Soulful Equine Assisted Therapy – Josephine Sellers
‘There is something about the outside of a horse that is good for the inside of a man.’ –
Winston Churchill.
Although now retired from practising as a Transpersonal Counsellor – a Soulful approach to therapy – for several years prior I worked some of my clients in partnership with my small herd of four horses.
There has undoubtedly been an upsurge in recent years in the use of horses worldwide in Equine Assisted Therapy. Over time I have seen examples of horses being abused for this purpose. Possibly not intentionally by those who set out to work humans with horses, but through lack of understanding, on the part of the facilitators and trainers also, of the high sensitivity of horses. Horses deserve our utmost respect, for horses are in touch with profound abilities that we humans, in most cases, have long forgotten are still available to us. It is these dormant abilities that horses seek to put us in touch with again and this is their gift to humanity, especially in a time when many speak about feeling totally at a loss about the purpose of their lives. People speak of feeling as if something is missing and the search for this missing inner peace leads to an external search for meaning. Dangerous diversions then have an opportunity to take a grip by way of addictions. The gift the horse offers is to help us to be put in touch with our authentic selves, so that we learn to relate to our true selves and not to the myriad of false selves we have adopted to survive our challenging lives. Many people today live very sterile, material lives, in urban environments where contact with the natural world is extremely limited. It is by turning back to the natural world that we can learn to live within the same energetic flow, to get back in touch with and trust our intuition, to feel our energetic responses within and make the right choices and responses in our relationships with ourselves and others.
There are basically two approaches in which horses are engaged with in a psychologically therapeutic context. Equine Assisted Psychotherapy, which was the modality I worked within, albeit my approach being Transpersonal. This work has the possibility of taking clients into the depths of the psyches and souls. There is also Equine Assisted or Facilitated Learning. The latter is allows clients to work at a less deep level of personal investigation and understanding. In depth knowledge of horses and their psychology is imperative to work in these fields. Also it is my strong opinion that all Facilitators need to have undergone in depth psychological training themselves, including personal therapy to make them safe to work with other damaged humans and understand the need to keep the therapy safe. There are of course many other ways in which people can and do engage horses to help and encourage children and adults.
In the October/November edition of Horsemanship Magazine I was moved to read the quote made by Buck Brannaman: ‘Your horse is a mirror to your soul, and sometimes you may not like what you see. Sometimes, you will.’
Soulful Equine Assisted Psychotherapy engages the ability of the horse to mirror unspoken human behaviour and emotions. The therapy, is considered to be short term, solution based, allowing the client to regain their faculty of personal choice over their reactions within relationship with themselves and others.
What is it about horses, that makes them so capable of this work and produce results so swiftly and profound? For me the answer is found in their high sensitivity. Horses have to live very much in the moment for their daily survival – they have a powerful fight or flight survival mechanism and they are totally honest. Their senses are finely tuned to their environment and other herd members and they can pick up human thoughts and emotions and interpret body language and reflect it back to us for us to see. They allow us to see our patterns of relating, some which are authentic and some which are inauthentic, and give us the opportunity to experiment with changing those ones that do not serve us well.
For me horses are telepathic, you cannot lie to a horse and so, ultimately, you cannot continue to lie to yourself. Horses can help us to become authentic, remembering who we really are beyond our masks.
Horses reflect what is going on inside us. When we are authentic and living in the moment they want to be with us. When we leave our centre point and are not present, they sense this and do not feel safe and will move away. For this very reason, I always liked to work my clients with my horses at liberty on a field, with the horses free to move away if they felt uncomfortable or draw close if they felt inclined. This choice of the horse to be with the client or not brings up huge personal insights, for clients, relating to their hidden and unowned emotions, body language etc. that can have a dramatic influence in their own personal relationships. It is also very moving to witness a horse drawing close to somebody owning very uncomfortable emotions and feelings. Horses have the capability of immense empathy. Owning emotions is the key word here.
How many people have been told that when going to ride a horse, leave your emotions at the field gate? Here is the great mistake. We cannot disguise our emotions as humans and so the horses, in fact all animals pick up on them and react accordingly. Horses reflect what is going on inside us. They can see beneath our masks and react accordingly and that is the gift they bring us, reflecting our true selves back to us in a way that very few human therapist can. If a rider works a horse by using domination and restrictive riding tools, eventually such incongruence can lead to disaster and danger for both horse and rider.
Horses need good leaders they can trust, to work in relationship with. It is my opinion, and I know the opinion of others who work in Equine Assisted Psychotherapy, that horses trained gently using energetic horsemanship techniques, make possibly better therapy horses than those who have been desensitised into conforming to the wishes of their trainers. However, I need to add here, that horses can always be rehabilitated, even after many years of experiencing human dominated relationships. It takes, time and commitment on the part of the trainer. Energetic horsemanship being all about the use of energy, both through the mental intent and the use of good body language to convey what is being asked of the horse. Body language and social sensual awareness is how horses relate to each other. If owners have trouble relating to their horses, and blame the horse when the relationship does not work out and put it up for sale, they should perhaps look to themselves first to see if the problem lies in their own way of relating.
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