Equine Facilitated Therapy

Equine Facilitated Therapy offers an environment to learn about yourself, how you interact in the world, how your behaviour affects others and how their behaviours affect you. Learning these skills have a positive impact on how you live your life.

At Thoughts and Soul, we offer a friendly, non-judgemental space to learn more about yourself. We work with the horses to experience and learn these new skills.  We can help clients learn about, but not limited to, themselves, boundaries, emotional resilience, emotional understanding, trust, communication skills and relationship skills. Horses are herd animals and social in nature which gives them a heightened awareness of the rest of the herd. This means that they can sense emotional and behavioural changes within the herd. When we do this work with them, we (the client) are included in their herd, they will pick up on the clients emotional, behavioural changes and reflect that back to us. We call this feedback.

At Thoughts and Soul, the horses are treated as facilitators in their own right, they are not tools in this process.

Working closely with the horse in a trusted and supportive environment can be an incredibly rewarding experience and the new skills learned with the horses can be transferred into everyday life. We are in no doubt about the positive effects that Equine Facilitated Therapy can have in helping people to deal with social, emotional, and behavioural problems, and to encourage them to change and grow as individuals.

Why do we use horses?

Horses are social animals and have their very own role within their herd. They have their own personalities and most importantly, they are honest with no hidden agenda which allows them to give us powerful messages.
Horses live entirely in the present, they respond at that very moment, this allows the client to become more aware of their intentions, actions and emotions. Because they are prey animals they are sensitive to emotional changes within the herd and react accordingly. Within sessions we can use the horses’ reactions and feed this back to the client. They are our mirrors and our teachers. They act with congruence.

Equine Facilitated Therapy is non-directive and a non-confrontational way to help you to read and understand the signals others send, identify your own skills and strengths and, realise your potential.

We offer an encouraging and supportive environment and we aim to improve the physical, mental and emotional well-being of people.