• Overcoming Fear: Becoming A Confident Rider
• The Top Ten Reasons It's Cool To Wear A Riding Helmet
• Horse Time

Greg Kersten addresses a workshop of 46 therapists and horse people who  were certified Saturday in the budding field of Equine Assisted Psychotherapy,  which Kersten pioneered.

Four abreast, linked at the elbows, the four women walked toward the horse Angelic Promise.

Their immediate goal was to get a halter on the Morgan, but their broader goal was to learn about a new form of psychotherapy that uses horses.

The four were doing an exercise called ‘Appendages,’ where the two women in the center acted as the brains, the two outside women were the hands. The brains gave directions and the hands executed them, and the task was getting that halter on the horse.

It is supposed to model the way families behave, with the parents as brains controlling the children like arms. When done during therapy, the exercise would be a chance for therapists to see a family dynamic in action. But this incarnation of ‘Appendages’ was a demonstration, done at a Hollister ranch this weekend for a workshop in Equine Assisted Psychotherapy.

Some shrinks use inkblots, others use word association, but for getting at the nature of psychological issues these folks think there’s nothing like a little horsepower.

Using horses to help the disabled has been done for over 30 years, but in the last 10 years a new use for horses in human well-being has emerged and is trying to gain legitimacy.

Participants in equine therapy are led through a horse-related activity, not so they can master horsemanship skills, but with the goal of coming to terms with fears, behavior patterns, or other mental and emotional problems.

Gurus, practitioners and newcomers to horse psychotherapy came to Hollister last week for a three-day course in how horses can be used as an aid in psychotherapy sessions with clients as wide ranging as gang members to broken families to soccer teams to corporate boards.

Those who came were licensed family therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, cowboys, dressage riders and horse rescuers – 46 men and woman from across the west and as far away as Ireland. They came to see demonstrations, take tests, and get certified in the art of barnyard head shrinking by a Utah-based organization called the Equine Assisted Growth and Learning Association. Their approach is to pair a professional psychotherapist with a horse specialist, creating what they call a “treatment team.”

It made the three days a heady mix of two usually divergent worlds – shrink and cowboy, workshop coffee and manure, cowboy boots and hiking boots, legal notebooks and southwestern horse blankets. The cynic might say it’s psychobabble dressed up in horse feathers, but if you stick around and watch, the concept starts to make some horse sense.

The idea is for the horse specialist and the therapist to give patients, or ‘clients,’ a horse-related task – like putting a halter on a horse, or leading a horse through an obstacle course. The treatment team observes the client as they do the task, asking questions that draw attention to behavior patterns or ways of thinking that might be problematic. The hope is that the exercise will create a vivid metaphor of their problems, and successful completion of the task will also point to a way to solve those problems.

“Working with a horse can bring about a realization a lot faster than might happen in the office,” said Annie Agah, who hosted the event at her Rancho Sueño horse stables south of Hollister. Six days a week Agah rides dressage and takes care of the horses she boards on her 6.5-acre ranch. But on Tuesdays Agah and her horses team up with professional therapist Peggy Kline, who comes down from her office in Santa Clara.

Kline, a Licensed Marriage Family Therapist, likes using horses because it’s a chance to get her clients off the couch and out of the role of reporters who simply describe their problems.

“Instead of talking and thinking and processing, their dynamics tend to be happening right in front of you,” said Kline. “I can just stand back and say, ‘Is this familiar? Is this what happens to you?’” But it’s not just about getting out of the office, the horses themselves bring something unique to the mix. But just what that is is hard to pin point.

The general consensus at the workshop was that most of human communication is non-verbal, and that horses can pick up and mirror that very well. Jenny Silber Butah, a therapist from Soquel, looks to the horse for truth about how her clients are feeling.

“If the client is incongruent (says they’re mad when they’re really not), the horse will reflect that. The horses will not lie,” said Butah, who partners with horse rescuer Sharon North Pohl.

“Experiential education and therapy has been valuable for hundreds of years,” said Pohl, who likens horse therapy to ropes courses and other forms of outdoor education. “Horses up the ante because [ropes courses] don’t have another intelligent being that you’re dealing with. And a horse is another intelligent, caring, sensitive, feeling creature.”

They’re also hungry.

A peckish horse named Earth Angel stood by Saturday morning as workshop participants sat on folding chairs in the dirt of a horse arena ready to learn about ‘Temptation Alley,’ one of about 20 basic exercises taught. In front of them was a diamond-shaped obstacle course made of wooden poles, chairs, with a bucket of hay in the middle. Three volunteers were picked to play the parts of mother father, and child.

Co-founders Greg Kersten and Lynn Thomas gave them the guidelines for the exercise. They had to put a halter with two lead ropes on Earth Angel, and the child had to mount the bareback horse. Then the parents were to lead the horse through the obstacle course. But they had to remain on the outside of the course, which starts narrow but in the middle becomes as wide as the two ropes fully extended. And most significantly, they couldn’t let the horse eat the hay.

“This is a nice one for addictions because we use things that are analogous to addictions, like the hay for the horse,” said Thomas, who played the part of the therapist during the exercise. She was joined in the arena by Kersten, who played the horse specialist. He made sure the rider knew how to ride safely, and kept an eye on the horse for non-verbal clues that might indicate what the family was going through.

As the exercise began the ‘parents’ were so busy talking about which rope they would hold that they ignored the ‘child’ as she struggled to mount the horse. Later Kersten pointed out the auspicious beginning, which stimulated a conversation about how the treatment team can use the observation to form a clearer picture of the family dynamic, and how to share this observation with the clients.

As the ‘family’ tried to lead the horse through the obstacle, communications broke down, one of the parents bailed out and the horse kept going right to the hay. The metaphor was yielding up enough insights into the family dynamic to fill a legal notebook…or for that matter a cowboy boot.

“As a therapist I get far more information about a client from a one-hour session with the horses than a month in the office,” said Thomas, a Licensed Clinical Social Worker. But the exercise aren’t meant only to reveal problems, Thomas says they reveal solutions.

“As they find solutions to becoming successful [in the exercise], that also directly relates to what’s going to help them be more successful [in life]. It’s like, ‘OK, yeah, this is going to help me.’” said Thomas.

Learning to let go or hold on at the crucial juncture, or focus on the goal not the obstacles, these were some of the solutions the ‘family’ learned from Temptation Alley.

The workshop participants learned how to facilitate such an exercise, including which kinds of questions to ask, where to stand, when to intervene for safety, and how to keep the clients involved with the horses, which prevents the session from morphing into the kind of conversational therapy that goes on in an office.

“It’s so easy to slip into office mode,” said therapist Janell Anderson during an afternoon exercise in which she peppered two clients with questions instead of getting them to interact with Angelic Promise. “I can see why it’s important to have someone there with horse eyes.”

Sitting on a fence rail in a white cowboy hat and continually drawing attention to the horse in an exercise, Kersten definitely has ‘horse eyes.’ He grew up on a ranch in Nebraska and was at one time a professional bareback bronco rider. He began using horses as part of therapy 15 years ago when he was working at a youth correctional facility in Washington DC and training horses on the side. He would invite kids to help him, but instead of teaching them how to halter and catch horses, he would let them discover their own way.

“They got so much out of it that they would go back to the program and tell other kids what they learned: that horses are very adaptable,” said Kersten. “That’s what they were telling the other kids: be more creative, be more adaptable, instead of relying on the same old ways that are getting us in trouble.”

Kersten kept at it and by 1996 had coined the term Equine Assisted Psychotherapy to describe the work. In 1999 he founded the non-profit EAGALA. Now he and Thomas do two or three workshops a month and see patients two days a week in Santaquin, Utah.

Over time Kersten learned more about psychotherapy and Thomas has become more horsey, each often pointing out something in the exercises beyond their field of expertise.

Such blurring was a common theme at the workshop, where each business card revealed a unique take on how to use horses to aid human emotional well-being.

One card promoted ‘Overcoming Fear and Anxiety for Equestrians,’ on another an ‘Equine Education Consultant’ touted ‘Intuitive Horsemanship,’ others announced their ‘Equine Facilitated Experiential Growth Learning and Therapy,’ and Martha McNeil’s card describes her practice as Equine Facilitated Psychotherapy.

McNeil came to the workshop to pick up new ideas to add to her practice in San Martin. She got involved in horse psychotherapy shortly after Sept. 11, 2001 when she had a vision while driving across the Golden Gate Bridge.

“I decided that God had put me on this earth to work with kids and horses, and if I was going to be blown off the face of the earth by Osama bin Laden, I didn’t want to have to stand in front of God and explain why I never got around to having a program,” said McNeil.

She sold her Mill Valley home and moved to San Martin, where she began buying horses. She now has seven horses, most of them miniatures, which she uses with clients she takes two days a week. She still sees patients in her office, where she has worked as a psychotherapist with San Francisco County Mental Health since 1993. But her dream is to work with horses full-time.

She thinks so highly of the creatures that she sometimes brings her mini horses to the city and into her office. But usually the kids come to her in San Martin as referrals from other offices where they have come to some kind of dead end in traditional therapy. They are gang members, substance abusers, and troubled urban youth.

She enthusiastically relates stories of seeing closed, hardened, confused kids transform when they come to her barn and get around the horses.

“Most of the kids I work with have never been around a horse before, they love doing horse therapy because it’s not threatening, it’s not painful, they have a ball,” said McNeil.

For her it’s not just about her love of horses, she sees how horse power works to loosen up the kids she sees.

“If parents are wanting to get help for their kids who are resistant to going to an office, they really should consider it, it’s a completely different setting,” said McNeil.

Straight from the horse’s mouth, you might say.

Return to top