Resilience in Equine Assisted Therapy

The relationship between equine assisted therapy and resilience has been little researched, but a comparison of the two areas highlights the value of equine assisted therapy. Horses can be great teachers in building resilience, as learning to work with them requires us to revisit our coping strategies, learn them through persistent and patient work, and apply them appropriately to make our communication clear and our requests to our horses well articulated.

What Is Resilience?

Resilience means that a person successfully adapts to the negative influences that affect him or her. This kind of resilience in coping means that we return to our resting state as soon as possible after a stressful situation. Although it is debatable whether resilience can be considered a personality trait or a current state, it is more likely that research has shown that resilience is understood as a set of protective factors that help a person to adapt appropriately.

The question is: How does equine therapy become a form of therapy that builds resilience, and what factors contribute to empowerment and the acquisition of coping tools?

The Resilience-Enhancing Properties of Equine Assisted Therapy

Below we will look at some of the therapeutic features that help to strengthen resilience.

Observing the herd, observing and learning about the behaviour of the horses, we know that the goal of the herd is always survival, and to achieve this, efficient cooperation and the least energy-consuming interactions. They do this in the shortest possible time and then return to their original resting state. Are we capable of returning to calm so quickly? Even when our daily life or an encounter does not go according to plan, when unexpected influences strike?

It is in the ongoing work with the horse, in the building of a relationship, that we grow in perseverance and in the acceptance that until we develop a shared communication with our horse, we both make mistakes, we can both make mistakes. It takes a lot of patience and adaptation to develop this, so we need to deal with our bad situations with acceptance and work on possible positive outcomes. Recognising situations of difficulty needs to be tailored to our own individual standards, so how we handle a situation with our horse in question depends on our individual resilience and adaptability.

With the right resilience, we can recall our previous positive experiences in difficult situations. We may have memorable and vivid examples of pleasant experiences with horses, but we may be less able to recall them in a less positive situation. In the therapeutic space (with the help of the therapist), we can recall previous experiences where we have successfully communicated with our horses, or tasks where we have successfully accomplished something with our horse.

Understanding how horses perceive people and interact with us can help us to mentalise them. This means being able to switch from our own perspective to another perspective. In this way we can come to a more realistic understanding of the situation.

As long as we don't have the internal tools to get back to a state of calm in which we are comfortable, we can't actually cope easily with a difficult situation. A resilient person is able to become active in the situation he or she finds himself or herself in, actively acting and seeking, shaping and changing situations until he or she is able to be in them properly. Equestrian therapy differs from other forms of therapy in that it is an active, acting method and therefore has resilience-building, shaping and strengthening characteristics.

What does this mean? Not only does the client report his difficulties and stucknesses, but in the so-called inviting situations with the horse, the process of coping with these problems is initiated. The emotional states that first appear are only the first stages of the person's coping potential, how he or she behaves and feels in difficult and challenging situations. This challenging situation may be different for each individual. Some may find it challenging to get on the back of a horse, others to lead it by hand through an obstacle course, and others to make any request to the horse and carry it out.

We can look at the most difficult emotional situations as snapshots, because we can understand what the person is doing with the internal resources and what the influences in his environment are doing to him (the horse's reactions, as it happens). The aim is to steer him in the right direction through the right adaptation processes (gradual, appropriate adjustment), so that he has a good experience with the horse, by the horse.

Here we come to the recognition and application of strengths. Resilience can be increased by openness, by increasing the positive interpretation of events, by optimism, by appropriate self-assessment, by friendliness, by internal control. However, this is unthinkable without resilience, appropriate emotion regulation and attachment. When we revisit learning situations with horses and work on implementing new possible positive outcomes, we help to anchor appropriate problem solving within ourselves. With each good outcome, our horse's appropriate behavioural response reinforces us and our correct actions. Our resilience builds and grows in this way, and the toolbox associated with it expands with our ability to retry in situations that are completely new and unfamiliar to us. This is the case even if we have had several experiences in the past where our request to the horse did not go according to plan.

The possibility to ask for help is particularly important in equine therapy situations. In equine therapy, it is not only the interaction with the horse, but also the therapist as a person who can reinforce and facilitate positive outcomes, and in his or her presence it can be experienced that in certain situations it is important to ask for and receive help, and that this should not be labelled as a weakness, but as a strength and a skill.

Recognising the positive, supportive signals of the horse is as important as the negative behavioural response, as it increases our sense of joy and gradually defines what we have become stronger at, how we can achieve the right communication with our horse and how we have achieved it.

The conditions on the horse's face are a good indication of this comfort, or even a state of discomfort. Signs of pain, stiff ears, tension around the eyes, stiffness of the chewing muscles, flared nostrils, and a pinched tail are behavioural signs of stress. While a relaxed, relaxed, joyful state may be indicated by loose, half-closed eyes, loosely turned back ears, loose chewing muscles. Lansade and colleagues have observed that grooming horses with gentle, pleasurable movements produces a more rapid resting physiological response, while more vigorous grooming is more often performed with a raised neck, wide-open eyes, pursed lips, and asymmetrical ear posture. So, even during a grooming activity, we can observe our own and the horse's condition and practice observing how balance can be restored after a spill.

The aspects mentioned above develop responsibility and recognition for our own feelings, actions, thoughts and resilience. Resilience can be increased and practised and our horses are excellent partners in this. What talents and skills can be strengthened to do this at different ages is discussed further on.

Source

Enhanced Understanding of Horse-Human Interactions to Optimise Welfare, Katrina Merkies, 2021