With Equine Assisted Psychotherapy (EAP), people find that change just happens and healing occurs on many levels rapidly and effortlessly. They can take the experience in the arena and apply it to their lives without the typical sort of resistance that often occurs with traditional therapy.

Purple Ponies Equine Therapy is a 501(c)3 organization that offers veterans, and their families, a special program designed to help veterans adjust, to returning home, and come to terms with any emotional trauma, grief and loss that they carry as a result of serving our country. We are honored to be able to offer this alternative type of healing experience for returning veterans and their families. By helping harness the strengths people already have, the facilitators and horses often provide life changing experiences for veterans, and their families, in one or two sessions.

Equine Assisted Psychotherapy (EAP) offers experiential psychotherapy sessions to diagnosed or diagnosable clients. Natural horse and herd behavior are observed and honored as a model for healthful human behavior. Equine-assisted exercises are designed to elicit metaphors and self-awareness. These exercises help clients recognize their own behaviors and patterns and create their own solutions. The field of Equine Assisted Psychotherapy continues to grow and adapt to every type of psychotherapy client.

Equine-assisted work honors the natural behavior of horses and herds. Horses are skilled at keeping themselves safe and adept at survival; their natural behaviors are optimal for mental and physical health. In many respects, humans have lost the instinct to keep themselves safe and healthy. We entrust horses to show us the way back to health. Work and observation in the horse world lends itself to extremely powerful metaphors into our own patterns, strengths, and the nonverbal messages we send out. Equine Assisted Psychotherapy implements the power of equine-assisted principles and exercises to introduce therapy clients to themselves in a modality that has been found to be more efficient and less threatening than traditional talk therapy.