FAMILY MATTERS by Jude Dobson

Jude Dobson | 6th February 2010

EAGALA is unlikely to be something you have heard about, I'm picking. Me neither, until late last year when I was lucky enough to learn more about it.

EAGALA is the Equestrian Assisted Growth and Learning Association. In a nutshell, it is what the power of the horse can do for the fragility of the human spirit, in particular those people needing help to address things in their lives they are having difficulty dealing with.

The association's been going for 10 years in the USA with great success, but it's still only a fairly recent arrival here. This week and next, however, trainers from the States will be here to boost our number of practitioners. I was fortunate to see its work in practice and, without doubt, it is a therapy worth pursuing.

I confess to being a horsey girl, spending my teenage years with horses and developing a real love and respect for these beautiful creatures. They are quite my favourite animal. If time and money were things I could call on in the volumes needed to look after a horse the way it deserves, I would love to share my life with one again.

To the uninitiated, though, horses are a somewhat big, scary proposition to be around.

An EAGALA session involves a horse and two therapists, one an equine specialist and the other a trained counsellor. The group I was with comprised teachers who deal with children who have behavioural problems. They had come along to the session to see how it works by being clients themselves.

The client does not actually ride the horse. They simply share the same space. The marvellous thing about horses (like humans) is that they each have their own distinctive personality. Jimmy is a (middle-aged) 13-year-old horse who was abused as a youngster. He is understandably standoffish and not too keen on anyone getting overly cosy with him. Yet, to his owner of four years who has shown him love and respect, he is anything but.

Tai, on the other hand, is only four. His human equivalent might be a playful, mischievous child or at other times a teenager with ADHD. As it was so beautifully explained to the group, horses are like snowflakes. You might think at first glance they all look the same, but on closer inspection they are all different... just as we are.

However - and this is the gem in this therapy - they do all mirror our behaviour. Get stroppy and try to bully the horse into doing what you want and you'll get a horse that won't want a bar of you and will let you know it.

A client who was a boundary pusher at home with his parents tried to push the limits of being understanding with the horse on a given task and, of course, could not achieve the required outcome. The lesson was learned. Bringing things back a bit and delivering what the horse expects of you in a certain timeframe means they respect you, understand your needs and will oblige happily.

It is a lesson that is easily translated into human interaction. The "stubborn, antagonistic" horse might just change their behaviour miraculously when the human interacting with them changes their own behaviour first.

Another of life's useful tools was demonstrated to us with the horses: do as you always do, and nothing will change. Change your behaviour for the better and those around you may magically do so as well. As a counsellor on a YouTube clip from EAGALA America noted, copious counselling sessions talking about one's dysfunctional behaviours, and the fallout thereof, to the people around you, can be so successfully brought to life by the non-verbal communication of a horse in a few short sessions. Plus, there is an "out of your comfort zone" factor in being in an enclosed space with a large animal instead of in a comfy chair in a counsellor's room. The experience is an in-your-face incentive to participate actively in your own therapy.

I hope EAGALA NZ will make a difference here as it has in other countries. As Winston Churchill once rather pithily opined, "There is something about the outside of a horse that is good for the inside of a man."