Programs for Military Families

We are honored to be seeing Blue Star and Gold Star families. While not on the front lines themselves, these families bear the burden of either not knowing where in the world a member of the family is now, or have lost a family member who’s made the ultimate sacrifice.  In both situations, family members must deal with an inordinate amount of stress or grief and all are in need of tools that build their capacity to handle these experiences.

To that end, sessions with military families center on building the ‘window of tolerance’ for feelings of powerlessness, worry, sadness and grief that are mixed with ones of pride and honor. 

We have specific exercises designed to: 

• Address the need for healthy boundaries, 
• Offer a process for managing difficult emotions, 
• Encourage asking for help with the horses
• Provide tools for managing the natural and authentic feelings that are difficult for all of us to acknowledge

Our goal is to help military family members become more congruent,  more grounded, and more connected to themselves and others around them. 

We help break through self-limiting patterns and help people see for themselves what happens when they change.

We use ground-based experiential learning with horses, didactic material called Emotional Agility to address healthy ways to process emotions, and resilience tools to help clients manage people and situations between and beyond sessions.  

Why horses?  As prey animals, horses assess their situations with a keen sense of safety and survival.  They never mask their intentions and value trust over all else.  Learning to deal with them effectively implies that we ourselves must be trustworthy — honest, congruent, respectful, and fair.  As it turns out, when we can do this:  ‘The inside of a man/woman becomes good for the outside of a horse’.

All programs for military families are free of charge.

We typically run programs once a month for 4 months — and sessions are 4 hours, including lunch.