A Gestalt Approach in Guiding Therapists to Effectually Treat Teenagers With SUDs What is a ground tie?

 This is the very question a therapist may ask after receiving simple instructions about a ground-tie exercise (i.e., promoting a process of potential implementation of healthy risk-taking behavior) in a profession growth workshop in equine assisted counseling (EAC). EAC is a form of animal-assisted therapy (AAT), and AAT has been around for more than a 200 years. The historic founder of AAT was Florence Nightingale in the 1800s that original observed the benefits of an animals ability to help reduce anxiety in adult and children psychiatric patients (Ernest, 2014). However, EAC, which is a counseling approach of equine therapy for psychological disorders, especially for substance use disorders (SUDs), was not established until 1999 (Pegasus ECT, 2018). The EAC model provides a non-threatening opportunity through objective observations of verbal and non-verbal cues between the therapy horse and the participant. Open ended, yet thought stimulated questions are asked by the EAC team, sometimes during and after the participant struggles to complete exercises on the ground or on the therapy horse. Usually, the participant will use ineffectual communication with the horse, until a new awareness changes the behavior. Even potential metaphors to current issues may be explored, yet the horse is the true counselor, not the EAC team. For example, the instructions, from the EAC team, may have been something like this: “Take the therapy horse out to the middle of the round pen and ground-tie him to the best of your ability, which is your perception of a ground-tie, not mine, or anyone else’s.” “Please let us know when you are done.” Typically, the same question comes up (i.e., what is a ground-tie?). The horse mirrors back behavior, and reads hidden cues that are usually masked from others (Pegasus ECT, 2018). This exercise is Gestalt in nature, and Gestalt psychology tends to look at the mind and behavior as a whole, rather than separate parts of a complete system