What is EAP

Equine-Assisted Psychotherapy and personal development programs are  experiencing rapid growth around the globe because of strong outcomes.

Research shows horses add a compelling dimension to the clinical  experience. They serve as powerful living metaphors and stand-ins for  the challenges and opportunities clients face in their lives.

There is power in experiential learning with horses. Equine therapy  incorporates the use of horses to facilitate positive, long-lasting  behavior changes. As horses are incredibly intuitive creatures,  interacting with them helps to build self-esteem and a connection with  something outside ourselves. A horse’s sensitivity to nonverbal stimulus  gives them an amazing ability to read people and reflect our emotional  states. Horses have an incomparable understanding of the feelings and  emotional stress that a person is going through.

Equine-assisted work often helps clients change and grow more  effectively and quickly than traditional clinical and psycho-educational  approaches. That’s because people typically learn best by doing. Life  lessons take deeper root when individuals both understand them in their  heads and experience them in their bodies. Working with horses is  engaging, real-time, and hands-on. The experience is immediate and fully felt.

A client who has trouble managing anger, for example, can only learn  so much by talking about it out of context in a therapist’s office.  Progress can be slow and results hard to sustain. But when the client  has the opportunity to practice new coping skills with 2,000-pound herd  animals whose survival depends on their ability to read and react to the  inner turmoil of those around them, experience leads to change because  the process is real, practical and sustainable.

In the right professional hands, using a proven professional model,  horses have the power to help clients practice new ways of engaging with  the world without judgment or shame.