By Claire Dorotik, LMFT

“The outside of a horse is good for the inside of a man.”

If this statement is really true, there should be many uses for equine psychotherapy. However, being that the field of equine psychotherapy is relatively new, do we know if this is an appropriate method of treatment for trauma clients?

Sure, there have been many alternative forms of treating trauma clients — EMDR, biofeedback, meditation, even yoga — to describe just a few. What these forms of treatment share is the task of engaging the client’s awareness of both emotional and sensory responses to traumatic events.

In doing so, these methods attempt to identify the client’s emotional personality (EP), or the part of the personality that develops in response to being emotionally overwhelmed, and provide a means through which the client can integrate the EP with the apparently normal personality (ANP), or the part of the personality that develops in order to function on a daily basis.

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