Equine Therapy

Serenity Reins provides mental health services for ages 6 and up. Our clinician is specially trained to incorporate the horse into the overall plan of care to help build skills for better daily living. Horse and clinician are joined by a skilled equine specialist to create safe and effective sessions. Equine-assisted psychotherapy, both mounted and unmounted, helps people move forward from trauma, anxiety, depression and the challenges of living with mental illness.

Studies show that equine-assisted therapy can have the following benefits:

Enhance problem solving & social skills
Learn empathy and stimulate creativity
Gain a sense of personal control
Learn stress, anger & frustration management
Decrease feelings of hopelessness & depression
Learn better communication skills
Build a strong & positive perception of self
Learn cause & effect - taking responsibility
Find direction, focus & meaning for life/future

Clients can expect to learn about the care of horses, as well as learn how to develop a relationship based on patience, trust, and respect which then equips a person to transfer that knowledge to human relationships. There is no need to have previous horse experience to participate in equine-assisted therapy.

Meet the Horses

Wild Hearts n' Horses Website

In trauma-focused equine-assisted psychotherapy (TF-EAP), the therapist employs a trauma-informed lens that enables them to address anxiety and other mental health issues from a neurobiological perspective. TF-EAP treatment emphasizes the reorganization and integration of the brain to heal trauma and related neurophysiological disorders that affect regulation and relationships. Anxiety disorders are of several types, including generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder and panic attacks, social anxiety, separation anxiety, selective mutism, and specific phobias. Treating anxiety through a trauma lens means the therapist seeks to understand the neurobiological patterns, which are often adaptive responses to trauma, underlying the anxiety the client experiences. The goal of the TF-EAP session is to integrate neural networks in the brain so that the client becomes increasingly able to override anxiety through top-down cognitive strategies, such as mindful breathing and self-calming techniques (Jobe, Schultz-Jobe, & McFarland, 2018).