Equine Assisted Therapy
All behaviour is communication
Children, young people and adults with learning and behavioural difficulties may struggle to communicate effectively, which can result in behaviour that is disruptive at home or school or prevents them from integrating with peers or groups. Through observing and discussing the behaviour of horses, we work with people to help them better understand their own behaviour and how this affects others and to read and understand the behaviour of their parents, teachers and friends.
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For those with multiple and complex learning difficulties our aims are to increase awareness of the outside world and the desire to communicate. We help people to develop communication skills – which may be as simple as body movements to indicate a desire to continue or stop an activity, using a cone to encourage talking in children who are selectively mute, or perhaps encouraging them to talk via a horse.
For more able clients, we work with horses to better understand and develop team-working skills and taking turns, understanding danger and keeping safe, overcoming fears, managing emotions and anxiety, and building confidence and self-esteem.
Overcoming physical difficulties
Horsewyse is not an RDA (Riding for the Disabled Association) centre, but we do what we can to cater for everyone. We have many clients who visit in wheelchairs or who are unstable on their feet – if you have physical difficulties or feel adaptations may be needed, please contact us to discuss how we can meet your needs.
The Horsewyse approach
Our approach is welcoming, inclusive and flexible, but also firm and with strict boundaries. Although we have underlying aims and objectives, we remain flexible so that we can respond to the individual clients – this means that we can seize opportunities to build on or change activity if the client loses interest or becomes distressed. We aim to provide a non-judgemental, experiential (and challenging, where appropriate) environment in which our clients learn (rather than being taught).
Benefits can be startling!
Horses offer a unique way of helping young people liberate painful emotions and take a whole new perspective on their lives and how they could be lived. Relating to and caring for horses and other animals has the power to free them from their old, stuck fear patterns.
Horses have such an ability to pick up on human energy that they act as a mirror to reflect back your hidden feelings in a safe, non-verbal interaction. This is how they help young people access and process their emotions. These young people are given the opportunity and the environment, perhaps for the first time, to be emotionally vulnerable.
Animals live so fully in-the-present-moment, responding to your love and your care that a bond of deep trust can develop. In caring for the horses, young people learn what it’s like to truly love and trust and care for another. Old emotions like anger and sadness can be transformed into more positive emotions such as inner peace, positivity and the ability to manage, cope with and regulate challenging emotions.
Being in nature and out in the fresh air positively impacts the young persons mental health, physical health and emotional well being.
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