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Aspen RanchAspen Ranch is a residential treatment center for troubled teens, at risk youth, and adolescents with a variety of behavioral problems. Through the Ranch's animal-assisted therapy programs, students learn life skills that initiate change. Horsemanship skills are integrated with team building activities, experiential learning, and therapy groups to create a unique program with endless possibilities.

What is Equine-Assisted Psychotherapy?

Equine-Assisted (or Facilitated) Psychotherapy is an experiential therapy that utilizes horses, which includes activities such as handling, grooming, riding, and other tasks involved in caring for horses. This type of therapy is designed to address particular issues, including: Equine-Assisted Psychotherapy has been found to be particularly effective with children, pre-teens and teenagers. It's also especially effective with children who have witnessed family violence and have responded with depression, suicidal feelings, anxiety, anger, withdrawal, and escape mechanisms such as drugs and alcohol use.

This type of therapy is not limited to riding horses as is traditional therapeutic riding for the disabled. Equine-Assisted Psychotherapy uses the different tasks of caring for the horse and the bonds that are formed through that process to establish trust, respect, and responsibility. The rural type of environment where the therapy takes place often has a calming effect on patients so that anxiety abates and the ability to think clearly increases. This therapy has improved confidence and self-esteem because once a patient has earned the horse's trust, the horse will become unconditionally attached and loyal. Without the fear of being judged, or having to meet unreasonable expectations, biases, or motivations, a child can relax and begin to express his or her true feelings. This process leads a child towards a greater sense of self-identity, which goes a long way to fostering an innate self-confidence and functionality in other social situations.

When a group of patients work together who have emotional or behavioral issues, they learn ways to communicate with each other and with the horses, which promotes self-esteem, body-confidence, and physical awareness. Patients with extreme anxiety will learn effective relaxation techniques, and patients dealing with abusive relationships will learn how to be both assertive and trusting as they work with an animal much stronger and larger than they. Children with out-of-control behavior problems will learn how to solve problems and control frustration by leading and directing the horse in activities that begin with the patient on the ground. These children will also gain significant self-confidence by achieving their goals.

A horse responds to a person's actions and emotional state, so a patient must become self-aware to effectively work with and ride on the horse. In order to ride and care for a horse, good communication skills with the instructor and the horse are necessary. Anger issues must also be confronted because manifestations of anger will result in a horse that refuses to be ridden. A person will have to develop other methods of dealing with aggression and anger to obtain the horse's cooperation and trust. A patient who is fearful or especially anxious will also have difficulty getting a horse to cooperate, but the process of grooming, feeding, saddling, etc. are usually effective in helping a child achieve a calmer, more confident state of mind.

The increase in confidence and self-esteem that is achieved through Equine-Assisted Therapy will also increase a desire to interact socially, while the skills used to effectively work with a horse are transferred to other areas of the child's life. Riding a horse aids the patient in dealing with others because it helps teach how to form meaningful bonds and relationships. Forming a bond with a horse can be very rewarding and empowering for a child; the trust that both horse and rider must have for each other and the loyalty the horse responds with teaches what qualities are best in any type of relationship. The fact that patients can see a direct connection between action and reaction also helps foster trust and gives the patients a greater feeling of control in this and other situations.

The experience of riding a horse is unique and empowering. To be able to sit so high up on a such as powerful animal and control what happens instills great confidence, while the learning process increases the ability of an individual to connect on a personal level with both horse and instructor. Additionally, horses (and all animals, including humans) can be unpredictable when they are under stress or scared or spooked by something a person cannot even see, and this creates situations where a patient must learn how to respond, how to confront their fears, and how to make adjustments in their own behavior to handle sudden changes.

Equine-Assisted Psychotherapy is a form of therapy that patients tend to associate with having fun, and they usually look forward to these sessions. The therapy is removed from many of the negative ideas and emotions which surround the therapy process and the therapist, so it becomes easier for the therapist to gain the patient's trust and respect, which makes the therapy much more effective much quicker.

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