Three Reasons Equine-Assisted Therapy is Effective

During a session of Equine-Assisted Therapy (EAT), your daughter will work one-on-one with a therapist, a trained horse professional, and a horse. As part of the sessions, she may take part in grooming, feeding, haltering, or riding the horse. While these activities may seem recreational, they have enormous therapeutic benefit.

Helping to Develop Social Skills

Horses are naturally intuitive and social animals. Because horses are prey animals, horses tend to observe and react strongly to the people around them. For the horse, being aware of people’s feelings is a matter of survival. Therefore, when someone is angry, afraid, or holding back their emotions, the horse will sense that and react. Horses react negatively to aggressiveness, hostility, or coldness. A horse may react to a person with a negative attitude by shying away from the person or stubbornly refusing to follow the person’s commands.

While your daughter may try to hide her emotions, the horse that your daughter works with will not. Instead, the horse will provide a mirror for your daughter’s emotional experiences. With the help of the horse professional and therapist, seeing her feelings reflected in the horse’s behavior will help your daughter to better understand her own behavior. Because horses respond positively to appropriately assertive behavior, working with the horse can help your daughter to practice these behaviors. She will learn the difference between assertiveness and aggressiveness.

Enabling People to Open Up

Many people who struggle to form relationships with other people are able to let down their guard around animals. Unlike human beings, horses have no preconceived notions about people. Your daughter will be more likely to open up emotionally and express her inner feelings and thoughts. This emotional openness is invaluable to the horse professional and therapist who will treat your daughter. When emotional barriers are removed, therapy is most effective.

Providing Immediate Therapeutic Responses

Compared to a traditional therapy setting where your daughter might meet with her therapist once a week in an office, EAT tends to produce more immediate results. In part, this is due to the experiential nature of the therapy.

While your daughter may be able to remain composed during a traditional therapy session, an EAT session allows the therapist to see your daughter in a novel setting where your daughter must adapt to unique challenges and use problem-solving skills. In this environment, it is easier for the therapist and horse professional to see “the real her”. They will be able to identify patterns of behavior that are holding your daughter back from reaching her full potential. In addition, the therapist and horse professional have the opportunity to point out these behavioral patterns as they occur, rather than waiting to reflect on them at a later date.

EAT is a unique and effective form of therapy. EAT has made valuable contributions in helping people with a variety of different mental health challenges to gain social skills. In addition, EAT can help people in making them more open and ready to accept therapeutic change. Because of the unique in-the-moment nature of EAT, this form of therapy also tends to provide results more quickly than other forms of therapy.