Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Teens with Self-Harm Videos :(

I read an article today, which I was going to post, but it wasnt completely relavent to horse therapy, and two I didn't want people to get the wrong idea. 

Basically what the article talked about was teens posting self-harm videos on youtube. This automatically seems like a bad thing from the word "self-harm", but apparently there have been good results. In the article researchers started to notice that the teens, after posting a video, would get messages and comments back from other teens as support. Or the alternative would happen. A teen would be looking for other self-harm videos on youtube and once they found them it compelled them to stop harming themselves. 

Very interesting. Honestly I think a little bit of horse therapy or some equine courses would go much further in these cases, but I'm suprised that, that little community is doing well helping eachother recovery from whatever it is they suffer! :)

If you want to read more you can check out the article...

http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2011/02/22/teens-share-self-injury-vide...

 

Pegasus is an organization that brings recovery through Horse Therapy and Equine Courses to help people achieve an addiction cure! Visit PegasusEct.com for more information! :) 

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Monday, February 28, 2011

How to Thank a Therapist!

People often come out of horse therapy or equine courses with very thankful spirits. If you've been curious on how to show that appreciation heres some things others have done! :)

 

"I've given small, meaningful gifts... something very appropriate to our therapy, or something meaningful shared... 
To one who worked with me through exposure therapy re being strangled, I gave a warm and funny scarf with a card thanking my Therapist for "saving my neck"."


"I also write how I feel in a blank card and give them that..."

 

"I found a funny "when you know you have a lot in common with someone card". He really appreciated it and when he called to thank me I could tell by the sound of his voice that he was really touched that I had taken the time to do that for him."

"I took my Therapist home baked cake."

 

You can find more at this thread below...

 

http://www.ptsdforum.org/c/threads/how-to-thank-a-therapist.15129/

 

Pegasus is an organization that brings recovery through Horse Therapy and Equine Courses to help people achieve an addiction cure! Visit PegasusEct.com for more information! :) 

Please support us by "Liking" our page at...Horse Therapy

 

Thursday, February 24, 2011

Painting Therapy?

There are many types of creative therapy, including horse therapy and equine courses, but what about painting? According to this thread...

http://www.ptsdforum.org/c/threads/painting-therapy.12448/

and a few other sources it seems this could catch on. Right now its just a small group of individual people that paint out feelings and try to focus bad ones into better and more productive things. 

As one girl said...

"I have a painting from when I was 15 yrs old hanging on my wall. When I walk past it and look at it, I feel what I did at that age."

Paintings can bring you back to different times in your life whether they are good or bad. When you look back on a painting from the past at a rough time in life, it might make you thankful for where your at now. Or if your going through hard times and look back on a good painting you made in the past, it can renew hope. 

I think it would be great to start seeing Painting Therapy groups start popping up everywhere. It will probably be a while longer before you see this get any bigger, just like it took horse therapy years to "catch on". 

Pegasus is an organization that brings recovery through Horse Therapy and Equine Courses to help people achieve an addiction cure! Visit PegasusEct.com for more information! :) 

 

Please support us by "Liking" our page at...Horse Therapy

 

 

Thursday, February 17, 2011

Other Equine Groups on Facebook!

I don't normally promote other pages or groups, but hey why not :) If you guys like this group please check out these listed below and help give back to the equine and horse therapy community!!

"The University of Kentucky's College of Agriculture has several equine-related pages on Facebook with the latest news and events information. Stay up-to-date with the latest happenings by following their activity on these pages:

Equine InitiativeThe UK Equine Initiative is an overarching framework for all things equine at the University of Kentucky, including the undergraduate degree program, equine-related student organizations, equine research, and outreach activities.

University of Kentucky Maxwell H. Gluck Equine Research CenterThe mission of the Gluck Center is scientific discovery, education, and dissemination of knowledge for the benefit of the health and well-being of horses. 

Kentucky Equine Networking Association (created by the Kentucky Horse Council and University of Kentucky):The Kentucky Equine Networking Association's (KENA) mission is to provide an educational and social venue for equine professionals and other horse enthusiasts from all disciplines to share ideas and business strategies and obtain current knowledge on horse and farm management with the principal objective of enhancing individual horse ownership and the horse industry at large.

Saddle Up SAFELY: Saddle Up SAFELY is a new rider safety awareness program sponsored by UK HealthCare, UK College of Agriculture, and many community organizations. It aims to make a great sport safer through education about safe riding and horse handling practices."

Source: http://www.thehorse.com/ViewArticle.aspx?ID=17789&source=rss&utm_sour...:+TheHorse/News+(TheHorse.com+-+News)

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Pegasus is an organization that brings recovery through Horse Therapy and Equine Courses to help people achieve an addiction cure! Visit PegasusEct.com for more information! :) 

 

Please support us by "Liking" our page at...Horse Therapy

 

Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Books on Horse Behavior

  1. The Ultimate Horse behavior and Training Book
  2. "I found Practical Horse Psychology by Moyra Williams an interesting read. Some the the chapters cover Urges and Instincts, The World as They See it, How Horses Feel plus a few more. ISBN 0 - 87980 - 247 - 2. Book sellers use that number instead of author or title. It's an easy to understand read, not full of technical baffle-gab."
  3. I like all the Mark Rashid books, they are written more like 'stories' than 'manuals' but they give you a good overview of different horses and their different behaviours and how to decipher them.
  4. The Ultimate Horse behavior and Training Book
  5. Understanding Horse Behavior
  6. Horse Behavior Problem Solver

Horse therapy focuses intensely on Horse Behavior and communication so the books listed above can be a great help to anyone looking to get into Equine Jobs.

 

Pegasus is an organization that brings recovery through Horse Therapy and Equine Courses to help people achieve an addiction cure! Visit PegasusEct.com for more information! :) 

Please support us by "Liking" our page at...Horse Therapy

 

  

 

Saturday, February 12, 2011

Positive Orientated Therapy

In this sarcastic article the writer shows you the amazing power of positive orientated therapy. Like horse therapy, when you are doing things in a very posistive way the effects are Long Term. 

"In a recent issue of the Journal of Positive Psychologyresearchers Michael Cohn and Barbara Fredrickson were able to demonstrate the sustainability of positive experiences with subjects who had engaged in loving kindness meditation (LKM). This is the first time researchers from the field of positive psychology have demonstrated that an intervention designed to enhance subjects’ well-being produced sustainable results. Prior to this the positivity of any specific intervention was notable, but its enduring effects were unknown. The researchers were able to show that subjects who used a LKM were able to have more positive experiences (PEs) and that these experiences were sustained for an extended period of time.

In this particular study the effects were measured more than a year after the original introduction of the practice of a LKM. Loving-kindness is the first of a series of meditations that produce four qualities of love: Friendliness, Compassion, Appreciative Joy and Equanimity. The practice begins by developing a loving acceptance of whom you are, and can be thought of as a form of self-therapy.


Negatively Oriented Therapy, NOT, hates this kind of advance in the field of positive psychology. We really do. Good news from them is bad news for us. We don’t like positive psychology and brood over their successes. When they publish something this good we are small-minded and jealous. This gives us the satisfaction of carrying a grudge and keeping our spirits low. But in an unprecedented move we are taking a proactive approach to help spread the sense of misery. Our mission is to sabotage good news and help people languish in a state of helplessness. If we are successful we will not rejoice, but rather find something else to annoy us. Our successes are our failures.In other words, this proves that if you engage in the practices of positive psychology, in this case Loving Kindness Meditation, you are not only likely to feel better initially, you likely will continue to have significant positive value in your life.

 

NOT proposes that such empirically validated progress be counteracted with the identification and promotion of new negative feelings. In the rapidly expanding field of positive psychology, the evidence–based, hard-data, scientific approach needs to be disparaged with shoddily constructed notions and flimsy concepts. Of course dwelling on bad news and ruminating over things outside our control typically keeps us from being enthusiastic about any advances from the positive psychology community. But to keep our spirits and motivation down we want to borrow a concept from the positivists. They promote the notion of “broaden and build” to enhance positive feelings. To keep up, we plan to broaden and build negativity, helplessness, and apathy. Feeling bad about life is an art form we believe in.

Lately the positive psychology scientists are making too good of a stride in their assertions. As a stopgap effort we want to make things up off the top of our heads and hope people will gravitate toward it. Toward this end we declare there are simply not enough negative terms for crummy feelings. The buzzwords of positive psychology — savoring, zest, optimism, and flourishing — are now being used more regularly. New research on the flow experience has bummed us out. We desperately need something to give equal acknowledgment to the evolution of negative feelings. We’ve begun exploring the possibility of a new quasi-miserable feeling, and think we may have hit upon something that will do the trick.

“Craptastic.”

This word seems to be a perfect addition to our endeavor.

The Hiptionary (a dictionary made specifically for slang words) defines “craptastic” as something so extraordinarily bad it is comical. While we certainly don’t wish to introduce merriment into our negatively oriented therapy, we thought something the positives might smirk at and find comical might chip away at their enthusiasm.

Here’s how we recommend you use “craptastic” in your daily vocabulary.

Question: How did it feel to come back from the Bahamas to ice and snow on the roads?
Answer: Craptastic.

Question: You sound like you are coming down with a cold and you look miserable. How do you feel?
Answer: Craptastic.

Question: Guess what? The people from IRS are at the door.
Answer: Craptastic.

You can also mumble or say it to yourself. Here is an example when you may want to say it under your breath. At the coffee shop they give you a coffee and you go over to the station and put in your milk and sugar. You think you have the lid on but when you go to take a sip the coffee spills all over you. What do you say to yourself?

You guessed it.

But more is needed if we are to keep up with the power of loving kindness meditation. The worst part about this type of meditation is that it can be brought into the streets and spread as you walk around with others. We are open to suggestions for new negative feelings.

The researchers from the Journal of Positive Psychology article also found that it wasn’t just LKM that helped people sustain their positive feelings. It was actually any form of meditation. In fact they also noted that the original LKM experience may have “… given people additional energy, optimism, or willingness to experiment…” More bad news for us here at NOT. It just isn’t fair that these people keep finding more evidence to help people change the way they think, and improve the way they feel.

How do we feel about it?

Bingo."

Source: http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2011/02/03/negatively-oriented-therapy-...

 Pegasus is an organization that brings recovery through Horse Therapy and Equine Courses to help people achieve an addiction cure! Visit PegasusEct.com for more information! :) 

Please support us by "Liking" our page at...Horse Therapy

 

Thursday, February 10, 2011

Family Treatment and Therapy

We get family in equine courses and horse therapy all the time! The turnout is normally....amazing. You get to see how the family operates and in most cases the group will leave the session more as a family than ever. Heres a story of someone who went for help and it helped their family. 

"Looking back at my active addiction I would have to say that my biggest enablers were the ones who really loved me. Whenever I was unable to get my hands on the funds that I needed to support my alcohol addiction and drug abuse I would undoubtedly turn to my family and close friends and tell them some story on why I needed money. I didn’t know it then but essentially my family and loved ones were helping me to continue my addiction.

When I finally made the decision to go to addiction treatment I had no idea that if I were going to be able to achieve long-term quality sobriety I wasn’t the only one who was going to have to change my behavior. The people who supported me throughout my addiction were going to have to change too. The family program offered at the addiction treatment center I attended helped them to learn how to keep healthy boundaries from me.

I have to admit that I was upset when I initially heard the teachings that my loved ones were learning in the drug rehabs family program. In fact it was outright scary. However, now I feel that these lessons have proved to be influential over the past five years as I have moved through life as a sober, productive individual. In the family program my loved ones learned how they could support me and my new found way of life without getting too involved. They learned that even though they could support me emotionally they could not enable me be giving me money or getting me out of trouble. More importantly they were taught that if I did indeed suffer a relapse they would have to separate themselves from me until I was ready to once again get help.

Fortunately, thanks to the teachings in addiction treatment I have not suffered from a relapse. The family program offered at addiction treatment not only taught my family and loved ones how to behave around me but in the end have made us a much closer and tighter nit group."

Source: http://www.recoveryconnection.org/blog/2011/01/an-addiction-treatment-family-...

Pegasus is an organization that brings recovery through Horse Therapy and Equine Courses to help people achieve an addiction cure! Visit PegasusEct.com for more information! :) 

 

Please support us by "Liking" our page at...Horse Therapy