BUILDING SKILLS FOR LIFE

One of the biggest pieces that are missing for a lot of individuals in recovery is the skills of how to reintegrate back into everyday life. 

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The objectives and skills people can develop while working with the horses are what makes Equine Assisted Learning an imperative part of any recovery process or development process. When we are working with people, even adults, who have had been though addictions, we need to remember that the past skills that they have learned are what led them to making decisions that led them to addiction. Whether we are helping a 30 year old adult or a 12 year old youth to move forward from addiction, both must learn the basics of life skills to be able to grasp and maintain behavioural change. Whether that skill be communication, negotiation, active listening or trust, these are the skills that will create an armour for the clients to take out into the world to make healthy life decisions and because the programs are interactive, they are able to pull from the past experiences with the horses to apply that learning to everyday life. 

We can help people to understand different methods of what they need to change, even how to make those changes, but without basic life skills, people are unable to understand what that process would look like or feel like to be able to properly implement those changes. EAL is an imperative support to other programming in that it allows people to make the changes that they need for their lives - not because a person told them too - but because they made the choice themselves to achieve a different outcome. 

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