Tired of talking? Don't want to talk? Well, we have an answer for that.
Horses’ Hooves and Warriors’ Hearts is a non‐residential treatment program that uses horses as part of a therapy team. The sessions occur in an open pen and do not involve any riding. No prior experience with horses is necessary, and, in fact, sometimes the less people know about horses, the better! Two types of equine therapy sessions are available and both use the EAGALA-model team approach: at all times both a licensed mental health professional and an equine specialist professional work with the clients, as well as one or more horses.
Both Equine Assisted Psychotherapy (EAP) and Equine Assisted Learning (EAL) sessions utilize the horses in the same way, after all, they don’t know what kind of session they are in, but the session goals are different. EAP is a powerful psychotherapeutic approach that can address many life challenges and clinical issues such as PTSD. EAL sessions focus on education, learning and skill development.
Horses are prey animals. The nature of prey animals is to be acutely aware of their environment at all times. This capacity to notice and respond instinctively to subtle shifts in their surroundings means that horses are often in a state of hyper arousal, not unlike human trauma survivors. For horses, this heightened awareness and hypersensitivity assures both their individual survival and the survival of the herd. As part of this survival instinct, horses are finely tuned to the emotions fueling or underlying the behavior of people interacting with them. This is what they respond to. Horses can't talk, but they give us an incredible amount of feedback about our actions and body language through a process called mirroring. We learn what is going on with our human clients by watching what the horses are doing.
Working with horses can help people:
identify and change old patterns and behaviors
enhance the ability to solve problems
communicate
improve relationships
build confidence and self control
increase trust
set healthy and safe boundaries
It can also address trauma symptoms as well as help families renegotiate roles and responsibilities, help children and adolescents with adjustment and deployment difficulties, and re-establish trust.
You’ve been going it alone for long enough. Sometimes the best therapist is - a horse!
Horses’ Hooves and Warriors’ Hearts is a non‐residential treatment program that uses horses as part of a therapy team. The sessions occur in an open pen and do not involve any riding. No prior experience with horses is necessary, and, in fact, sometimes the less people know about horses, the better! Two types of equine therapy sessions are available and both use the EAGALA-model team approach: at all times both a licensed mental health professional and an equine specialist professional work with the clients, as well as one or more horses. 
