| Through the Eyes of the Horse |
EAGALA newsletter regarding Equine Assisted Psychotherapy
How do you treat your horse? Is it the same as you would treat your client or your therapy partner?
If you answered yes to any of the above then there is a congruous or
mirrored behaviour going on, if you are also doing these things with
your horse. This in itself would be of questionable professional
behaviour on its own. I would venture to say that the vast majority of us do not do these things to our clients and therapy partners. Then the questions have to be asked; if you are doing these things to your horse and for what reason are you doing them? Just as we ask our clients what is going on here, this could be a good question to ask of ourselves if we are exhibiting these behaviours towards our horses and not to the client/therapy partner. For myself, when I am in a therapy session and I see a client exhibiting any of these behaviours or actions, it gives me information to work with or reflect back to the client. Find out what is behind that, and to explore it with them. I have found it to be a very good and basic indicator of most underlying issues. Therefore for those issues to be revealed, I like to have a horse that is sensitive to rather than hardened to the stimuli. Horses we are currently using in EAP work have come from a variety of owners with a number of them coming from homes with problem owners. I have found these horses once treated differently make dramatic changes in how they behave and yet still retain the sensitivity to the original issue it had with its original owner. Now, if we use hitting the third member of the therapy team as an example. Sometimes this is disguised as patting. I am sure you would all agree that a horse is a very sensitive member of the team; otherwise we wouldn’t be using the equine for therapy. When we look at patting, and break this down, we are basically in our mind praising the horse for being good or reassuring ourselves that the horse will be good. At the same time we are hitting the horse. Is this not a double message? An incongruity, an example of what we are looking for to allow a therapeutic process to happen in a therapy session. The same is the case for pushing and pulling the horse around, we would never dream of doing this in a session with client or partner and yet it is fully acceptable to do this with the horse. Why is this the case? Is this the only way we can get a response from this horse. How does this reflect on ourselves as we operate in other areas of our lives? When we boil this down if we are condoning the use of force and aggression in our horse relationship then maybe we are sending a double message to the client, one that it is acceptable to be hostile with a “dumb” animal and thereby this being OK to use on a “dumb” human or someone that is not doing what the client wants. The passive behaviours above of bribing, begging, giving treats and kissing again are not a picture we want to send to clients and therefore, needs to be addressed if therapy is to work to its full potential. Unless we want to send the message of indirectness, manipulation and lack of boundaries to our clients we need to stop doing these things ourselves. We all know that these types of things have consequences in the human world, so what makes it acceptable to think of horse type consequences for these actions as acceptable. I do not have a problem with any of my clients doing these things to any of my horses as it becomes a very clear part of the clients’ therapeutic process. When it comes to the equine specialist, I feel there could be a degree of professionalism that is lacking. We could by start by looking at how we handle the horses and questioning if it is the same as when clients or members of the public are around looking on. All these types of actions are alive and well within the horse world, all over the world, and apparently very acceptable and quite normal. So as a group of therapy professionals we need to look at all the elements of the therapy processes we are currently using. Perhaps if we looked through the horses eyes at how they see what we (humans) are doing and how we are behaving or even if we raised horses to the same level as ourselves, to regard them as an equal, then we can evolve EAP to another and even greater level. “Who is this Equine Specialist?” I have been around horses in a fulltime professional capacity for the last 13 years and sure I know a heck of a lot more now than I did back then. However, the amount that I do not know about horses has actually increased. It would appear that with every question that I have had answered over the years there would be another 10 (at least) questions that have become apparent. So when it comes to what or who is an equine professional or specialist and who can call themselves this in the model of EAP, I am perplexed. Is it an equestrian who has a cabinet full of trophies and ribbons from a lifetime spent competing in the various disciplines of equitation? Is it a cowboy who has ridden the rodeo circuit and has the belt buckets and broken body to prove it? Is it a graduate that has walls covered with certificates, diplomas and degrees from having been to college and studied horses? Is it a farm hand that has spent a lifetime around horses while ranching? Is it a therapist that owns a few horses for pleasure riding? I could go on. But you are probably getting the idea of what I am meaning. Are there degrees of specialisation or levels of being a professional? The following are the definitions offered by the Oxford Dictionary: Professional: engaged in a specified activity as one’s main paid occupation. Specialist: one who specialises in a particular branch of a profession. It would seem to me that every horse person that I come into contact with (and I meet a lot) is of the view that there is their way and the wrong way and I will include myself in this long list of the right way. Considering all these different beliefs, techniques and opinions on whom or what is an equine specialist, there would seem to be a quandary. Where to find an opinion as to what are the criteria that makes the ultimate equine person suited for EAP work? After all, this is the person who will have the major influence on the horses overall behaviour and attitude. This is also the person who cares for and attends to the horse in the other 23 hours of the day outside of an EAP session. Here’s a thought, what about the horse! Who would be better qualified to render an opinion than our humble equine co-worker? Supervision for the equine professional carried out by the horse itself. How to achieve this is another matter. Perhaps another way to look at this would be to ask the question of the horse person; how often do you take your own medicine and how willingly do take it? When was the last time you listened to the horse for messages or metaphors about yourself and the way you operate in your life? This in itself could be the criteria as to the equine specialist; a willingness to listen to the horse and look at each situation from the horses’ perspective. Then the equine specialist can take this new perspective and integrate that into their way of being, and not just reserve it for the therapy sessions. |
