How Equine Therapy is Used in Addiction Treatment

When confronting a substance use disorder, an addiction to drugs or alcohol, it’s vital to find not only the right treatment program but the right combination of therapies. This means individuals need to look at facilities that provide various therapeutic options and work with clients to create a customized treatment plan to meet specific needs. Addiction treatment isn’t something that can be one-size-fits-all. At Beaches Recovery, we understand that each client has different goals in achieving sobriety. To accommodate this, we offer extensive therapies that are innovative, like our equine therapy program.

Beaches Recovery provides a comprehensive approach to overcoming chemical dependency, alcoholism, and co-occurring disorders. Many clients come to Beaches Recovery with emotional and mental health issues along with their addiction. Therefore, Beaches Recovery offers many experiential therapies, with equine therapy being one of the most popular.

How Does Equine Therapy Work?

Equine therapy provides a unique experience for individuals and groups. Through direct connection with a horse, a client can explore life issues, enhance insight and develop personal goals. The horse is the focus of this experiential approach. By utilizing the horse’s strength, intuition, and expressiveness, participants develop their own methods for transition. The horse’s responsive presence provides feedback and reflection for the participant. Equine therapy provides a safe and active environment to explore solutions to life changes. Areas of focus for equine therapy include Trust, coping skills, self-esteem, depression, grief, loss, anger, team building, and self-harm behaviors.

Horse therapy is often conducted as a group. Each participant in the group will have a moment with the horse, with the group then gaining insight into the horse’s reaction to the individual. This opens up a dialogue about deep fears and concerns that clients are often unaware exist within themselves until they work with a horse.

Benefits of Equine Therapy

Horses have an innate ability to calm angry people and instill pride in achievement in fearful and open communication for people who are bottling their feelings. At first, many clients are apprehensive about horses due to their size. But once clients realize that horses mirror their behaviors without judgment of any kind, the relationship with the horse becomes one of the most rewarding and honest relationships that clients will ever experience. From horses, clients learn how to have honest human relationships in the future and gain insight into how their own nature affects closeness to others and personal growth in themselves.

It has been said that clients can mislead their therapist. However, a horse can only see the truth. Through equine-assisted therapy, both therapists and clients can see the truth of emotional and behavioral issues each client possesses. This helps overcome barriers to recovery and enables clients to develop necessary life skills and personal attributes for a productive life.

Discover Addiction Treatment Options at Beaches Recovery

To treat addiction fully and with lasting results, use all of the resources available to you. At Beaches Recovery in Jacksonville, Florida, equine therapy is just one of the therapies used in treating clients. We understand that as clients progress through treatment, they will need to change their therapeutic approach. Some forms of therapy work better than others for certain people. Thus, we provide a wide range of options, such as

• Anger Management
• EMDR therapy
• Experiential therapy
• Family therapy
• Individual therapy
• Mindfulness-based treatment
• Nutrition therapy
• Trauma therapy
• Cognitive-behavioral therapy
• Dialectical behavior therapy
• Yoga Therapy

All of these therapies and more are available across all our addiction treatment programs. Whether you enter residential, inpatient treatment, or opt for an intensive outpatient program, we provide all clients with the same high-quality care but built around their specific needs. Call 866.605.0532, or contact us online today to learn more about getting on the track to recovery from addiction.