The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Horses help health care workers ease stress
SHARON — Through The Equus Effect, frontline health workers are learning coping strategies to help them get through the coronavirus pandemic and other stressful situations in their lives.
The Equus Effect is a nonprofit organization originally started in 2013 with veterans, and first responders and frontline health workers have been added in recent years.
The organization is intended to teach tools that can be used to increase resil
“The whole point is to settle yourself down, and if you’re settled down, you will deescalate things around you.” Jane Strong
iency, according to Jane Strong, co-founder and executive director.
By working closely with horses, participants learn how to navigate complex situations in their lives, she said.
The flagship programs of The Equus Effect are free. The program is funded through donors and community foundations. Since it was founded, it has helped around 1,000 people, according to Strong.
The work is based on the nature of horses.
“They are prey animals and so they are very sensitive to the intentions of anybody around them, especially predators, and we are predators,” Strong said. “We’re trained as socialized beings to hide our intentions and hide our real feelings. We learn to mask those things, even to ourselves.”
If someone walks into the barn and is anxious, but is hiding it, the horses will pick up on it, and react, according to Strong.
“The horse is feeling something different from this person’s heart rate, respiration and muscle tension,” she said. “Horses just have these radars that unmask that stuff.”
When the facilitators observe those behaviors in the horses, they’re able to guide the frontline workers to express their true emotions.
“They are so wound up and tense,” Strong said. “Then they put their hands on one of the horses and then they start to cry or shake and release all of this tension.”
Each session with the horses lasts several hours.
“They groom the horses and start to read their body language. They learn how the horses express themselves, and what they like,” Strong said. “We start doing activities. We have them move around with the horses. We teach them how to attune themselves to the horses’ energy. They start to relax and feel energized at the same time.”
While the resilience tools the frontline workers learn are started in the presence of the horses, they can be used anywhere, at any time, according to Strong.
“It’s tools they can use when they need to bring more calm to situations, or when they need to be able to calm someone else down or face something that will be really difficult,” she said.
One tool is to take a couple of breaths and feel the ground under one’s feet.
“The whole point is to settle yourself down, and if you’re settled down, you will deescalate things around you,” Strong said.
According to Strong, the major difference between frontline health workers and veterans in terms of their stress level is health workers have to keep returning to the situation, whereas veterans have usually already served their time.
“We become more flexible and can adapt the work to meet their needs, and can work in smaller groups,” she said.
Capital campaign
Last year, Yale and the West Haven VA asked The Equus Effect to conduct a pilot study on a wide sample of veterans — those who are coming back into their homes and communities.
“They want to research the impact of our work on a wide sample of veterans who have conditions such as post traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, depression, and trouble relating to people and settling down,” Strong said. “In order to do that research here, we had to build a structure so that we could work no matter what the weather.”
Construction on the structure began in September and is 80 percent complete. The Equus Effect organized a capital campaign called Raising the Roof to get funding to build the building. It’s a 70-foot covered round arena with sides that can go up during the winter. It’s heated, has lights, and accommodates for social distancing.
The new building has doubled the organization’s capacity to see clients, and will enable the group to conduct its research, which is planned to start in the spring.
For more information or to make a donation to The Equus Effect, visit its website.