Horses are too big to bully, so people have to work with them. Especially people who may be working through their own issues. That's the point of some unusual psychotherapy in Hernando County.
By DAN DeWITT
Published October 26, 2004
[Times photos: Keri Wiginton]
The Lukeharts, from left, Dave, Lauren, 5, Ally, 11, and Cindy, work with a gray mare named Alex during their equine-assisted psychotherapy session with Tricia Wilmoth, background.
Dave Lukehart pats Alex, a key part of his family's equine-assisted psychotherapy sessions, as his daughters sit on the horse.
BROOKSVILLE - The point was to teach Cindy Lukehart to hold her tongue.
And she had, mostly, allowing her husband, Dave, to lead a horse through the woods while she followed, holding a slack rein, and their two daughters rode bareback.
But, finally, after she demanded with a stomp of her boot that her husband stop - and after the psychologist encouraged her to share - the dam burst.
"I would tell him he needs to pay attention where he's leading the horse. I look up and there's this tree I'm about to run into. He's walking along the middle of the path and I'm over here in the mud and the weeds . . . and there's these piles (of horse manure) I have to step over . . . and I'm winded," Cindy said.
Could she sum up, asked Darlene Williams, the psychologist who was running the session, and focus on being more constructive?
"He's going too fast. He's too dangerous, and he needs to take my needs into consideration."
Cindy is a "confronter," one of her psychologists said; Dave is an "avoider"; together they are "dysfunctional." Their problems are common; these descriptions are well-worn.
"I don't want to say it's the same old stuff, but it's the same old stuff," said Tricia Wilmoth, a psychologist with practices in Brooksville and Palm Harbor.
What is different are the surroundings - the woods and pasture on Wilmoth's 20-acre horse farm - and, even harder to miss, the main therapeutic tool: a dappled gray mare, standing 16 hands at the shoulder, named Alex.
This method is called equine-assisted psychotherapy. Wilmoth and Williams, who has offices in Clearwater and Palm Harbor, say they are its only practitioners in the Tampa Bay area.
Though they are used to fending off skeptics - "No, we don't put the horses on a couch," Wilmoth said - they are hardly alone in using horses to improve behavior and mental health.
Groups of mentally handicapped adults and troubled young people throughout the country work with horses. So do inmates at the Marion Correctional Institution near Ocala, which runs what is basically a retirement home for thoroughbreds. These programs are said to develop confidence, responsibility, a capacity for caring, and to just make people feel better.
Wilmoth recognized all this as a longtime horse owner. She learned to apply it to her work two years ago when she attended a three-day seminar run by a Utah organization, Equine Assisted Growth and Learning Association. It inspired her enough that she persuaded her friend, Williams, to enroll and bought the horse farm with her fiance, John Frazho.
"Wow! Wow! Capital letters. Exclamation points," Wilmoth said. "It was the most exciting thing I had encountered since hypnosis training."
Horses, because of their sensitivity to human emotion, are a dramatic diagnostic tool, she said.
"Whatever problems you are having will be displayed like you're at a drive-in theater."
Their size forces patients to communicate rather than bully. And though traditional counseling encourages patients to identify and talk about destructive habits, equine-assisted therapy gives them a chance to practice good behavior, or at least to practice not behaving badly.
Which is one reason Williams suggested it for the Lukeharts, who are struggling to change patterns that have been obvious to them for years.
"Basically, she runs over him like a tank over a speed bump," Wilmoth said.
The Lukeharts have been in equine-assisted therapy since August 2003, shortly after Wilmoth and Williams began offering it. Each session begins, in a way, when the family leaves crowded Pinellas and approaches Wilmoth's farm, in one of the most remote sections of Hernando County.
"Just coming up here is like a mini-vacation," Dave said, soon after the family spilled out of their small white sedan. He had close-cropped black hair and wore a gray T-shirt, his favorite, that his wife would insist that he change before he was photographed.
"My father was the type - I never did anything right," said Dave, 46.
"When he got on me, I just shut down."
He didn't do this so much early in his 12-year marriage, when he was happy with his career in the Army and with raising Cindy's two sons, who are now grown. His old habits returned, though, while serving under a commander who treated him as his father had and let him retire, in 1999, without any commendation.
As his confidence waned, his wife said, she grew more frustrated - and aggressive.
"I come from a yelling family," said Cindy, 43, who wore an orange shirt and spoke with her hands on her hips.
"I don't think he leads enough. When I ask him to accomplish something, he has to call me on the cell phone three times to ask me how to accomplish it. When I ask him to do something, he needs to just do it without being afraid I'm going to jump down his throat."
What finally brought the couple to Williams' office was the realization that they were both being bossed around by their 11-year-old daughter, Ally, which was especially alarming because Dave and Cindy both work at home and homeschool their children.
Dave thought he wasn't being firm enough with his daughter. Cindy was sure she was seeing a reflection of herself.
"I don't think girls should talk back to their mother at any time, and it got to the point where she was saying stuff to me at the hairdresser and I couldn't respond," Cindy said.
According to her psychologist, many couples have similar problems. The Lukeharts should be commended for addressing theirs.
"They are clearly in a preventative mode," said Williams, who explained the rules of the first exercise while Wilmoth and the two girls led Alex from the large wooden barn.
Dave was to lead the horse, Williams said. The girls would ride. Cindy would walk on the other side of the horse holding a lead, but could neither steer nor give directions.
Almost as soon as they set out on the wooded trail, Williams had to encourage Dave to provide more guidance - "David, why don't you say what your plans are?" - and to reprimand Cindy for providing too much.
She had suggested they take a left when they approached a tree growing in the middle of a clearing. She felt she had to, she told Williams:
"The horse is looking at me, like, "Why aren't you talking? Why are you letting him do this?' "
Even so, Williams said, "We have to stop and give you a consequence. What's your consequence, David?"
"Spanking," he said, and Cindy backed up to her daughters, who, without dismounting, tapped her on her shoulders.
Williams told him this punishment might not be appropriate. "David, your challenge is to come up with a consequence that doesn't involve violence."
She then said, more quietly, that his choice might have revealed a usually hidden aggression. So might the fact that he was leading the horse through stands of vine-tangled sweet gum trees and across muddy gullies.
"He's choosing a very dangerous path," Williams said.
After the ride ended, and after Cindy had unloaded her feelings, the Lukeharts' daughters were encouraged to give their a father a grade. The youngest, Lauren, 5, gave him an F;' Ally bestowed him with an A-, which seemed to surprise everybody.
"It sort of shows where the alignments are," Williams said.
The next exercise was called "lunging," which means almost the opposite inside the horse world than it does outside it. The goal, Williams said, as they walked to the middle of a show ring next to the barn, was to get Alex to trot in a smooth circle and for the Lukeharts to do, together, what is usually done by one person.
Cindy, who was again prohibited from talking, held a lead about 20 feet long while David was given a whip.
"You really have to work as a team," Williams said.
"Are you ready, horse?" Dave asked Alex.
"She has a name," Cindy said.
It didn't go well at first, with Alex repeatedly pulling away on the lead and stopping. At one point, when her husband continued to snap the whip while she was trying to comfort the horse, Cindy stomped as she had in the woods and shot him a furious glance.
Soon, though, they got it. David was flicking the whip just behind the mare's rump and Cindy led her in a smooth trot.
Williams replaced Alex with an aging gelding, named Willy, so even-tempered one of his nicknames is "Prince Valium." By the time the Lukeharts coaxed him into a trot, they were both smiling proudly.
"Look at those faces," Williams said. Williams noticed another good sign, she said. The girls, who had once interrupted these sessions constantly, were playing together quietly on the sidelines.
"They wouldn't be doing that if they didn't recognize their parents were a team," Williams said.
After it was over, and Willy was being led back to the barn, Dave said the whole family liked being around the horses. He thought he benefitted more from this kind of therapy - being outside and working through the problems - than from "just sitting in a chair talking about them."
