How Equine Therapy Helped A Troubled Teenage Girl
Sixteen-year-old Susan Smith called Copper Canyon Academy home for the past two years. It is a therapeutic boarding school for troubled girls 14 to 17 years old and offers a college prep program, a traditional therapeutic program, and Equestrian Therapy.
"I was having a lot of anger issues," Susan explains. "Anger with myself, with my parents, with my sister, with my life basically. I needed to learn how to control my anger and what to do if I'm spiraling out of control." It was her mother's idea to attend a residential school" Susan's mother had been looking at boarding schools for over a year. They consulted with an educational consultant, and the consultant helped them get Susan into Copper Canyon Academy. "I started therapy when I was around six years of age when my parents divorced," Susan says. "It wasn't a big problem then, but it developed into a bigger problem later." She admits she was flying into rages, both yelling and hitting.
The period of time leading up to Susan's enrollment in Copper Canyon Academy was tumultuous. "I was going in and out of hospitals before they sent me to Copper Canyon," Diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, doctors were trying to adjust Susan's medication, hoping that it would calm her down. "I have more problems with the ADHD because I can't sit still. I can't focus on one thing for a very long time. But I'd rather not be on any of my medication," she says.
At the end of each hospital stay, she was voluntarily dismissed with an agreed upon plan between the hospital therapist, social worker, and psychiatrist. After her fourth or fifth hospital stay in 4 months, she came home, but Susan's behavior was not improving. Three weeks after her final hospital discharge in 2005, it was decided that she was going to attend Copper Canyon Academy as they were able to take her immediately.
In order to participate in the Equine Therapy program at CCA the students are required to take the Canine Therapy Program. "The canine experience is really fun," Susan says. "A lot of times you're working with puppies because they need to be trained, so you're trying to get them to sit, but they won't listen to you because they don't know what it means. You're trying to teach them to sit, stay, roll over, jump, and it takes a lot of time and patience, so it's taught me how to be patient with things." When Susan completed the Canine Therapy program, she began Equine Therapy.
Her experience with Equine Therapy at Copper Canyon turned out to be a lot of fun. "When I went to Equine Therapy, we played a lot with the horses and worked with them. We worked on getting closer with the horses because some weren't great people horses because they had been abused. I don't think there was anything I didn't like about Equine Therapy. It really helped me because I don't like talking a lot in therapy. Because I've been doing it since I was six, it gets really boring after ten years. To me, getting to work with animal is a lot different."
In many ways, the equine experience is more like playing than anything resembling the anguish of talk therapy. Susan actually did a lot of talking to the horses, and according to the Copper Canyon website, the horses "serve as co-therapists, providing unconditional positive regard, setting firm boundaries, testing student's boundaries and providing students with an opportunity to learn to empathize, nurture, and care for others. Animals don't lie, manipulate, or cheat. They are direct in their communication and they respond to direct and clear communication from others. As students work with the animals, they begin to realize that lying, manipulating and cheating don't work; they begin to form bonds and to expand their horizons beyond themselves."
"We play a lot of games in the equine program," Susan explains. "One of the hardest game that I've ever played is called Pinball. You had no verbal communication with the horse, and you had to lead the horse through an obstacle, and you couldn't use grass or anything to get it to follow you. It was really difficult and nobody ever passed the course. There were other things that we did too, like going into fields where there were two or three horses, and we followed them and talked to them and tried to get to know them. It's not like I sit there and talk to them all the time. I'm petting them and trying to get a better idea of who they are."
Susan also had the opportunity to ride horses, and she took riding lessons. "I've been riding since fifth grade, and I always got close with the horse really fast, but at school I was able to learn more about a horse from its background history. Things like why they might not like people touching them, or why they're afraid of people in general," she says. "I wasn't really good at picking things that like up before equine therapy. Being around horses makes me feel better about myself. When I go riding, I feel better about myself because it's something I do really well."
Equine Therapy taught Susan how to read body language - something she had difficulty doing before. "If the horse walks away, I can see that they don't want to be around somebody right then. And I would look in their eyes and try to have a conversation with my mind. I learned how to get a better connection with the horse, and I learned how to read body movements better."
Susan recently returned home, but she didn't finish the program due to a lack of funds. "I want to go back," she admits. "It's really hard because I have so many friends there and I was really attached to them. But I talk to my friends from the program all the time, and I'm going to California to visit one of them, so it's a mixed combo."
Susan says that she really enjoyed going to school and therapy at Copper Canyon. Today, she continues her work with horses near home, and there are some advantages to working privately. "There were six other girls besides me at the equine program at school, and we just worked with one horse, so it was hard to tell who the horse was reacting to. Now I work with horses one-on-one all the time, and it's easier to tell if it's me or if it's the teacher," she says.
Susan has returned from her boarding school experience a happier, calmer person. "I was really helped by the program," she says. "I learned a lot of tools there that I might not have learned if I had stayed home. I am really grateful for the opportunity to go to Copper Canyon."
* All family names in this interview have been changed to protect the privacy of the family.