Thursday, August 21, 2008

JDancer, JD for short, is prone to the horsey equivalent of panic attacks. So, Stefan suggested we do EMDR on him. EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing.

Stefan wanted to video the whole thing. We cross-tied JD . . . which means he had two lead ropes attached to his halter. With EMDR, the person or animal needs to move their eyes from side to side, not their head. So, we wanted his head to stay in one place.

Stefan used both hands . . . one hand in front of each eye. He would move one hand and then the other. Pat video-ed and counted the time. Stefan did it for forty seconds with a ten or fifteen second break in between where he petted JD on the forehead. I counted how many rounds we had done, because we wanted twenty rounds of forty seconds each.

In EMDR, when a person does it, while they are on the bi-lateral segment, they are supposed to concentrate on the things that are bothering them. During the forty second parts, I would use reiki to "remind" JD of the bad things that happened in his youth . . . being shot with pellet guns and having firecrackers going off in his corral. I felt like I was getting his images again, like what happened with Cisco when I first came here. I had images of a lot of horses in a small corral, and when the bad things were going on, all the horses were pretty panic-ed and fearful. I could almost feel his anxiety and fear and panic and it felt bad. After several rounds of the EMDR, it felt lessened, but who knows. Only time will tell. EMDR doesn't always work immediately, plus he'll need more than one session of it.

Before starting the EMDR, we had put JD in the round pen with Pat riding Chester, which always gets JD riled up. We video-ed that, also. And after we finished, we put JD back in the round pen with Chester again. We will compare the videos and see if he seemed more relaxed the second time.

This is a picture of Largo Canyon School taken from the pueblito on the cliffs above us.  To the far right is the barn.  The farthest building to the left is the kitchen/gymnasium/bathrooms.  Just to the right of that building is the main building where all the rooms are, and where I sleep.  In the middle are covered stalls for the horses.  You can see how big the corrals are - - they go from the other side of the barn to the left of the  stalls.  The corrals are upside down L shaped.