CARMEL VALLEY — Saddles slung on gates, hoof prints pressed into hay and coils of well-worn rope — have you stepped into a stable or a therapist’s office? For some students and staff at Monterey Peninsula Unified School District, the answer is both.
With the help of the locally based Equine Healing Collaborative, Monterey Peninsula Unified students, teachers and parents will have access to new group equine therapy sessions starting next week.
Scheduled during after-school hours and weekends, the two-hour sessions located in the collaborative’s Carmel Valley ranch will provide focused mental health support for different sectors of the district. Available opportunities include group therapy for people ages 13-17, the LGBTQIA community and Spanish-speaking women.
Offered as an option to step outside of schools for help, these sessions swap couches for corrals to address socio-emotional shortcomings the district has shouldered since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“A lot of needs arose with COVID for students and staff as well,” said Donnie Everett, assistant superintendent for the Monterey Peninsula Unified multi-tiered system of supports. “Being able to go outdoors, interact with horses in a safe environment and have a lot of time to reflect is a different kind of alternative experience that we’ve seen people respond well to.”
Unlike traditional treatments, equine therapy’s office isn’t limited by walls and self-reflection comes through tending to an animal rather than responding to a question. Mental health specialists watch clients as they lead, groom and interact with horses. As clients build relationships with their hoofed confidants, they tap into and work through emotions otherwise difficult to uncover during regular person-to-person conversation.
This alternative human-to-horse connection is what the Equine Healing Collaborative and Monterey Peninsula Unified hope to cultivate among students, staff and parents — a goal that has been a long time coming.
The upcoming equine sessions are an expansion of a relationship Monterey Peninsula Unified and the Equine Healing Collaborative have cultivated throughout the past 18 months. Though a collaboration had been briefly discussed in early 2020, the program didn’t take off until the pandemic revealed just how important face-to-face connection can be and what’s missing when it’s gone.
“It became a way to connect with each other and get away from the screen,” said Meghan Giles, mental health specialist with the Equine Healing Collaborative. “It’s taxing to do distanced learning every day, so we wanted to give them a break and an opportunity to just be in nature.”
When it became increasingly clear that in-person class would not be returning anytime soon, Giles, who is also a mental health specialist with Monterey Peninsula Unified, knew equine therapy could provide a much-needed break to seemingly endless screen time. Even as the threat of COVID-19 was just setting in, she and two other mental health specialists broached their idea to the district. Momentum for the program has been building ever since.
“The program really caught on like wildfire,” said PK Diffenbaugh, Monterey Peninsula Unified superintendent. “We started out with a small group of students and then it ballooned into a waitlist. … It really meets a need that we’re seeing across all levels of the district in terms of having to fill social-emotional support and self-care.
“Being able to offer different avenues of mental health support was important to us because we really saw the need. The need has always been there, but it became more acute during the pandemic.”
According to a 2020 mental health screening of nearly 2.5 million people nationwide, Mental Health America found the stress of COVID-19 leaving a lasting and detrimental impact. It found that 77% of youth surveyed scored at risk for emotional, attentional or behavioral difficulties. More than half a million people screened exhibited anxiety and nearly 85% reported having moderate to severe depression. Screeners attributed these mental health struggles in large part to feelings of isolation and loneliness triggered by the pandemic.
The story was the same at Monterey Peninsula Unified.
“I think that for students, there was an increase in isolation, anxiety, depression and suicidal ideation,” said Diffenbaugh. “For staff and teachers, moving to distanced learning was new and really hard for people. Educators get their energy from seeing students every day, and not seeing them made an already difficult job that much more demanding.”
Upon returning to school, these problems have persisted and presented themselves in the form of emotional dysregulation, or when someone cannot manage emotional responses to situations properly, Giles explained.
“A lot of kids are now struggling with not having the ability to self-regulate and learn,” she said. “We’re rethinking where they are and what they lost in the last year in terms of social skills.”
It turns out equine therapy is uniquely suited to address dysregulation.
“Equine therapy is so great because you have to be self-regulated,” said Giles. “Horses feed off of your energy.”
Like people, horses are sensitive to movement and emotion, often mirroring client’s behavior and conveying understanding without a verbal response. Clients can then use a horse’s mirrored reaction as an internal check-in and build self-awareness, said Giles.
This opportunity for recalibration is one of the ways Diffenbaugh thinks Monterey Peninsula Unified can get back on track for this school year.
“People need unconditional support,” he said. “They need to be able to express themselves in a way that is non-judgmental and not feel ashamed. … It’s hard to open up to another human being whereas this approach allows for a different avenue to tap into different emotions expressed in ways that are really healthy.”
So far the response has been nothing but positive, and the work isn’t close to done.
“This was a very powerful experience for all of us,” one teacher said of their time in equine therapy. “It was beautiful to watch each individual grow in their own journey, and I am grateful for the safe space to reflect on my own internal thoughts and processes.”
