When 12-year-old Lyra came to Turning Point’s Somerset Drug and Alcohol Service (SDAS), she was dealing with trauma that came from being a part of a family with a history of multi-generational substance use.
Lyra’s early childhood experiences led her to taking overdoses of medication and self-harming through cutting. Despite her struggles, Lyra would dismiss therapy, saying ‘what’s the point?’ However, when she revealed that she had an interest in animals, the young person’s team felt equine-assisted therapy would be a way to give her the support she needed.
The Pegasus Project takes an holistic approach, incorporating horses into therapeutic processes to address mental, emotional, and physical health and wellbeing. It focuses on activities like brushing, feeding, and leading horses – rather than riding – under the guidance of mental health professionals and youth workers. Although these might seem like everyday activities with a horse, with the facilitation of the skilled trauma therapist they can become highly effective ways of undertaking, processing, and transforming adverse experiences.
The idea came from a conversation between myself – in my position as the operations manager at SDAS and the national young person’s lead at Turning Point – and Philip King, who is an equine facilitated psychotherapist. We really wanted something different for the young people that we support in Somerset, something that they could do alongside the more traditional forms of therapy. From this partnership between SDAS and Philip’s CIC, Equi-Librium Coaching and Therapy, the Pegasus Project was born.
BUDGETARY CHALLENGES
I’ve long wanted a project like this, and having found the right therapist to partner with we then had to tackle the challenge of not having the budget for equine-assisted therapy – as it’s not funded by the NHS or other statutory agencies. The significant levels of trauma among the young people we support also meant we needed exactly the right equine therapist – if we’re going to open a Pandora’s box we need someone qualified and experienced who can deal with the issues that come up.
Philip’s was also looking for the right organisation to partner with. ‘Having worked for 36 years in mental health services, I know that working with people when they’re young, when these traumatic experiences are a bit fresher, you can make a massive difference to their whole life trajectory,’ he says.
Until last year, Philip was chief nurse and chief operating officer at an NHS Trust, and often saw people waiting for six months to get mental health support. ‘Six months is a massive amount of time in a young person’s life,’ he states. ‘In that time, you can really help them start to change the way they see themselves so they’re not thinking that they’re a failure or a victim of life – they can start to see that there’s real potential for them to achieve things.’
When it came to funding the project, we were able to get a grant from Avon and Somerset police and crime commissioner that would see it run for a year. One of the things that we felt was important was that we weren’t just dropping off young people to do a session with Philip – we wanted to embed it into our care plans.
If a young person wanted to get involved, their substance use recovery worker would take them to the yard to work with Philip. Support workers have found that taking the young people out of a traditional therapy room has helped them open up about their struggles.
SOCIAL SKILLS
‘We want to encourage people to come along to find the benefit of working alongside horses,’ says Philip. ‘They don’t ride the horses – it’s not about horsemanship at all. It’s about forming relationships. It’s about learning social skills. It’s about processing unprocessed trauma. One of our first clients, she said very little, so we just hung out with the horses for a few weeks. After a while, she would brush the horse and in that process of caring for the horse, she’d talk about what it felt like when she didn’t get the care and attention and love that she needed. We ended up working together for a good year.’
Philip describes the horses as ‘mirror, metaphor and medicine’, adding that they ‘mirror our emotional state. We talk about how the horse feels. How can we help the horse calm down? How can we look at regulating emotions? Usually the young people will say, “oh, the horse did that” and this leads to discussions on things like how they feel when someone approaches them too quickly. Does it make them feel a bit scared? How do they deal with it? Let’s practise these calming techniques with the horses. And medicine, because neuroscience shows very clearly that being around horses can make us feel good. It affects the emotional centre of our brain. It helps us process unprocessed emotion.’
I saw firsthand how horses can pick up on how a person is feeling. I attended a session with a young person who had a history of abuse, self-harm and substance use – estranged from her family and struggling to engage with everyday life. Once, when she got upset, the horse came and placed its head next to her head. That feeling of not being rejected was an empowering experience for her.
EARLY TRAUMA
In the year it’s been running, the Pegasus Project has supported 25 young people. ‘I work with the young person, alongside their support worker, to look at traumatic experiences they’ve had,’ says Philip. ‘They’ve been identified as someone who uses substances or alcohol and that’s pretty much always as a result of early psychological trauma. Or they’re a hidden harm client and often you’ll find that somebody in the family – usually a primary caregiver, a parent, or both parents – has been involved in drugs and alcohol.’
Both of Lyra’s parents use drugs and were involved in supplying drugs – when she first started attending the project, her father was serving a prison sentence for dealing heroin. She is estranged from her mother, and the community she lives in has few socio-economic opportunities and high levels of unemployment, drug use and crime.
Lyra wasn’t attending school when she first came to the project, and had no real friends. Any contact she had with other people was online, and there was a real risk of her being groomed by online predators.
Through time and patience, it became clear that Lyra had experienced a great deal of trauma in her short life and she was clearly at risk of becoming one of the next generation of problem drug users. She was initially only interested in engaging with the horses, but over time she grew a little ‘softer’ – eventually saying that she thought her support worker and Philip were ‘alright’. Lyra disclosed her experiences of physical and emotional abuse in a very matter of fact way, describing being pushed down the stairs at the same time as talking about what her favourite fast food was.
THERAPEUTIC RELATIONSHIP
‘With time and patience Lyra has been able to build on our therapeutic relationship,’ Philip says. ‘She’s still fiercely independent, but she now understands that this is adaptation she has developed to survive psychological and emotional trauma – she’s accepted that this is a ‘front’ to keep people away from her. She now understands more about her own part in social interactions, and that in some cases it’s safe for her to let down her guard a little and allow connection and closeness.’
Lyra is now 15, and back to attending school. She would like to work with animals in the future, and still has times when she finds life challenging – but she works her concerns out in therapy.
Most pleasingly, she now has a small but trusted network of friends she sees regularly. We are now looking to help her build on her interests from this project and to further expand her life trajectory to fulfil her potential.
Dawn Holmes is Turning Point national young person’s lead