us. But the tenacity, the sense of self, the emotional resilience to do hard things anyway.

My dad was the first person who showed me what that looked like. A man who worked hard his whole life, loved his family without making a production of it, and taught me — mostly without words — that difficulty wasn't something to escape. It was something to walk into with your head down.

Just like a buffalo.

Every time I look at the one on my desk, I remember that. And I remember him.

That's why they're there.

At Arizona Family Institute, resilience isn't just a concept we talk about — it's the foundation of how we work. If you're ready to stop running from the storm, we'd love to walk with you.