Equine Therapy
Can horses save 8 middle-aged alcoholics?
Yesterday, right after breakfast we went to a lecture by Reverend Jack, the spiritual director here at the treatment center. He looks just like Barry Manilow, I think, and his lecture was about negativity and expectations and outcomes. Blonde locks flowing, he started in on the grumbling and complaining that people do at the treatment center and how counter-productive it all is, “Wait, why am I only allowed to smoke in the gazebos? Why isn’t the food better? Why, Why, Why, blah, blah, blah. Here’s the thing, it’s time for all of you to WAKE THE FUCK UP!”
Reverend Jack screamed that last part and you could see more than one person startle awake. “Folks, I had bladder cancer and the hospital where I got treated had a banner in the waiting area that said ‘Where Miracles Happen Every Day.’ He continued. “And I thought that was important and I tried to embrace that thought—particularly when they were pushing medicine up my dick. And you know what, I didn’t enjoy having things jammed up my urethra, but I had bladder cancer and they told me that’s how I could get better. So when they told me they had to push some huge tube up my dick, I smiled and tried to think of it as a miracle happening.”
At this point, Mike, who was sitting two seats down from me snorted and it was pretty loud. We were only a few rows up in the auditorium and Reverend Jack definitely heard it—he scowled at Mike for a moment and shook his head before he went on with the rest of the lecture about miracles and penis cancer and the importance of only smoking in the designated gazebos.
Mike is one of the new guys---says he was a lawyer at one time and is now a musician, although it’s not really all that clear. He is around my age and has a pony tail and that often rings alarm bells for me. He hates Reverend Jack and that goes back to a run-in at Music Group on one of Mike’s first days. Mike signed up for Music Group, which Reverend Jack ran, and was looking forward to playing the piano. Surprisingly, but like so many other things at the treatment center, it turns out that Music Group is very tightly and kind of absurdly controlled. Mike thought playing the cheesy, electronic keyboard was beneath him and the music he intended to play and requested to play the grand piano in the chapel. Reverend Jack refused this request and now Mike hates him. I don’t think this bothers Reverend Jack very much.
Anyway, Mike is relentlessly negative, judgmental and views almost all of what happens here as aversion therapy; He thinks it’s so horrible being here in rehab that he would never drink again simply to avoid ever having to come back. I think that applied to Alumni events, too. I think I speak for Brian, Red, Runaway Sam and Reverend Danny: Mike drives all of us crazy and he was at his best/worst today when we set off for equine therapy.
To be fair, I was skeptical, too, but it was an off-site field trip with the prospect of a stop at the Sheetz--so I was all in. We piled into the robin’s egg blue van we affectionately called the Druggy Buggy and headed out. It turns out the the Wernersville State Mental Hospital is only a few minutes away and we drove very slowly through the campus, which seemed like a bit of a gratuitous, passive-aggressive threat by Dennis, our counselor and driver. Dennis is in his late 30’s or early 40’s and has sandy brown thinning hair and wears glasses with thin gold frames. He looks more like an accountant than a recovering heroin and meth addict. He’s very soft-spoken and when we get on his nerves he’s almost apologetic about it.
Like when Beef (not his real name) tried to buy 20 cartons of cigarettes on a Saturday-evening trip to the Sheetz and Dennis objected. Beef logically reasoned that we were allowed to smoke in designated areas so why couldn’t he get 20 cartons of Marlboro Lights. Dennis asked, “why do you need so many cigarettes?” clearly hinting that he that he suspected that Beef might be looking to become a cigarette kingpin when we returned to campus. Beef was demonstrably offended by the implication, “I smoke a lot of cigarettes and I could be here a fucking long time,” he sniffed. Dennis wasn’t having it, “You can buy one carton now, if you run low on smokes before we go to CVS or Sheetz again, we’ll help you out.” There was a little bit of spluttering, but that was the end of Beef’s 20 carton empire.
Anyway, Dennis pulled the van into the farm’s driveway and we were ushered into a big barn--20 yards wide by 40 yards long—with three horses inside. The horses were unbridled and there was a huge pile of toys on one side of the barn. We signed waivers and the man who runs it gave us his background (20 years working at the treatment center before starting this operation) and told us about therapy assisted by horses. We were told to feel free to approach the horses, or not, whatever we were comfortable with and to try to get to know them better. There was a white and brown horse who stood nearly motionless and attracted a lot of attention; a charcoal colored horse who was more interested in walking around the ring and a chestnut colored horse that I liked but that started to back away whenever Reverend Dan, the gun-toting, anger-challenged minister who won every instance of our nightly story contest: “That’s Fucked Up,” came close.
We were told to work as a group and use the toys and other objects to create something that represented the obstacles to getting sober and staying sober and that we needed to find a way to involve a horse in helping us overcome the obstacles. The idea we came up with was to pile up all of the toys in the middle and that would represent the mess and chaos our drinking had caused and then we would get one of the horses to knock it over, finally clearing the way for us to stay sober.
Of course, horses get spooked pretty easily and one thing we learned is that no rational horse was going to approach this huge, ridiculous mess we had created in the center of the ring. Being chased by eight middle-aged alcoholics did not alter the odds of securing the therapy horse’s help with our demonstration. We tried for about 10 minutes and then we were invited to change our approach. Three of us extracted a big rubber ball (about 3 feet in diameter) from the mess in the middle and our plan was to roll it close to the horse and get him to touch it without him spooking and running away.
We had not yet formulated what this would represent, but it felt like it was potentially doable. And we were right. Other people were trying out their own alternative plans like laying PVC pipes in a line to the original pile that were intended to somehow connect the horse standing 20 feet away to the mess. No, I don’t know why we were given PVC pipes as part of this.
My group was asked to explain our plan. I pointed out that like true alcoholics, we had managed to come up with a completely insane plan that had almost no chance of succeeding —uncannily replicating our own hapless efforts to get sober. We made the problem too complicated, expected to solve too much and somehow believed that an innocent bystander horse was going to come and help knock down the obstacles keeping us from sobriety. Our explanation for our revised plan was that we took one thing out of the mess, the big rubber ball, hopefully the most important part, and we were willing to show it to someone else and to see if they would be willing to tolerate having it near. Not fix it or move it or change it--just have it near. I thought that wasn’t such a bad explanation. I’m not sure any of us actually thought that when we were devising the display, but whatever. It’s horse-assisted therapy.
The next project was for each of us to take some of the toys and lay them out in a way that illustrated something about our drinking. I took two foam tubes (the ones kids play with in the pool) a bunch of cute stuffed animals, a stuffed toy dog and a parrot doll that looked like the parrot from Aladdin. I put all of the stuffed animals, save for the dog and the parrot, on one side of the tubes and the dog and the parrot on the other. When I was asked to explain my furry rehab sculpture I said that the pile of stuffed animals represented the people who loved me, the tubes represented my drinking. I was the stuffed dog on the other side and the parrot was the angry, negative, mocking voice in my head. The alcoholic drinking tubes kept me away from the people who loved me and the mean parrot voice kept me away from them, too.
Some of the displays were very complicated and some were very funny. When it was Mike’s turn, he held up a tiny, stuffed Elmo doll---about 6 inches big. He was asked to explain his selection and it was very, very complicated. Somehow the tiny Elmo doll represented him, his drinking, his children, his career, his divorce and some other stuff that I couldn’t hear. He was holding the Elmo doll in front of one of the horses and then the therapy horse lunged and tried to bite the head off Mike’s Elmo doll. No lie. There have been a lot of funny moments in Rehab---but not sure when I’ve laughed quite that hard. Mike did not find it terribly funny.
A couple of us were then asked to pick up our toy displays, carry them in our arms and then try to lead the horses around the ring three times. Of course, this was impossible. I think the floaty tubes spooked the horses for a bit and they galloped around for a lap but that was about it. I think this was supposed to drive home the point that as long as we carried our own “bundles” we wouldn’t be able to accomplish anything or stay sober. I’m not sure if that’s what I took away from it—it could also have proved that you can’t simultaneously carry an armful of pool toys and lead a horse around a ring.
The Horse Counselor turned to me, “Everyone else has set down their bundle, why haven’t you?” I had the tubes in my lap and was clutching all of the stuffed animals in my arms. I said that it was because he hadn’t said to set them down, but then I said that I was still holding on to everything because I was afraid to forget what drinking had done to me. He asked why I was still holding on to the parrot and I said it was because the parrot’s horribly mean voice was unfortunately a part of me and that I didn’t think I could just turn it off. I thought the most I could do was to stop listening to it so much and that maybe if I could find a way to not hate that voice and what it represented quite as much that maybe it wouldn’t be as loud or talk as often.
And that was the end of our horse-assisted therapy. I’m a little unclear about what we learned today, but they had mini Butterfinger bars in the fridge for us---so it was a gigantically successful morning, as far as I was concerned. We all bought extra cigarettes for Beef at the Sheetz on the way home.