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Our Approach

Emotional, behavioral, and mental issues are not uncommon. Many youth and women will experience psychological, emotional distress or behavioral difficulty from time to time and require professional help. CoachHorse Counseling Services’ programs are oriented toward Healthy Minds and Healthy Lives. It is what creates emotional regulation, satisfaction in life, the ability to maintain good relationships with others, as well as developing a strong sense of their own potential in school, the community, and at work.  

CoachHorse’s primary approaches:  

Individual Counseling for Youth and Women
Individual counseling provides youth and their families and women with the means to focus intensively on emotional, behavioral, and social issues, and their solutions, while building a trusting client-professional counselor relationship. From this place, a client can begin a treatment process that is based on a deep understanding of self and others.  At times, when needed, consulting with other therapists will aid in the counseling process which can greatly benefit the client.

Group Counseling for Women
Group counseling is an effective way of helping clients. It allows clients to apply their individual psychotherapeutic progress in a safe, supportive, sense of belonging, and a sense of community setting, that challenges social context. By interacting in a group setting, inferiority feelings can be challenged and counteracted effectively with other clients and staff and the mistaken concepts and values that are the root of emotional and social issues can be deeply influenced or looked at from a new perspective. 

When agreed upon between the professional counselor and the woman, she can attend groups designed around specific issues, such as boundary issues, body image, depression, trauma, and sexual boundaries. The group setting allows the women to support one another as they apply new insights and techniques to a shared struggle.  Through mutual support, mutual accountability, and social interaction group therapy can be a very good adjunct to personal growth.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) for Women
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy focuses on undermining faulty assumptions and beliefs and provides coping skills needed to work with the issue. Thinking and belief systems are many times looked at as the root of the personal problem. The approach is action oriented in that the methods help clients change what they are doing and thinking. Homework assignments are given to the client enabling them to carry on their own counseling without the direct intervention of the counselor. Listening to CD’s, reading self-help books, keeping a journal of what they are doing and thinking and attending workshops aids in further progress of wanted change in themselves without becoming excessively dependent on the counselor. 

Women who are entering adulthood can benefit by this empirically validated treatment for a variety of issues that include anxiety, bulimia, phobias, and depression. CBT’s active approach focuses on the client’s inner world exploring existential concerns such as the meaning of life, guilt, shame, despair, and hope. The belief is that there is an assumption that thoughts and emotions, reactions to life situations, lead to feelings resulting in a cause-and-effect relationship. Many times, clients contribute to their own psychological issues, as well as to specific symptoms by the way they interpret events and situations.  For example, positive or rational thoughts lead to accompanying emotional positive responses and negative or irrational thoughts lead to dysfunctional, destructive emotional reactions and, therefore, behaviors.  By bringing these internal messages to a conscious level, the counselor gives the client the tools to identify and dispute irrational beliefs replacing ineffective ways of thinking with effective and rational cognitions. The focus is on thinking and acting. The result is a more rational response to everyday events and situations

Recognizing that undesirable behaviors are often driven by strongly held but flawed beliefs, we work with women to bring these beliefs to consciousness where they can be replaced with a more accurate and functional understanding of things.

Equine-Assisted Counseling (EAC)
Equine-Assisted Counseling is an emerging treatment modality where the counselor and client are joined by a horse in the process of exploration and growth. The encounter occurs in a safe place – a paddock, round pen, or enclosure with a professional counselor trained in Equine-Assisted Counseling and horsemanship. The client is given the opportunity to connect with a horse from the herd. After an initial check-in and assessment, the client is offered a relational experience with a horse specific to the needs and issues presented. The client is given some guidelines about the process of choosing a horse and supported in appropriate ways that meet safety requirements. The counselor has a very close relationship with the horses, which is central to the effectiveness of the work of EAC, and knows their personalities and temperament, strengths and weaknesses, and their history. The counselor also knows the herd’s dynamics and where each horse stands in relation to each other.
EAC provides the space for respectful relating and trust.  The relational experience with the horses is an opportunity for clients to explore, question, and make grounded and present contact, and creates the opportunity into embodied awareness in the moment. The encounter is offered in the spirit of safety and support without judgment. The counselor, the client, and the horse together create a unique opportunity for deepening self exploration through non-verbal and verbal experience in the moment.

EAC is experiential and also offers an opportunity for re-connection with nature in the contact with horses and the great outdoors. Structured activities are designed to utilize the inherent soothing properties of the natural world to heal wounds, gain insights, and create a more peaceful interior and exterior world. EAC uses the organic material of nature to both heal and enhance the interior world of our clients.

Equine-Assisted Counseling (EAC) for Youth
EAC is an emerging treatment modality that the counselor may use in treating youth. In short, the youth must earn the trust of a horse. To earn this trust, youth must learn to relate effectively with the horse and successfully respond to the challenges the horse presents. Horses are prey animals, which naturally puts them into a position of being aware of their surroundings and on constant guard. The animals are highly sensitive and respond to the moods, feelings, attitude, and especially body language of the child or adolescent. Horses do not respond well to anger, aggression, frustration, manipulation, bullying, or disrespect, which many troubled youth initially may try to use in their interaction with a horse. The child or adolescent have to develop alternative strategies for relating with a horse than they have used in the past to relate to other people in their lives. The sheer size of a horse – in many cases, the animals weigh over 1,000 pounds – also inspires the child or adolescent to develop respect and awareness. Horses help guarded and closed-off youth release their hostility, work with their defense barrier, open up, and act more truthfully and authentically. Many times they can develop admiration, compassion, and empathy as well as reduction in loneliness. Children and adolescents learn to develop healthier ways of interacting and cooperating with others.

Equine-Assisted Counseling (EAC) for Women
EAC is an emerging treatment modality that the counselor may use in treating women. Through hands on ground activities (if safe, riding) and forming a bond with a horse, metaphors are generated which is then reflected on how the woman relates to herself and others. With the support of the counselor, the woman is given the opportunity to address the metaphor and expound on their reactions, perceptions, and feelings gaining insight into their habits, fears, and unconscious ways of coping or relating. This offers an opportunity to work toward the understanding and healing of those issues.

EAC is an effective means for focusing on cooperation, communication, and problem solving. Working with a horse provides a natural setting in which to face fears and self-doubt and increase confidence and self-esteem. Equine-assisted therapy also provides a safe context for exploring, challenging, validating, changing, and learning more ways of relating. Students find this part of our program highly social, challenging, and fun, yet therapeutically powerful and often life-changing.