The Therapeutic Farm Program
What We Do
Animal Assisted Therapy (AAT) is an alternative or complementary type of therapy that includes the use of animals in treatment. The Therapeutic Farm Program provides mental health counseling to children, adolescents, young adults, and adults using a specific evidence-based treatment that includes Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (TF-CBT) combined with Animal Assisted Therapy.
Our approach is unique in that the utilization of animals as a part of the therapeutic modality to facilitate healing and rehabilitation, incorporates abused and neglected animals that are rescued and cared for the rest of their lives at The Lucky Horse Sanctuary.
What are the Benefits of Animal Assisted Therapy?
Animal Assisted Therapy offers numerous benefits beyond those available through traditional therapies. In this era of managed care and cost reduction, AAT allows mental health therapists to use one treatment tool, an animal, to target a variety of goals. In a facility setting these goals are limited, relying solely on a medical model. During the same counseling session, using an animal, cognitive and perceptual deficits can be addressed, but also the client receives psychosocial benefits such as building rapport, increasing self-esteem and motivation, and stress reduction.
At The Lucky Horse Sanctuary all the animals involved in The Therapeutic Farm Program are trained, temperament tested and provided with the proper veterinary screening prior to working with our clients.
What is the Difference between Temperament and Training?
Temperament is an animal’s natural or instinctive behavior. This is the innate way an animal will respond when stressed. Training is teaching an animal to follow commands while under the control of a human. Our therapy animals have all been screened for sound temperament and completed obedience training.
What are the Benefits of Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy?
Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (TF-CBT) is an evidence-based treatment for those impacted by trauma. It incorporates trauma-sensitive interventions with cognitive-behavioral and humanistic principles and techniques.
The three main components of TF-CBT are stabilization, trauma narration and processing, and integration and consolidation.
By integrating Animal Assisted Therapy with Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy our therapeutic approach provides benefits of relieving trauma-related symptoms and increasing an overall sense of self-worth, well-being, and increased engagement in the therapeutic process by forming healthier comforting attachments with the therapy animal. This unique and powerful aspect allows clients to not only recover but also assist in the rehabilitation of another.
What We Offer
The Therapeutic Farm program offers Mental Health Counseling specific to group therapy for children, adolescents, young adults, and adults. Our psychotherapy groups are designed to specifically meet our client’s needs and provide an experiential group process. This experiential approach allows for hands-on real-life experiences to occur, enhancing the therapeutic process. The program’s psychotherapy groups focus on depression, anxiety, and relationship building and target specific problems such as substance abuse, and/or trauma-related symptoms. All while improving social skills and helping people deal with a range of issues such as anger, shyness, loneliness, and low self-esteem.
Visitation with a therapy animal(s) to your location can be arranged.
Fascinating Facts About Animal Therapy
- Just 12 minutes of animal therapy lowers stress
- Clients involved in animal therapy meet their goals faster
- You don’t have to be an animal person to benefit from animal therapy
- Even insects can help your health
- There are several classifications of animals used for therapy
What we do at the farm is an experiential hands-on form of therapy. This helps our clients walk through difficult situations, better process their emotions, and learn to see things from a different perspective, all happening outside the confinement of four walls.
Humans and animals rescuing each other: Lucky Horse Sanctuary
When Blair Barone, a licensed clinical psychologist, first opened her private practice in Boca Raton, she incorporated animals into her sessions, bringing a dog, a hamster, and a rabbit to the office with her. This practice proved so popular with her patients that she started bringing clients out to her four-acre farm in Coconut Creek and was blown away by their transformation.
When I first came to the farm, I saw rescue animals that had been brutally broken, physically, emotionally, and spiritually just as I was when I came for help. I look at these animals and I am in awe of their will to live despite how they have been treated. They don’t give up on themselves like many of us do. Like the animals, we can be provided with food, water, and shelter but without that hunger to live and believe in ourselves, we won’t make it. These animals rescued me.
