A few facts:
According to the Blue Cross Blue Shield Health Index, major depression “is
the second most impactful condition on overall health for commercially insured
Americans, second to hypertension (high blood pressure).” That’s 9 million people.
For Rev. Lynne Phipps, it’s interactive equine therapy.
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Phipps said that her own experiences, coupled with how
she’d observed how horses benefited others, made her
realize that more people needed access to horses and the
therapeutic help they offer.
Enter Beachwood Center for Wellbeing, a company that
exists on a seaside farm in Wakefield for the past two years.
Phipps and Beachwood’s methods are so uniquely successful
that they’ve garnered the attention of Brown
University, which began an evaluation of the organization’s
therapeutic approach in January. In fact, researchers
haven written Phipps: “Early examination of the data shows
consistent decreases in depression, anxiety and stress
scores. Patients are also reporting improvements in their
subjective sense of well-being.”
But what is that process? Phipps explained: Clients come
to Beachwood typically dealing with anxiety, depression,
PTSD and other health issues. Over seven, one-and-halfhour
sessions, clients join one of Beachwood’s five horses
and a trained therapist out on the Beachwood farm. There,
they begin interacting with the horse from the ground — no
riding.
The equine therapists are trained to work with both horses
and people, and as such, the horse’s reaction to the client
guides how the therapist leads the session.
“There’s not much talking at all,” Phipps said. “Once a
horse and human are connected, I can see what’s going
on with the human through the behaviors of the horse. …
Oftentimes, people don’t know what’s wrong, but the
horse knows what’s wrong.”
Phipps explains further. “The horse’s responses are quite
subtle,” she said. “They move closer or farther away; they
create safe space for themselves and for the clients to
feel and react, which is why it’s not judgmental. There’s
no shame, because the horse’s physical reactions not
so literal or obvious like seeing our own behavior reflected
back at us.”
“Horses,” Phipps continued, “are objective readers of
people, as they must accurately observe their environment
to survive as a prey animal.”
“They’re constantly aware of who’s around them,” Phipps
said. And, unlike dogs or other pets, horses don’t rely on
the direct influence of the people they interact with to
take care of them — and as such, don’t mirror the surface
moods of their caretakers.
EQUINE Health
Continued...
What’s the solution?
“I started figuring out that horses help people heal,” she said.
“I’ve been a life-long equestrian, but about five years ago, with
one horse in particular, I recognized what he was doing for me.”
Essentially, horses cut through projection and get to the
heart of the matter.
“If you’re anxious, if you’re worried, they’ll show you that
you’re worried,” Phipps said. “It shows up in a really kind,
gentle, wonderful way; there’s no judgement. It’s the most
judgement-free space in the world.”
And it’s a therapy that works, Phipps added. How? The
time with the horses reprograms or rebuilds the neural pathways
— mental and nervous connections between learned
information — that trauma has scrambled or broken,
restoring clients to health.
Phipps told me story after story of clients coming in and
experiencing freedom and recovery after their sessions
with the horses. There’s the client who’d long suffered from
fibromyalgia who was able to leave her therapy pain-free;
a young adult with severe anxiety and panic attacks who
was able to get out of bed, go to school with peace and
ultimately graduate; and one patient’s mother said her
daughter had improved more in the five days she’d spent
with the horses than a month at a large medical center in
New York. These are not the center’s only successes, and
they span age and gender.
“What the therapists are trained to do is create a safe
space to go to those places and get in touch with your
highest self, the person you are at the core of your being
– and then become that person,” Phipps said. “People
oftentimes come to us who aren’t horse people, saying,
‘I’m scared of horses, why horses? all of those things.”
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