ABSTRACT
It is clinically and ethically necessary that providers, regardless of the equine psychotherapy approach utilized, even when not partnering with the equine, utilize a best practice based, staged, and titrated approach to trauma treatment. This chapter examines the client’s window of tolerance for affect and the eventual processing of traumatic material. There must be a wider tolerance for calm. Without it, the repeated overexposure to the traumatic material, whether in or outside of the arena, will shore up the client’s dissociative structure, increase length of treatment, and further posttraumatic decline. This chapter utilizes equine-assisted eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) and structural dissociation theory for the treatment of dissociation. This chapter offers the clinical rationale for, and examples of, utilizing equine-facilitated experiences to decrease phobia to calm.
