Equine and Natural Therapy
Equine assisted therapy is extremely powerful. What is truly extraordinary about it is that they reflect the emotion of the individual. So if you are making eye contact with those horses, and they are trusting you, you will feel it in how the horse responds to you. If you're not trusting them and your hiding all kinds of feelings, secrets that you've kept for a long time, the horse will show it and the therapist will know it. Those are the things that they're going to work through with you and therapize, things that you're feeling that you just can't verbalize.
During the progress of the treatment, it becomes apparent that as the trust develops between you and the horses, that suddenly you are able to talk about things that have burdened you and have kept you totally afraid to go into areas that need to be dealt with for you to progress on to wholeness.
Many of our clients would not have a successful completion of this program without the equine assisted therapy. It is probably one of the most powerful types of therapy that you can have. Plus in addition to that, the caring for the horses, the feeding of the horses, and the nurturing of them teaches them the skills of self-nurturing again. Looking after one 's self. Because many times during addiction and substance use, people have stopped feeding themselves on a regular basis, they've stopped caring for their clothes; they've stopped caring for their environment. This teaches them how to do that all over again.
And along with that exterior therapy, we do gardening therapy; learning how to grow things, to watch them grow, to enjoy growth, to reflect their own growth. We also enjoy a lot of outdoor activities like yoga. And the purpose of that is for people just to be aware of their own bodies. It doesn't matter what size you are, whether you're big, your small, you're fat, your thin, you're black, you're white; it is being happy with yourself, whatever form that takes. Getting comfortable with just who you are.
We have swimming activities. We have ball activities like volleyball. We have a full ball field where we do family therapy and we work as teams also and again, much of the unspoken is spoken through how people respond to loss and it also demonstrates how comfortable they are with their own bodies and with themselves.
And that's why it is so important that it is a female-specific facility, and not just a facility, but it must be a female-specific program. Women are less strong than men, women have monthly cycles, women bear children, women have parental expectations, they have parenting expectations, they have career limitations. All of these things have to be carefully reviewed in the program and are specific to being a woman and that is why both the program and the facility are dedicated to that gender and to needs of that gender specifically.