This summer, the graduate Counselor Education & Family Studies program at Liberty University will offer a 14-week summer pilot to test its new Equine-Assisted Psychotherapy course.
The launch will allow students to experience the course prior to the school year.
Associate Professor at the Center for Counseling and Family Studies at the School of Behavioral Sciences Dana Kasper designed the course for graduate counseling and doctoral students. The course will include weekly readings, papers and quizzes in addition to a unique one-week intensive, which will allow students to get hands-on Equine-Assisted Psychotherapy experience at the Liberty Mountain Equestrian Center.
Students will be allowed to observe and interact with horses, as well as receive in-depth lectures from Kasper. The goal of this new course is to give students an opportunity to go beyond the books and learn by experience that can be applied in the field one day.
“It’s less of me talking and more of them having an experience with the horse,” Kasper said. “It goes much deeper and there’s a lot more retention.”
Students will have the opportunity to observe the social relationships within the herd as they are exhibited naturally, which connects to the theoretical counseling concept of Family Systems. The intensive will include opportunities for students to increase self-awareness as they interact with the horses throughout the week.
Kasper encourages students to take this course as a method of finding unique avenues and approaches to counseling.
“Talk therapy and medication doesn’t always work,” Kasper said. “There’s some research being done on the benefits of being outside in nature, because that’s where we belong. It’s less intimidating and freer (than an office environment).”
According to Kasper, horses are extremely useful for therapy because of their heightened emotional sensitivity and ability to have relationships with humans.
“And so, (patients) see their self-confidence, their self-esteem and they see their value,” Kasper said. “They realize that the horse doesn’t care how they look or what color they are, what language they speak or what they’ve done in the past. It’s like total, immediate self-acceptance.”
Kasper learned about the emotional ability of horses through her own personal experience and through multiple Trauma-Informed Equine-Assisted Psychotherapy (TI-EAP) trainings over the past decade. As a young child, she was thrown from a horse, which caused her to develop a life-long fear of the animal.
However, as an adult, her family was given a horse. Kasper worked through her own fear while caring for this horse.
“I realized I was trying to be sweet to him, like I was to people, so I wouldn’t get hurt,” Kasper said. “To have a revelation like that, it’s significant.”
This moment of realization inspired Kasper throughout her professional life and is one of the reasons she designed the Equine-Assisted Psychotherapy course. She hopes students can have life-changing experiences like these while participating in this new course.
To learn more about the program, visit https://www.liberty.edu/behavioral-sciences/counselor-ed.
Combs is a feature reporter for the Liberty Champion.