EAP is a field of psychotherapy in which horses are used, in a therapeutic partnership with a counsellor/psychotherapist, to help emotional growth and learning in the client

•It is experiential in nature – participants participate in activities with horses .

•The focus of EAP is not riding or horsemanship -  90% of the work takes place on the ground.

•It is a powerful & effective therapeutic application.

•Personal development including:

•relationship/communication problems

•behavioural issues

•eating disorders

•depression

•anxiety

•substance abuse etc.

 

Horses can influence people in powerful ways.

They require & so encourage: responsibility, assertiveness, communication & relationship.

They are large animals & working with them can help people overcome fear and develop confidence

Horses are social creatures with defined roles.

Horses have the ability to mirror what human body language is telling them and they pick up on human emotions and react.

My story of initiation into this therapy process:

I write here about the deep relationship that binds horse to human, that  has existed since the year dot.  World wide, something is happening - people are beginning to remember and reconnect with the magical therapeutic possibilities of that relationship. I came across the potential of this work through my relationship with a young horse who, in the early days of our being together, shared a similar, short term, physical disability with me. We both recovered but, through the process, we discovered we could work as a team to help ourselves and thereafter assist others to understand themselves more fully. 

I have owned and loved horses for the past 35 years.  Three years ago I bought a young Irish Piebald Gelding called Danny Boy.  He was only three, very gentle,   pretty, but also very needy and quite sad and insecure.  He came to be a companion to my horse, Merlin, a magnificent, bold and courageous gypsy driving cob.  A year after Danny Boy arrived, I found myself in some physical distress.  Something was amiss – I had lost much of the power in my legs and much of my vitality.  Even walking more than a few hundred yards was difficult.  Strangely, Danny Boy was also suffering from some kind of energy depletion in his legs as well.

To help Danny Boy, I enlisted the help of a bio-energetic therapist, who also possessed the gift of horse whispering.  Pam invited me to send her a cutting of Danny Boy’s mane so she could read the condition of his physical and emotional system.   Pam then asked to visit him, because she could see he needed help.  

As she stood in the horse paddock inviting Danny to communicate with her, I held on to his mane.  Suddenly a rush of extreme sadness surged through my body and tears ran from my eyes.  Pam began to relate much of the story of Danny Boy’s first three years, some of which had been quite traumatic for him.  I knew Pam was correct in what she had understood telepathically from my horse, because I already knew about Danny Boy’s earlier years from his previous owner.  

The surge of emotion that passed through that horse and discharged through me, as he told his story to Pam, obviously helped him to release some of the trapped emotions that he stored within his physicality.  Pam told me that the energy of the grief was held in the area of his lungs, affecting his heart and that it was causing him circulation problems, the physical effect being, loss of power to his legs.   Danny Boy was given certain remedies to help him heal physically and emotionally and from that day onwards his power began to return to his legs.

Astounded and very impressed, I asked Pam to look into my loss of leg power.  She took a piece of my hair and in a couple of days called to see me with her observations.  I would add here, that prior to this, my condition had been investigated via conventional medicine, to little avail.  I had been given physiotherapy and hydrotherapy, but with no improvement very obvious.  Actually the problem turned out not to be half as serious as my loss of leg power felt to me.  I had Candida throughout my gut, without realising it and so even though my diet was good and varied, I was not absorbing any goodness from my food and so had become depleted of vitamins and minerals big time.  Pam told me it would take me six months to get back onto full power again by taking remedies and supplements.   When eventually I regained my leg strength, I am pleased to say that those in the medical profession, who were overseeing me, were very impressed with my diagnostic process and care via alternative medicine.  A clinician remarked to me – ‘sometimes we don’t look for the simple things when we do blood tests’.

However, this article is not about my health or that of Danny Boy’s.   It is about a wonderful and magical emergence, through the adversity of physical distress, of that age long relationship between man and horse.   I had always felt passionate and close to my horses over the years, but this was something different.  Because I could not ride or drive them at that time, I spent a lot of time just sitting with them and feeling them and talking to them.  Gradually I could see that my two horses were able to mirror my personality in its diversity and I was given ‘food for thought’. It was quite a moving and enlightening and, in many ways, a liberating experience for me.

As often happens, certain wonderful books about horses and their therapeutic powers fell into my hands at this time and between the pages, I began to discover and remember, from what I read, that my horses were beginning to show me, through their deepest relationship with me, that we could work together.  If they could mirror my psyche, then they could mirror that of others. 

Working as an Integrative/Transpersonal Counsellor and Tutor, I realised that I had, at my figure tips, a most wonderful creative therapy application.  However, I needed to find training to develop this skill and once again, as often happens, a series of synchronicities lead me to the opportunity to train here in the UK, via trainers from the USA, where this type of therapy is more common 

Equine Assisted Psychotherapy and Learning engages the ability of the horse to mirror unspoken human behaviour and emotions. This therapy, often worked in a therapeutic triad, of client, therapist and horse professional, using these mirroring abilities of the horse, is considered to be short term, solution based, allowing the client to regain their faculty of personal choice over their reactions.

What is it about horses, that makes them so capable of this work and produce results so swiftly?   For me the answer is found in their high sensitivity.  Horses have to live very much in the moment for their daily survival and they are totally honest.  Their senses are finely tuned and they pick up human thoughts and can read human behaviour and mirror it back to us for us to see.   For me they are just telepathic and you can’t lie to a horse and so, ultimately, we can’t continue to lie to ourselves.  Horses can help us to become authentic and remember who we really are beyond our masks.

 See also website: http://www.wessexaquarianhorses.co.uk