For this Moment in Time we would like to share a snapshot of a teenage client who was struggling to find a good fit between the person he wanted to be and the person who people “assumed” he was. This particular client had previously been through a group therapy program and was now in individual therapy sessions to address some of the negative behaviors and thought patterns we were able to identity in the group, for which he asked help in addressing. He had been in and out of detention and had countless of different people in his “world”; most of them are with the court system or are outreach specialists, social workers, and school employees. He knows that they are all there to help him succeed, but on this day he said he felt that “Everyone underestimates me, and they are just waiting to lock me up again… If they do, then they will see what happens.” The treatment team spent a few minutes outside of the arena, checking in with him and his case manager to verify what was the real picture for him. We reiterated that he was the only one who could control what would happen when he goes back to court in a few months. He could either turn back into the underestimated boy and “mess things up again” and get locked back up, OR he could choose to keep changing his behaviors, making the right choices, and go into court proving that he has changed.

At this point the client and the treatment team entered the arena for the day’s session. The activity for the session was called “ground tie.” The idea is that the client be able to have a horse stay in one spot (by its own choice – not tied to anything) while he moved away from the horse to do other things. Kind of like in the Old West days when cowboys didn’t have a place to tie up their horses while they got off to fix a fence or tend to a cow. The cowboys had to be able to leave their horses and expect that they would be standing in the same place until they returned. After receiving this information, the client was free to work on the task. It is worth mentioning that once the client was in the arena he seemed calmer and not so angry and unhappy.

The client noticed that the horse was standing against the wall of the arena, licking on a salt block. The client instantly began to move jump standards and other poles to “box in” the horse. Once the client had the box the way he wanted it and the horse still inside the box licking the salt block, the client began to move away from the box. Once he was a few steps away from the box, the horse lifted his head, turned around inside the box, and began to bat around one of the poles with his head. The horse knocked on the same pole multiple times, until giving it one last hard bat that knocked it over, and then walked out of the box. Once the horse was out of the box, he turned and watched the client as he began trying to reinforce the box by adding more poles. Then he led the horse back into the box. However, before the client could begin to walk away the horse ran out of the box through one of the wider gaps on the other side. The client continued to reinforce the box by making it smaller and tighter. The client made an entrance to the box that he could get the horse through and then close behind him. At this point the horse would enter into the box and keep right on going through the poles and out the other side. Once out of the box, the horse would continually return to the client, on his own, and stand freely next to him, waiting for the client to “fix” the box. Then the horse would be led back into the box, only to run through the poles again and out the other side. This process was repeated a few more times until the horse no longer returned to the client, preferring to go over to the treatment team and stand.

At this point the session was almost over; there was just enough time to do some processing.  We asked the client to turn around and look at what he had created and to tell us what it looked like from our perspective. The client started laughing and said, “It’s a jail cell. I was locking him up…no wonder the horse didn’t want to stay in there.” We asked the client to think back to the directions he had been given – the horse had to make a choice to stand where he was left, all on his own. No outside forces could be making him follow the rules. We processed what it would take for that to happen. The client talked about needing to have a relationship and trust with that horse, and the horse would have to want to listen in order to be successful.  We asked him what he would have liked to have tried with the horse for this task. After a few moments he stated, “I would have liked him to stand in the middle of the arena while I walked away.” We followed that up with an observation that he had never even tried that approach – he never gave the horse that option; instead, he had immediately started building a “cell” around him. Our question that followed was, “Wow, what is that about…?” His answer was pretty amazing: “I guess I just underestimated him, too, and I didn’t think he would ever be able to do that.”

That was the peak of our session. We asked the client to spend some time before the next session thinking about how he had treated the horse and the parallels to how some people treat him, and most importantly, how he could change it.