Equine-Assisted Psychotherapy and Coaching

An Evidence-Based Framework

Andreas Liefooghe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000186437
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychoanalysis
• Index: Psychology

Based on over a decade of sustained longitudinal research with a broad range of different user groups, Equine-Assisted Psychotherapy and Coaching: An Evidence-Based Framework is an essential guide which offers both theoretical foundations and practical models for working with horses in psychotherapy and coaching.

While not a panacea for distress and difficulties, the connections that humans find with horses can become a catalyst for deeper self-knowledge. By de-centring the human subject and placing the horse in the middle of the investigation, the ways in which humans make sense of themselves can be explored and more easily understood. Drawing on this wide spectrum of different client groups, the bookfeatures intervention studies with expelled teenagers, adults in addiction recovery programmes, children diagnosed on the autistic spectrum, people suffering from trauma and mental health problems, prisoners and even multi-national corporations wanting culture change. The practice of using horses in a psychological intervention is thoroughly scrutinised throughout, with ways of establishing successful change documented and assessed.

Liefooghe's analysis of these studies builds up to provide a comprehensive, evidence-based framework for equine-assisted psychotherapy and coaching. This essential book offers psychotherapists, coaches and all those who work in a helping capacity a clear insight into what horses can and cannot do in a therapeutic role.

Chapter 1

Operation Centaur

Operation Centaur is an organisation set up to promote the relevance of the working horse in urban sites. We do this through conservation and heritage work, and through community and therapeutic programmes. HRH The Prince of Wales, who has been supporting Operation Centaur’s work, refers to both our traditional and non-traditional roles of working with horses in London’s historic royal parks and palaces in the book The Last Herd:

In a further extension of their role, Operation Centaur now deploys its Shires as co-therapists in equine-assisted psychotherapy and learning. Shires that log trees and mow hay are also helping schools deal with bullying, raising the self-esteem of women prisoners and teaching that strength lies in collaboration, while leadership potential resides in us all. Words cannot do justice to what people experience when they find themselves face to face with a huge horse that weighs over a ton.

(HRH The Prince of Wales, in Stewart 2017, p. 5)

In these uniquely privileged spaces, we work with our horses in conservation, treading lightly in sensitive ecosystems that have survived for centuries surrounded by one of the largest cities in the world. We promote heritage activities and deliver outreach and community programmes. For the past decade, we have also provided equine-assisted psychotherapy and coaching to individuals, groups and organisations.

Therapeutic work undertaken with animals is not new. Riding for the Disabled have used horses for decades to help children and adults regain a sense of movement and quality of life. More recently, hippotherapy emerged as an intervention based on physiotherapy on horseback. The different movements of the horse mean the client has to adjust and adopt different postural responses. As such, the horse influences the client rather than the client controlling the horse. It synthesizes the human and the horse in a very physical way. Organisations such as the British Horse Society launch programmes to engage disaffected youth through stable management and close proximity to horses.

We have recently made a jump from the physiological relationship to the psychological. There is a limited yet burgeoning literature that casts the role and relationship we have with animals in a different light. The research that has been undertaken shows clear indications for the effectiveness of working with animals in a psychotherapeutic environment. For example, when working with children who had experienced violence in the home, Schultz, Remick-Barlow and Robbins (2007) found a significant impact on self-esteem and well-being after working for relatively short periods with horses in a psychotherapeutic context. A mixture of farm animals such as cows, sheep and horses have also been used in therapeutic programmes (Berget, Ekeberg and Braastad 2008) and have produced significant uplift in the self-efficacy and coping ability of participants.

Therapy and coaching with horses holds something unique, however. A flight animal of immense strength finds it within themselves to trust a predator, to allow them to touch their most vulnerable parts, to work with them – and then to seek psychic reparation. It could be done with rabbits, but it may lose some of its impact! Horses respond with unique insight into exactly who we are in the moment. Their very survival depends on reading us right. So by reading their reactions to us, we can get a profound insight into our selves.

Centaurs

Chiron is perhaps the most famous centaur of antiquity, not in the least because he was the mentor (therapist?) of one of the greatest war heroes, Achilles. Centaurs in mythology were boorish and blunt. Chiron was the eldest and wisest of the Centaurs, a Thessalian tribe of half-horse men. Unlike his brethren Chiron was an immortal son of the Titan Kronos and a half-brother of Zeus. When Kronos’ tryst with the nymph Philyra was interrupted by Rhea, he transformed himself into a horse to escape notice and the result was this two-formed son.

The centaur has always been the very epitome of energy, the wild child of the mythological menagerie. Centaurs are a fusion between Apollo (truth, rationality, wisdom i.e., Superego) and Dionysius (human, sex drive, Id). Human wisdom and cunning combines with power and speed. There has been a renaissance in the image of the centaur recently. Harry Potter books and films first reintroduced the centaur to general consciousness followed by the yoghurt-eating centaurs of Muller light. In the former, centaurs were seen as shadowy figures inhabiting a forbidden forest; the latter were referenced for their “unbelievable” status – zero fat. In the shadows and beyond reach are topological spaces that we often encounter during psychotherapy. The other-wordliness of the centaur reminds us of that shadow of the other in us, too, as Jessica Benjamin (1998) might put it.

Raulff (2017) calls the relationship between humans and horses a centaurian pact – the closer the bond, the greater the energy. In a wide-ranging exploration of the horse–human relationship, Raulff documents how for centuries this relationship has been inter-dependent, and has shaped our environment. Landscapes were altered to grow oats and hay so horses could be fed in inner cities. The stories we tell, our heroes and our foes, all rely on equine companions. People and horses were comrades in fate.

This was the traditional synthesis of man and horse. Can we re-articulate centaur from a contemporary perspective? By holding two halves that contain both base and elevated elements, the figure of the centaur shows us that these things do not need to be split. As we shall see in Chapter 4, splitting the world into good and bad is a technique that we all tend to use to manage our anxiety. A world where the good cowboys wear white hats and the bad ones wear black ones may not be wholly true but its simplicity appeals.

Chiron is also a healer. Because he was accidentally wounded and despite his immortality, he bore great pain – so much so that he renounced his immortality and become mortal, so he could heal himself. Combine this with his role as teacher and mentor, Chiron as a centaur is a good description of what therapy or coaching with horses is about – avoiding splits, containing anxiety, creating opportunities for learning so some understanding or resolution can take place: Operation Centaur.

Some history

When you observe horses being kitted out in pink and purple rugs, with glitter on their hooves and treated as pets, you could be forgiven for forgetting that the partnership we have has been millennia in the making. Horses and humans have a shared history dating back some 6000 years. Kelekna (2009) shows that what sets the horses apart from all other animals is the speed equus caballus offers. Through an effective relationship with the horse, humans can move further, faster. The first deployment of the horse was for warfare and conquest, but that was not all. Through the increased mobility of society, different cultures became linked, and trade much further afield became possible. The exchange of ideas came to fruition for the first time far outside of the home culture. Technologies were shared, religion diffused and art and science imported and exported. So while horsepower was initially and perhaps foremost an instrument of war, it also greatly extended the scale and complexity of civilization. Indeed, the spread of different languages can be traced back to the early nomadic horse routes. The language spoken in a particular area is in large part due to our historic equine partnership.

What allowed this to happen is the extraordinary relationship between the world’s brainiest biped and the world’s fastest quadruped. From war, trade, agriculture and the industrial revolution, in around 1910 a major shift occurred in the status of the horse. A transport system totally reliant on horses shifted to one that solely consisted of combustion engines – in the space of a decade. Similar stories can be observed in cities worldwide. Indeed, we would never have had Little Hans’ horse phobia, and the resulting learnings on transference, had he been born a decade later. So from living in a society where horses and all their paraphernalia (and excrement) were all around us, we find ourselves for the first time in six millennia further removed from the horse than we have ever been. Horses are now regarded as no longer “useful”, relegated to the category “leisure”. What, then, of our relationship with them?

Pockets of an earlier relationship survive to this day, however. In a seminal study of traditional horseback cultures, and more broadly the archaeological history between horses and humans, Olsen (2003) describes the traditional Kazakh nomads and their horses. This lifestyle is still maintained today in remote pockets in North-western China and Western Mongolia. The areas where Kazakhs traditionally live can be quite inhospitable, and indeed their ability to have expanded into these areas is, in part, because their lives are intimately entwined in a working and cultural relationship with the horse. It could also be argued that the horses’ survival in this terrain was assisted from the tending by Kazakhs.

For these Kazakhs, horses also form an important part of marriage ceremonies and funerals. A Kazakh man is said to never part from his personal horse while both are alive. After a man dies, his personal riding horse is tethered to a mourning yurt, and its forelock and tail are trimmed. The deceased man’s saddle is placed on the horse, his fur coat draped over it, the whip affixed, and hat put on backwards; it is driven past several mounted girls, wearing men’s hats put on backwards. The widow follows behind the horse. Following the funeral, the horse is herded with the other horses for a year, and then slaughtered at a funerary feast held near the man’s grave. Horse races are organised at the feast, so that the man may hear the thunder of hooves once more. The Kazakh, in life, death and the afterlife, defines the world by, and is defined by, the world of the horse.

The relationship

In the Upanishads, the human is seen through the metaphor of the horse–human relationship, with the self as the charioteer:

Know the Self to be sitting in the chariot, the body to be the chariot, the intellect the charioteer, and the mind the reins. The senses they call the horses, the objects of the senses their roads. When he (the Highest Self) is in union with the body, the senses, and the mind, then wise people call him the Enjoyer. He who has no understanding and whose mind (the reins) is never firmly held, his senses (horses) are unmanageable, like vicious horses of a charioteer. But he who has understanding and whose mind is always firmly held, his senses are under control, like good horses of a charioteer. He who has no understanding, who is unmindful and always impure, never reaches that place, but enters into the round of births.

(Müller 2000, p. 9)

Discourses such as this centuries-old cultural artefact point to the important of the horse in how we as humans make sense of ourselves. Domestication, the bringing into the home, in and of itself pinpoints that there is a unilateral start to the partnership. Yet, as Bradshaw (2011) references in In Defence of Dogs, perhaps there is some mutuality, or at least reciprocation, to this relationship. With canines, the lure of warmth around the recently discovered fire, and the cooking of food, became part of the quid pro quo in offering protection. The horse, it seems, was more generous. Indeed, it is precisely because the horse could (and can) overcome its very nature that the relationship persists: an animal of prey that trusts carnivores enough to allow itself to be harnessed in leather and chains, mounted and to work in partnership with them. Raulff (2017) refers to this as the central paradox at the heart of the horse–human relationship: even when mankind’s goals run contrary to the nature of the horse, it still cooperates. And it’s precisely the horse’s instinct to run and flee that was so coveted by humans in the first place.

Unlike cats and dogs, horses are born wild. They need to be “broken” or “gentled”, depending on the approach one takes. Xenophon’s still-relevant manual The Art of Horsemanship details how to prepare a horse for a theatre of war. In this text, Xenophon provided language that is still current in contemporary society, not only in the field of horsemanship but in any work context. He called the training space the “manège”, which then formed the root of management, probably from Italian maneggiare “to handle”, especially “to control a horse”, ultimately from Latin noun manus “hand”.

Dressage riders seem at one with the horse, and craft an exquisite partnership. The art of classical riding is very much about the symphony and synthesis between horse and rider – a slight incline of the head, a shift of posture, a touch of a leg and the horse will respond. Carriage drivers know that their hands communicate with their horses’ mouth through the reins. In these relationships, we are taking the flight instinct and through skill and patience on both sides forming a perfectly symbiotic relationship. The language for taking a horse from wild to cooperative has shifted from “breaking” to “starting” the horse into work. This work aspect becomes important in the relationship. In horses there is a wild, dangerous unpredictability lurking inside them. It has fascinated humans for centuries.

From object to subject

How do we start this relationship? In the past, techniques have ranged from subjugation to cooperation. Do we want a horse that follows a leader out of respect, or one that follows out of fear? The main difference between the traditional and “natural” methods is whether the relationship is based on force and compliance, or trust.

The traditional method, originating from the earliest days of domestication and usually the preserve of the military, involves “breaking” the flight instinct, and follows instructions from antiquity as specified in Xenophon’s The Art of Horsemanship (Xenophon and Morgan 2006). This is usually done by tying a horse up in such a way that they are deprived of their freedom. Techniques involve hobbling, tying the horse up so that they cannot move, or using straps and draw reins. By depriving them of their flight instinct, horses eventually give up and become docile. Once that point is reached, a saddle is placed on them and they are ridden. Those that don’t submit are deemed too dangerous to ride, and are discarded.

There was a new wave of horsemanship in the nineties that brought a fresh perspective to our relationships with horses. Following the success of acclaimed film The Horse Whisperer starring Robert Redford (1998), the notion of gentling horses rather than the more brutal breaking in of horses gave rise to a movement called natural horsemanship.

Monty Roberts wrote The Man Who Listens to Horses (1997), on the behest of HM The Queen, who wanted the gentler ways of natural horsemanship more widely understood and applied. Roberts’ quest is getting people to understand the “language of Equus” (Roberts 1997), where horse psychology is fully understood and appreciated. Roberts’ Join-Up International organisation is named after the core concept of his training method. Roberts believes that horses use a non-verbal language, which he terms “Equus” and that humans can use this language to communicate with horses.

Equally influential was Pat Parelli. The Parelli Program is a people-training programme focused on the study of horse behaviour and horsemanship skills. The program spans four savvys, or areas of development, through four distinct levels of skill improvement. Before Parelli, natural horsemanship was unknown except in the secret inner circles around Tom Dorrance and Ray Hunt, and it was known as “It”. Pat’s desire to spread this knowledge to the world rose up in him after his mentor Tom said with lament that “It” would never go anywhere. Now this knowledge has made a major impact on horse training world-wide.

Natural horsemanship has its detractors. Some argue there is nothing new, and that these techniques have been around for centuries; others claim that the application and release of pressure as used in the training is in effect using anxiety as a training method, and that this has questionable ethics. While these no doubt are valid points, moving from Xenophon to Roberts et al. heralds an important shift nevertheless – it has moved the horse from object to subject.

Throughout antiquity and until recently, horses were viewed as objects, as possessions – not dissimilar to how women were viewed, in fact. There are of course some notable exceptions. Alexander the Great managed to ride the mighty Bucephalus because he could take the horse’s perspective. He had a theory of the horse’s mind that allowed him to deduce it was the shadow of the man on his back that made him scared and would therefore not tolerate being ridden. By turning the horse into the sun while mounting, Alexander alleviated his anxiety and approached the horse in a partnership. Further testament that Bucephalus was a subject to Alexander is that the latter named a city after him. We all know Ignatius, Caligula’s horse, whom he purportedly made a consul, and Napoleon’s Marengo. These horses occupy subject positions, yet are very much the exception. Most horses were objects, and treated as such. The shift that natural horsemanship identified and strengthened has placed the horse more in line as a colleague to humans, and this is very much how we see our horses at Operation Centaur. This intersubjectivity is also the bedrock of any helping intervention.

Understanding the horse–human relationship

How can we understand horses and our relationships with them? Do we view them scientifically, as most veterinarians, farriers and physiotherapists would – a series of biological and physiological systems? Do we see them as unknown quantities that need careful interpretation in order to make sense of them? Do we look upon them as socially-situated and politically-laden objects? Or as a series of narratives, of discourses – as postmodern philosophers would?

Paradigms are systems of thought, and they are crucial to understand if we want to scrutinise our understanding of ourselves, others and the world we live in. This is relevant because we create all meaning and explanation based on observation, and observation in and of itself can be rather problematic. While it is tempting to think we are rational and objective, competing paradigms offer a range of alternative explanations.

Let us look at the example of one of our horses stamping his foot in the field, surrounded by a group of executives. To some, this would be a reaction to get rid of flies. To others,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• On equine-assisted psychotherapy and coaching: an introduction
• 1 Operation Centaur
• 2 Real Horse Power
• 3 Methodology
• 4 The horse in the centre
• 5 Interconnectivity
• 6 Relations and roles
• 7 Work
• 8 The whole horse: a coda
• References
• Index