The Turning Point at Trowbridge’s Ltd, based out of Bridgewater, Connecticut, is gratified and honored for the last year’s opportunities to take our mission across the country. We recently came back from a trip to California to meet with our friends and partners at Psynergy, which provides a range of services including mental health, medication support, case management services and equine assisted learning.
Equine Assisted Learning and the emotional agility that horses have taught humans for over 5000 years is the basis of The Turning Point’s curriculum. Our Equine Assisted Learning program focuses on the vital skills of emotional recognition and creates healthy responses through exercises in learning with the oldest breed of horse in the world, the Arabian horse.
Our plan was to educate Psynergy on the best way to incorporate innovative equine assisted learning programs into their already established equine services on behalf of their own clients. We encouraged Psynergy to help their clients understand the value of equine assisted learning in healing, confidence building and team building. The crucial life skills of staying present, grounded and in the moment are developed over the course of the program as well.
Why Horses?
While today’s horses have been domesticated for thousands of years, they never forget that they are prey animals. Horses are keenly aware of their own vulnerability, and their chief survival skill is in being hyper aware of the emotional intent, heart rate and respiration of all of the beings in their immediate area. Their sensitivity to our own intentions naturally requires us to be honest, clear, and trustworthy. Horse’s ability to “Mirror” other’s emotional state helps facilitate participants’ recognition of the emotions in themselves and to learn the correct responses to these emotions as they occur
One of our Psynergy participants asked the question of whether they were being trained both to handle horses or do equine assisted learning. Our answer? Both! In order to best facilitate a safe and productive equine assisted learning environment, we emphasize the importance of horse handling and therapy so that our own clients can in turn assist their clients in the most fulfilling way possible.
It is essential that anyone who is working in the field of equine assisted learning/ therapy become fluent in the realm of emotion and be able to help clients develop what counselor Karla McLaren calls “emotional agility.” This term refers to the ability to use emotion without being caught in the vicious cycle of suppressing or expressing feelings without changing something in response to them: To be able to get the message behind the emotion, to adjust behavior, relationship of environment accordingly, and then let that emotion go and return to homeostasis.
This training is important as horses have a neo-cortex, the part of the brain responsible for learning and higher thought. As a result, horses understand emotions, and even the gentlest horses will notice incongruence when a handler wears a mask of confidence and wellbeing designed to hide any emotion. It is as if this person appears out of focus to the equine awareness system. Some people sum up this phenomenon by saying “the horse can smell fear” despite it being much more complicated than this simple statement suggests. Horses often mirror the precise emotion being suppressed, then calm down the moment the handler acknowledges that feeling himself, even if the emotion is still there.
This is why experiential learning with horses is so effective as a diagnostic tool alone. To be effective and of assistance in this process however, it is essential for the facilitators to be able to help people recognize, process and respond appropriately to their emotions, rather than simply unearth them.
The trip was a resounding success and we were thrilled to hear overwhelmingly positive feedback from all of our attendees. It’s why we are pleased to be able to offer corporate and business training seminars, group workshops and strategy sessions on how to best utilize equine assisted learning on behalf of your own organization, or to foster team building. Contact us today to learn more!
