2) Life Began in the Rhythms of the Ocean

Slide notes

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1)

2) Life began in the rhythms of the ocean…

3) We carry rhythm inside, in our heart beat, and our breathing…

Take a minute now and find your own breathing rhythm.

And see if you can find your heart beat—either by taking your pulse or by tuning inside you.

4) There is a rhythm to relationship, a dance of give and take that you can see between an infant and mother. An attunement, where one reads and responds to the cues of another.

5) Sometimes the rhythms and relationships are aggregate.

6) Sometimes they are very moving.

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7) Riding brings rhythm together at all levels of our existence:

Physical

Emotional

Cognitive

Spiritual

8) This talk inspired by several questions that I had over the time I’ve been a therapeutic riding instructor and horse assisted therapist. I’ve done a lot of work with people who have experienced trauma and very disruptive reactions. I noticed and wondered…

9) The research on trauma is widespread. So, briefly, what is trauma? The perception that survival is in danger, either our own, or someone else’s.

“ The Trauma Response is perhaps the most avoided, ignored, belittled, denied, misunderstood and untreated cause of human suffering. Although it is the source of tremendous distress and dysfunction, it is not an ailment or a disease, but the by-product of an instinctively instigated, altered state of consciousness. We enter this altered state – let us call it survival mode– when we perceive that our lives are being threatened. If we are overwhelmed by the threat and are unable to successfully defend ourselves, we can become stuck in survival mode. “– Peter Levine

Trauma is carried in the body and in the brain. It is a survival/stress response.

Our BODIES focus entirely on survival and all non-essential functions (functions (complex thinking, language, digestion, reproduction) shut down.

These responses, if they last long enough, are considered Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or PTSD.

10) Trauma Symptoms

11) The effect is constriction.

“Because our bodies do not register that we are now safe, we remain stuck in the past, rather than being in present time.” –Peter Levine

Trauma responses are often misdiagnosed in children and untreated, so that symptoms continue on into adulthood –Hanson

So how can we help? How does riding help? How can we focus our riding experiences?

12) Research on riding and trauma? Not much!

So where else can we look?

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13) The brain is an action organ and as it matures, it’s increasingly characterized by the formation of patterns and schemas geared to promoting action. People are physically organized to respond to things that happen to them with actions that change the situation.”

But when people are traumatized, and can’t do anything to stop it or reverse it or correct it, “they freeze, explode, or engage in irrelevant actions. Then, to tame their disorganized, chaotic physiological systems, they start drinking, taking drugs, and engaging in violence-like the looting and assault that took place after Hurricane Hugo. If they can’t reestablish their physical efficacy as a biological organism and recreate a sense of safety, they often develop PTSD. (Besel van der Kolk)

Brain research has taught us a great deal about how the brain functions. Our understanding of the human brain and the way it works has undergone dramatic upheavals.

14) Brain organization is hierarchical, from simpler, lower levels to more complex.

Brain development begins with the simpler process in the brain stem, and works up to the complexities of the neocortex.

The organization of higher parts of the brain depends upon input from the lower parts of the brain.

All of the pieces of the brain communicate and coordinate with all of the other parts of the brain.

This development takes 25 years, and is never completely finished. Our brains continue to grow and change throughout our lives.

15) Get out your hand and make a brain model.

16) Brain Stem/Diecnephalon :

·  Manages motor regulation, arousal, appetite/satiety, sleep, blood pressure, heart rate, body temperature

·  Self Regulation

·  Reptilian Brain—reactive—non-processing

·  First to develop—very young children who are traumatized often get stuck at this developmental level.

·  Sensation driven:

o  tactile, auditory, visual, olfactory

o  Vestibular—sense of balance

o  Proprioception-where our body parts are in space

o  Visceral—information from our bodily center, part of intuitive knowing system.

·  Organized & regulated by patterned, repetitive neural input.

·  Use of patterned, repetitive neural input to the brainstem and diencephalong monoamine neural networks would be organizing and regulating input that would likely diminish anxiety, impulsivity and other trauma related symptoms that have their origins in dysregulation of these systems.

·  How would riding help with this level? (FLIP CHART)

o  Sensory stimulation,

o  Bilateral motion

o  Repetition

17) Limbic System

Affiliation/reward, attachment, sexual behavior, emotional reactivity

•  Mammalian brain—capable of interpreting & processing experiences

•  Interprets & encodes experiences to determine level of safety or threat, and retains the schema in a memory.

•  Rhythmic motion helps with self-regulation, by calming lower levels of the brain, thus allowing higher levels of the brain to function.

•  There is also a rhythm of relationship—a reciprocity-almost a dance. Can see this in the infant-mother relationship.

•  Attunement is the “ability to read and respond to the communicated needs of others, which involves synchronous and responsive attention to the verbal and non-verbal cues of another” (Hanson, 2011,p.8)

How would riding help with this level?

Animal human bond

Rhythm of relationship—use of hands to teach posting trot.

Incorporate ritual to increase sense of predictability and safety. Greetings, getting a helmet, using the same grooming sequence. Having a closing ritual helps prepare children for transitions within and away from the barn. Stop riding at the same place, have a predictable ritual closing, etc.

18) Neocortex

·  Cognitive brain—Concrete thought, abstract thought.

·  Planning, judgement, adjustment

·  Incorporates and coordinates input from lower levels of brain function

·  Shuts down under extreme threat.

·  Benefits from introspection, mindfulness, meta-cognition (thinking about thinking) and actual trauma processing, cognitive therapeutic approaches

·  How would riding be useful here?

·  Brain Gym bilateral movement activities stimulate cognitive processes

·  Building competencies through ground work and riding skills

·  Strengthening sense of resources and safety—Safe Place, Mindfulness

·  Opportunity for focused mindfulness experiences (VdKolk, ) and meta-cognition (Siegel)

·  Processing memories—shifting the type of memory from implicit to explicit

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19) Neurosequential Model of Therapeutics: a treatment approach to working with children who have single or complex traumas developed by Bruce Perry, based on brain development research.

With ongoing trauma brain development is impacted with cascading negative effects.

People can get stuck at the brain function level that predominated during their traumatic experiences.

·  Healing children who have been abused repeatedly or neglected requires that we provide experiences that are relevant to the emotional age of the child (which may not match the chronological age.

·  Healing approach must match the dominant brain function.

·  A person who is functioning from the brainstem level needs a healing approach geared to bilateral movement and self regulation, etc.

·  A person functioning at the limbic system level needs a healing approach geared towards emotional response and relationships needs healing at that level as well as the brainstem level

·  A person functioning at the cognitive level can benefit from cognitive therapies, and needs healing that approaches all 3 approaches.

·  Activities provided in a healthy, stable context. Both the child’s environment and the treatment.

·  Treatment needs to be

o  rewarding (to engage the child),

o  repetitive (to help the brain reorganize),

o  rhythmic, 80 bpm

o  bilateral stimulation (to help both sides of brain develop),

·  Provide attunement (responsiveness to the expressed cues of others)

·  But he is not specific as to which therapies to use.

What are you seeing here that would be relevant to riding horses?

20) NMT—limited research but some promising results.

21) Another approach to healing trauma was described by Daniel Siegel in Mindsight

“Integration is the heart of well being” --linking of differentiated elements into a functional whole

Two types of memory (implicit & explicit)

Role of the hippocampus

Right and left brain processing

Mindfulness awareness with body processing

Top down meets bottom up

22) Elements necessary for safely processing memories:

How can riding horses help here?

23) The goal to help clients integrate their experience into their coherent narrative of themselves and their lives, thereby integrating the past, present and dreams of the future.

24) This led to more questions.

Any others you can think of? (someone in the group recommended Sensory Integration—an excellent idea!!! SH)

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25) Bilateral Rhythmic Stimulation: Are any of you practitioners of these?

Eye Movement Desensitization & Reprocessing (EDMR)

Bilateral eye movement, auditory stimulation and tapping for processing trauma. Well researched.

I’m an EMDR practitioner and I’ve seen profound changes in people in a short time.

I’ve begun to use the bilateral rhythm of riding as my stimulation. More on that later.

Emotional Freedom Therapy (EFT)

Tapping on meridian points. Some supportive research .

This is not one I know much about, but I’m going to look into it further when I get home.

Brain Gym—Bilateral movements, crossing over boy. Used for educational purposes, not tested w/ trauma.

While this has not been researched well is meets some of the criteria of the NMT protocols

GABA goo???

GABA stands for gamma-aminobutyric acid. GABA helps inhibit fear and anxiety responses.

Dan Siegel refers to GABA goo as the calming responses we can initiate that helps integrate the neocortex with the limbic responses, and keeps the cognition on line.

This is a reference to an intriguing thing I heard about—a doctor talked about going to a conference on Anti-Aging where they said that the GABA receptors are the hardest to reach, and they can be accessed with bilateral rhythmic motion. But I have not been able to find any thing on it.

26) Somatic Focused Treatments

27) EMDR

28) EMDR and horseback riding—I’ve only done this with people who have riding experience.

29) Moderate to vigorous exercise helped reduce PTSD symptoms for veterans, children, adolescents, college students.

Those who exercise before their traumatic experiences had fewer post trauma symptoms. People in poor physical health had higher levels of PTSD symptoms.

Participating in sports & games showed no significant improvement.

Research is fairly strong, but no mechanism has been determined as to why exercise helps.

How might this support riding?

30) Music/Dancing/Drumming

Drumming proved to be helpful in some studies.

Group music therapy was studied with clients who had not benefitted from TF-CBT. There was a positive effect.

Active music participation resulted in improved social competence in adolescents with social skill deficits.

Community dancing proved helpful for child warriors and torture victims in Africa.

Research here is not as strong.

Social connection & bilateral stimulation

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31) Mindfulness

32) Back to my original questions:

33) Possible answers

34) Possible answers

35) Possible answers

36) Possible answers

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37) Summary

38) Conclusion. But this is actually ONLY a hypothesis. We need to test out the observation and see if it’s “real”.

39) Where do we go from here?

40) Resources

41) Resources, cont.

42) The end. Many thanks to all the horses, people, and researchers that helped with this presentation!