Since almost the dawn of time, humans and horses have had a fluid relationship that has changed over the centuries, from carrying us into the battlefield to plowing our fields.
Recently this relationship has developed into equine-assisted psychotherapy, in which horses are being used in treatments for various mental health issues. At the forefront of this latest development in mental health treatments is Eagala (Equine Assisted Growth and Learning Association), an international professional association for equine-assisted psychotherapy, providing education, training and support for practitioners using their specialized model worldwide since 1999.
Beginning in the mid-1900s the practice of using horses in physical therapy had become more commonplace, but it was not until the 1990s that utilizing horses in mental health treatments really started to gain ground.
“What is really unique to the Eagala model,” says Kristen DeMarco, an equine specialist with Eagala and executive director for Gateway Horseworks. “is that there is a team approach, so there is always a licensed mental health practitioner in the arena along with an equine specialist, horses and client. It’s also focused on the ground which is also unique—there is no riding and we don’t teach our clients any horsemanship skills,” she adds. “It’s solution-oriented, meaning that we believe that our clients have the solutions to their challenges if given the space to discover them. So, for example, we’re not teaching people or telling people what needs to happen for them to overcome a challenge or to reach for a goal, we’re really holding the space for them to find their own way through those challenges by incorporating horses in the process. And lastly the Eagala model really has professional standards and they have an ethics committee that can uphold all of those ethics of practice.”
This approach of getting out of the way and letting the clients work in their own space that will ultimately lay the foundation for furthering their treatment is what makes DeMarco the most enthusiastic about the work and progress she sees being done in this field where “traditional methods can fall short. . . . The mental health crisis in this country and around the globe has reached such astronomical levels that we need more tools in our toolbox and this is just another wonderful tool that is emerging as being effective in treating mental health issues,” DeMarco says.
“With the emotional support from the mental health professional and the physical safety support from the horse professional, it really creates this unique space,” DeMarco continues. “What I hear most often from clients is that the horses haven’t judged them, because they don’t care what drug they used, or what their record says, or how much money is in their bank account, or what their sexuality is. It just matters who they are in the moment and who they are in the next moment with the horses and we don’t really get that clean slate many places in our lives, so to be able to feel emotionally safe can then provide a space for clients to therapeutically work through very challenging often traumatic issues in a way that can empower them in the future.”
DeMarco tells of one particularly horrific case involving a client she was working with.
“She had been tortured by a family member and locked in a closet, denied food and sexually assaulted, and she was an adolescent. She had stopped speaking and was selectively mute and in the several months that she had been inpatient she had not spoken or spoken very little,” DeMarco says.
This individual would come out to a horse farm, where she began spending time with one particular horse over the course of several weeks.
“We just noticed that she started speaking to the horse, we couldn’t hear what she was saying because she was at the other end of our arena but little by little this horse came close to the group of people and the other horses and one day on no particular direct question to her she just started speaking about something very mundane but it was a breakthrough in her treatment not only at the farm with us but in her residential treatment facility,” DeMarco says. “She actually never stopped speaking from that day and that was after six sessions with us.”
DeMarco concludes the story by saying, “she continues to be one of their biggest success stories from the treatment facility that she was able to grow out of such a traumatic situation and be empowered to move on with her life in such a positive way. We still don’t know what happened over there with her and that horse and it wasn’t really important for us to know—what was important is that something shifted for her.”
Eagala will host its annual conference in Murfreesboro on March 6 at the MTSU Livestock Center. Local musician Templeton Thompson will perform at the conference where more than 400 mental health professionals, equine specialists, veterans, social workers, corporate leaders and many others will be present. For more information on the conference or to find a local organization associated with Eagala, visit eagala.org.
