Equine Therapy: Happy Trails to You!



Prince and I, Circa 1941

Bob Dylan said it right:  "The times they are a changin'"  Along with society's changing times in general, changes are coming into my personal life.  I'm about to relocate to Chehalis, Washington, and with this relocation will come huge changes in my therapy and in other aspects of my life.  Why the relocation?

My main reasons for relocating are that once again I find myself being priced out of my housing--the rent goes up, and my income remains static--and I want to return to a more rural area.  I have applied for HUD housing, the kind that keeps my rent at 30% of my income.  I have lived in this sort of housing three times, and I swore I would never live in this housing again, but as somebody said, "desperate times require desperate measures . . ."  My present apartment and my previous apartment were classed as "affordable housing."  The problem with "affordable housing" is that it gives no protection from unaffordable rent increases.  Oh, there is a ceiling on the rents, but the ceiling changes to accommodate the rent increases, so the so-called ceiling is no protection at all for those of us who are living on the financial edge.

I've reached a point in therapy where I can make a transition.  My work with Ego State Therapy prepared me well for EMDR, and the work I have done in EMDR has helped me deactivate the trauma energy accumulated from the most devastating of the childhood traumas.  Yes, EMDR does what it is cracked up to do!  I can certainly vouch for that.  My therapist and I plan to go full steam to do as much EMDR work as possible so that when I leave, I will have rendered a lot of the trauma energy harmless--inasmuch as possible, at any rate.  So what is the next step?  The answer to this question is complex; however, I will attempt to answer it clearly.

A couple of weeks ago, I read a very depressing article by Allan N. Schore, PhD, a member of the faculty at UCLA and a prominent name in the area of infant attachment.  Here is a link to his article: http://www.francinelapides.com/docs-mar-2008/Schore-5.pdf  After I read this article, I asked myself, "Why am I working so hard in therapy?  According to this article, healing is a hopeless prospect for me!"  Of course, I had overlooked the fact that already I have experienced some healing in that I have alleviated my PTSD symptoms and have processed and reduced the effects of some of my childhood traumas.  When I told my therapist how much of a downer Dr. Schore's article seemed, her immediate response was to say, "I don't understand why he didn't tell the other side of the issue.  He described the damages in his first book, and then in his second book, the companion book, he described the process of healing the damage."  Wow!  By the time I left my therapist's office, I was once more my optimistic self, and I even had a copy of Dr. Schore's Affect Regulation and the Repair of the Self to take home and read.  I have not read the book yet--reading it is going to be a challenge for me because I have no background in the field of brain science--but the title alone is enough to justify my optimism.

"Affect Regulation":  What does this term mean?  Very roughly, it has to do with the interaction between an infant and its caregiver and the effect of the interaction upon the infant's ability to regulate its emotions.  This, of course, is a simplistic description of an extremely complex process, but it's the best I can do at this point.  I have not had a chance to Google the term extensively, but if you are curious, you can do that.  If the interaction between infant and caregiver has not been consistent and "good enough," then the infant must somehow deal with its needs and emotions on its own.  The problem is that our brains are not wired to do this solo--we are wired to interact with other humans.  When we, as babies, must do alone what we are wired to do with another human, we run the risk of "getting it wrong."  And as you know, when we lay a flawed foundation and then attempt to build upon this flawed foundation, the whole structure can eventually fall down around our ears. 

As it happens, I am one of millions of adults whose mothers believed that touching babies and responding to their cries between feedings would produce "spoiled" tyrants.  Mothers who believed this and who did not respond to their babies denied their babies the interaction which the babies were naturally wired to expect.  Like many other adults raised by mothers who followed this policy, I have struggled all my life to keep my "structure" from falling down around my ears.  Now that my life is nearing an end, I'm beginning to understand why this struggle has taken so much time and energy, time and energy I could have used in other, more productive and creative ways.  In other words, my caregiver did not interact with me in a way that enabled me to build a solid psychic foundation. 

My recent awakening to the fact that I was cheated of this crucial interaction could cause my state of mind to take a real nosedive; however, I must be, as the song from South Pacific states, a "cockeyed optimist" because I don't do nosedives that easily.  And when I do nosedive, I seem to pull out of it when I find the slightest grain of hope or inspiration.  Granted, I spent the first few weeks of my life in a sterile hospital nursery waiting for my mother to recover from her kidney ailment so she could take me home.  Not much interaction with a caregiver there!  And then when we did go home, there still was not much mother-baby "mirroring" because I was on a strict four-hour feeding schedule with no interaction between times.  Very typical of the times--the era from 1900 through 1945.  As I said, there are millions of people running around who survived the same type of infancy I survived--unfortunately, some infants did not survive, victims of the "failure to thrive" syndrome.  So now that I am aware of this deficit within my psyche, what can I do about it?  This leads me to the next step in my therapy, the prospect of participating in equine therapy. 

What is equine therapy?  Here is a link to a site that answers this question: 
http://humanequinealliance.org/the-heal-model/  In short, equine therapy is psychotherapy that involves interacting with horses.  As I stated at the beginning of this article, I am hoping to relocate to Chehalis, Washington, and just outside Chehalis is the therapy ranch discussed on the web site attached to the link.  My present therapist, a clinical psychologist, is as excited about the possibility of my participating in equine therapy as I am.  We both see this therapy as a good next step because the work with horses will give me a chance to do some repair work on the foundation of my psyche, the affect regulation work that I did not have the chance to do when I was an infant. 

Of course, even though I have spoken with Leigh Shambo, the person who runs the therapy ranch, and have been given the go-ahead, I still have to be sure of the funding.  However, my insurance may pay for this.  If it does, then I'm in--as soon as I relocate.  I'm excited about this opportunity!  And as Leigh Shambo says, horse therapy is not only beneficial--it's just plain fun!  And I'm up for that! 

As I stated at the beginning of this post, the times are changing, and my life is changing.  Transitions are hard--what an understatement that is!  But the challenge of a transition can be energizing.  We'll see how this transition goes.  Here is a quote by Andy Warhol that pretty much says it all:  They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.  I need to remember these words!