THE EQUUS EFFECT · SHARON, CT
Build Your Emotional Fitness Skills
This flagship program - sponsored by donors - provides both basic and more nuanced tools for self-management and attunement to others so participants can stay grounded under pressure.
OUR MISSION
Why is Building Emotional Fitness Skills our flagship program?
Our mission is to provide military, veterans, first responders, and families with essential tools that help build healthy, authentic relationships through purposeful engagement with horses.
In 2008, Jane Strong and David Sonatore read the news that 22 veterans were taking their own lives every day.
Rather than seeing these men and women as broken, they saw them as canaries in the coal mine — reflections of the disconnect that many people feel in the 21st century. They believed that connecting and collaborating with horses through new and challenging exercises would offset the struggle that they —and many other high-functioning people — have in handling people and situations at home and work.
“When I learned how to trust myself on the inside, the outside got a whole lot easier.”
JD / FDNY
OUR APPROACH
We focus on skills that develop our capacity to improve communication skills, set healthy boundaries and manage triggers through four key principles:
Transition stress is no small task.
People who are trained to perform in high-stress environments tell us that putting down the skills and training they use to override fear and face lethal danger is not as easy as taking off their uniforms. Nor is it easy to keep the home fires burning and manage a family while spouses are away or on duty. Between cumulative stress and the identity shifts from one role in life to another, relationships can falter under the strain and stress of lives lived under the burden of too much adrenaline and not enough time to recover.
Our nervous systems are designed to use short bursts of adrenaline for emergencies — not as a steady diet. When we don’t find healthy ways to digest and metabolize the impact of traumatic events, we carry the past and project into the future in ways that are very expensive to our nervous systems. We can’t settle down, return to life at home or in our communities because we are distracted by intrusive thoughts and reactions that are out of sync with what’s really happening now. These thought patterns block our attunement, aliveness and ability to remain present to others.
Horses on the other hand, are always grounded and always present.
The in-hand skills and body-based attunement practices we teach help reveal places where we feel unsteady or reactive — in real time. Their clear, non-judgmental responses help us liberate energy and respond rather than react to people and situations that trigger us.
TEE is a multi-component curriculum. We teach in hand horsemanship skills, body-based practices and offer an engaging discussion we call Emotional Agility that provides tools to handle difficult emotions and triggers.
OUR IMPACT
Here’s what some of the first brave men and women we served said about TEE’s impact on them.
Hear it directly from them:
“I kept reacting to things that happened before instead of what’s really going on now. I had no idea I was dragging the past into everything until I understood how to show up for that horse.”
MP / US Navy
CONTACT US
Get in Touch
Interested in our Building Emotional Fitness Skills program?
Whether you have questions about the program or just want to learn more about what we do, we would love to hear from you. Fill out the form and we will be in touch shortly.