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NO SECRET SO CLOSE excerpt #14, by Claire Dorotik

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NO SECRET SO CLOSE is the story of a the most unthinkable betrayal humanly possible — at only 24 years old, Claire Dorotik’s father has been murdered, her mother arrested, and now, in a sinister twist of fate, Claire’s mother points the finger at Claire, accusing her of killing her own father. Battling the feelings of loss, abandonment, terror, and dissociation, and also learning about them, Claire struggles to stay in her master’s program for psychotherapy. However, when Claire’s brothers also betray her and side with her mother, Claire is left all alone to care for the 18 horses she and her mother owned. As the story unfolds, what is revealed is the horses’ amazing capacity for empathy in the face of human trauma, and the almost psychic ability to provide the author with what had been taken from her. Arising from these horrifying circumstances, the most unthinkable heroes — the horses — show Claire that life is still worth living.

Excerpt #14 from NO SECRET SO CLOSE:

“No offer refused,” was what I had scribbled on a piece of cardboard with a permanent marker. We had eleven horses at the time and could only take five. That meant three trips in a two-horse trailer from Tucson, Arizona to Morgan Hill, California. My mom, my friend Kim, and I, made at least twenty signs and posted them on any street sign we could find all over the east side of Tucson, Arizona. Kim wrote the “fire sale” signs, I wrote the “no offer refused” signs, and my mom wrote the “fine horseflesh” signs. I thought horseflesh sounded weird, but she insisted that people equated it to quality horses.

It was the no offer refused part that caught the attention of the middle aged Hispanic man who came and bought three of the horses. We had made a package deal. They were all nice horses, but it was the young stallion that he really wanted. Hispanic men seem to be attracted to stallions. They dress them up with fancy saddles and bridles garnished with silver, teach them to do tricks, and use them in parades. They call them charro horses. But they are not known for being nice to them, and he didn’t even want to ride any of the horses first. I knew that would be my last goodbye. And my gut told me their lives would not be easy. I made Kim promise to tell me if she ever saw them again.

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Contributors/Press, Equine Assisted Therapy, Publications/Media

Equine Therapy: The Healing Is in the Relationship, by Claire Dorotik MA

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While there are numerous complaints clients can present with and probably an even greater abundance of ways to treat these ailments, the majority of practitioners would most likely agree that the majority of them stem from the relationships that people find themselves in. Or perhaps, these present relationships are reflections of the more formative earlier ones. In either case, there is no shortage of methods to help people better understand themselves and their relationships.

One of these methods of fostering self awareness is equine therapy. And like many other forms of treatment, working with horses has taken many forms. While some organizations focus solely on creating and implementing exercises for clients to perform with horses, others attempt to generalize the client’s behavior with the horse to other, more fractured areas of his/her life. The thought in both cases in that if the client can learn how to alter his/her behavior across a multitude of situations, the outcomes will be different, and hopefully, more satisfying.

The benefits of these methods of equine therapy, are not to be missed, however, what is often overlooked is the relationship with the horse that is transpiring in the present moment. Within this relationship, the client, with his complexity of both conscious feelings, and the more misunderstood, unconscious ones is available to the horse. This is an important point because in human relationships, unconscious feelings, drives and motives greatly affect the outcome, albeit under the conscious awareness of the people who are affected. Horses, on the other hand, cannot avoid being aware of unconscious feelings, as they have physiological ramifications within the person, and horses communicate almost exclusively through physiological cues and signals. So while people respond to the conscious presentation of a person, a horse responds to the unconscious presentation.

What of course this means to the practitioner is that the horse, through his response to the client, provides a window into the unconscious. Armed with this information, the therapist can then have much greater efficacy in helping the client understand himself, and his relationships. And this, after all, is the purpose of psychotherapy.

Community/Charity, Contributors/Press, Publications/Media

NO SECRET SO CLOSE excerpt #13, by Claire Dorotik

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NO SECRET SO CLOSE is the story of a the most unthinkable betrayal humanly possible — at only 24 years old, Claire Dorotik’s father has been murdered, her mother arrested, and now, in a sinister twist of fate, Claire’s mother points the finger at Claire, accusing her of killing her own father. Battling the feelings of loss, abandonment, terror, and dissociation, and also learning about them, Claire struggles to stay in her master’s program for psychotherapy. However, when Claire’s brothers also betray her and side with her mother, Claire is left all alone to care for the 18 horses she and her mother owned. As the story unfolds, what is revealed is the horses’ amazing capacity for empathy in the face of human trauma, and the almost psychic ability to provide the author with what had been taken from her. Arising from these horrifying circumstances, the most unthinkable heroes — the horses — show Claire that life is still worth living.

Excerpt #13 from NO SECRET SO CLOSE:

In the end, it was she who made the first move. Stepping up to the car, she handed me a piece of paper. “Claire, your dad’s not back from his run,” she said, her voice trembling. “You need to call the police sergeant right away. Ok? He wants to know Bob’s running routes.” On the paper, she had scribbled the name, Sergeant Brady, and a phone number.

I had run with my dad enough to know there could only be one reason he hadn’t returned. He’d been hurt. My body went numb with the thought of what, or who, might have overtaken him. I had felt that strangeness in the area any number of times while running, and knew he had too. We’d never exactly spoken about our fears. But we had all kinds of names for the strange types we’d see while running.

It could have been me, was all I could think. Why him and not me? I would have been an easier target, certainly.

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Contributors/Press, Equine Assisted Therapy, Publications/Media

Equine Therapy and ADHD: How It Works, by Claire Dorotik MA

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For as long as the diagnosis of ADHD has been recognized, there have been experiential methods to treat it. From wilderness excursions to ropes courses, therapists have looked for ways to help those children burdened with high anxiety, short attention span, inability to focus and complete tasks, and heightened excitability, learn to understand and manage their condition. However, one of the difficulties that has been encountered repeatedly in working with ADHD children is a way to teach them the necessary social skills to develop effective relationships. As often those around ADSHD children will complain about their apparent lack of interest, difficulty in carrying on a meaningful conversation, and maintaining accountability, relationships are often strained. And while they may be able to learn to use goal and completion charts to organize and complete their own tasks, children with ADHD may continue to struggle with face to face interactions. While verbal reminders have fallen short, therapists have turned to non-verbal methods to help these children identify how they present and the impact that it has on those around them. This is where equine therapy has, of recent, been utilized quite intently.

So how is it that being around a horse can effectively help a child who has trouble focusing in the first place? To answer this question, we must first understand that ADHD is expressed as a hypervigilance to the environment. While the attention of those not affected by ADHD can be held quite sufficiently by one component of their environment, ADHD children are constantly switching their focus from one thing to another, and digesting little feedback from the world around them in the process. This hypervigilance is very similar to the physiology of a nervous horse. However, the difference is that for a horse experiencing this kind of heightened arousal, the pertinent response would be to run. After all, fear initiates flight. And in fleeing, the physiological components of arousal would be actualized and the system reset — essentially, the horse would calm back down.

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NO SECRET SO CLOSE excerpt #12, by Claire Dorotik

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NO SECRET SO CLOSE is the story of a the most unthinkable betrayal humanly possible — at only 24 years old, Claire Dorotik’s father has been murdered, her mother arrested, and now, in a sinister twist of fate, Claire’s mother points the finger at Claire, accusing her of killing her own father. Battling the feelings of loss, abandonment, terror, and dissociation, and also learning about them, Claire struggles to stay in her master’s program for psychotherapy. However, when Claire’s brothers also betray her and side with her mother, Claire is left all alone to care for the 18 horses she and her mother owned. As the story unfolds, what is revealed is the horses’ amazing capacity for empathy in the face of human trauma, and the almost psychic ability to provide the author with what had been taken from her. Arising from these horrifying circumstances, the most unthinkable heroes — the horses — show Claire that life is still worth living.

Excerpt #12 from NO SECRET SO CLOSE:

I don’t think I’ll ever stop replaying that day in my mind. As if I could somehow make it come out differently.  Makes no sense, of course, but I couldn’t stop the endless spooling of memory. If I could, I’d have to let go, I guess of wishing I could have prevented it.

I paid the toll and entered the 405 freeway headed for home looking down at the speedometer, I saw I was going too fast.  I’d stayed longer than I wanted to at my aunt’s house, and it was getting late now. The weekend with her had helped clear my head as it always did. Lately I’d been too busy to think. Only one semester away from receiving my undergraduate degree, I was already two semesters into my graduate program. That’s just the way things were: Up at five a.m. to train clients at the gym three days a week, followed by a rushed car ride to school the five jumpers I was training before it was too dark to ride, then a quick run down to the lake and back home by nine p.m. The other two days were back-to-back classes.

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Contributors/Press, Equine Assisted Therapy, Publications/Media

Equine Therapy: What Every Treatment Center Needs to Know, by Claire Dorotik MA

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With equine therapy abounding, it has quickly become a status symbol among the country’s most prestigious treatment centers. However, while promulgating their use of horses to uncover the hidden emotions of substance abuse and dual diagnosis patients has become popular, many centers have also struggled with how best to offer this valuable treatment.

When equine therapy first emerged on the forefront, there was really no set protocol to be followed. While some centers purchased their own horses — and further advertised the availability of the horses on the grounds — others contracted out this modality through an independent provider. Further complicating the matter, some employed the use of both a licensed therapist and a horse handler, while others simply utilized the horse handler, or the psychotherapist who happened to “like” horses. However, as one can only imagine with any new, relatively unproven, modality, the outcomes were scattered and accidents happened.

And even when there was a clear method to follow, as presented by the Equine Growth and Learning Association, or EAGALA (www.eagala.org), work with horses wasn’t free of harm. To be sure, over the past five years, EAGALA reported more accidents than any other equine therapy approach. (Reports on any psychotherapeutic harm that may have occurred as a result of the inappropriate “interpretations” of untrained horse handlers are not available.) Yet perhaps due to the presentation of exercises such as “temptation alley” that correlated with what substance abuse and eating disorder patients might be experiencing, EAGALA was also the most popular method of practicing equine therapy.

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NO SECRET SO CLOSE excerpt #11, by Claire Dorotik

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NO SECRET SO CLOSE is the story of a the most unthinkable betrayal humanly possible — at only 24 years old, Claire Dorotik’s father has been murdered, her mother arrested, and now, in a sinister twist of fate, Claire’s mother points the finger at Claire, accusing her of killing her own father. Battling the feelings of loss, abandonment, terror, and dissociation, and also learning about them, Claire struggles to stay in her master’s program for psychotherapy. However, when Claire’s brothers also betray her and side with her mother, Claire is left all alone to care for the 18 horses she and her mother owned. As the story unfolds, what is revealed is the horses’ amazing capacity for empathy in the face of human trauma, and the almost psychic ability to provide the author with what had been taken from her. Arising from these horrifying circumstances, the most unthinkable heroes — the horses — show Claire that life is still worth living.

Excerpt #11 from NO SECRET SO CLOSE:

“Come again.”

We trotted back again, and I glanced at Bill’s face. So far no reaction.

He squared the oxer, and pulled the ground lines out a little.

“Canter back over.”

Nimo hopped into the canter with enthusiasm, and galloped roundly toward the oxer. We jumped confidently and cantered off. Still nothing, and Bill raised the rails on each side.

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Do Horses Bond Like People Do? by Claire Dorotik MA

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Human attachments are a complex business. For one thing, when two people come together, they are often unaware of just what it is about one another that creates the attraction. On the other hand, when we are repelled by another person, identifying what about them bothers us is not the problem, yet why this behavior or characteristic infuriates us is quite another matter. But in the world of psychology, categorizing attachments styles has shed much light into the complexities of relationships. Now enter horses. When a horse and a person meet, are horses prone to the same types of attachments that people are? That is to say, can we actually classify their relationships with us or one another into categories the way we do with people?

Looking in the matter further, some established horsemen have attempted to do just that. Pat Parelli, (www.parellinaturalhorsetraining.com), one of the forerunners of the natural horse movement, promulgates what he calls “horsenality types.” Using a pie chart with related descriptions, Parelli breaks down horses’ personalities into four basic types, right brain introvert, right brain extrovert, left brain introvert, and left brain extrovert.

On the other side of the coin, some equine therapy programs attempt to address attachment styles of participants through the horse’s responses to them. One prominent one, Gestalt Equine Therapy (www.gestaltequinepsychotherapy.com), addresses this topic by using congruence levels of people — as reflected by the horse’s willingness to be near them — to determine secure, vs. insecure attachments styles. The idea is that when a person is experiencing congruence, his/her attachment style can be said to be secure. While this approach can be quite revealing about the participants attachment style, the horse’s attachment style is not taken into consideration.

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Community/Charity, Contributors/Press, Publications/Media

NO SECRET SO CLOSE excerpt #10, by Claire Dorotik

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NO SECRET SO CLOSE is the story of a the most unthinkable betrayal humanly possible — at only 24 years old, Claire Dorotik’s father has been murdered, her mother arrested, and now, in a sinister twist of fate, Claire’s mother points the finger at Claire, accusing her of killing her own father. Battling the feelings of loss, abandonment, terror, and dissociation, and also learning about them, Claire struggles to stay in her master’s program for psychotherapy. However, when Claire’s brothers also betray her and side with her mother, Claire is left all alone to care for the 18 horses she and her mother owned. As the story unfolds, what is revealed is the horses’ amazing capacity for empathy in the face of human trauma, and the almost psychic ability to provide the author with what had been taken from her. Arising from these horrifying circumstances, the most unthinkable heroes — the horses — show Claire that life is still worth living.

Excerpt #10 from NO SECRET SO CLOSE:

“Hi Claire”, she said, in her bubbly, if somewhat tense voice.

Trying to disguise my shock, I replied, “Oh hi Debbie.” It was a big horse show, and as far as I knew, she had only been showing at the smaller shows.

“I heard about your mom,” she stood back and crossed her arms.

“Yeah”, I responded. This again, I thought to myself.

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Contributors/Press, Equine Assisted Therapy, Publications/Media

Can Equine Therapy Improve Sports Performance?, by Claire Dorotik M.A.

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While equine therapy has many fans and many purported benefits, is it possible that this alternative form of therapy can be used to improve sports performance?

Looking to a “head guy” to help with the much sought after perfect golf shot, basketball game, or even ski run is nothing new. These mental specialists have only recently donned their breeches and boots and strode into the equine competition arena. As they have, psych strategies that have long been popular in other sports have made their way onto the back of a horse. Stress reduction strategies, such as progressive muscle relaxation, deep breathing, and cognitive rehearsal, have been among these. Now, even popular riders, such as Jane Savoie (www.janesavoie.com), employ the use of visualization techniques to cement the perfect ride.

Yet with the emergence of sports psychology in the horse world, can our horses actually help us to improve our performance, and possibly ride them better?

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