An Interview with Kelsey Devoille, LMFT, MS
Kelsey Devoille is a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and founder of Unbridled Counseling, which hosts equine-assisted therapy. Kelsey specializes in treating anxiety, eating disorders and depression.
Maya Hsu: Hi, welcome to this installment of The Seattle Psychiatrist Interview Series. I'm Maya Hsu, and I'm a research intern here at SAS. Today, I'm joined by Kelsey Devoille, a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist practicing in Washington state. She received her Master’s of Science from Seattle Pacific University in Marriage and Family Therapy and founded Unbridled Counseling in 2012, which is her practice of equine-assisted therapy. Kelsey specializes in anxiety, depression, eating disorders, relationships, and fertility. She is also a member of International Association of Eating Disorder Professionals and a member of the American Association of Marriage and Family Therapists. Kelsey, would you like to introduce yourself and start us off by talking about how you became interested in equine therapy?
Kelsey Devoille: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me, Maya. As Maya mentioned, I'm Kelsey Devoille. I started Unbridled Counseling about 10 years ago, noticing a need in the community for ways in which people can engage in the therapeutic process outside a traditional office setting. I grew up riding and training horses and started coaching about 15 years ago, and really recognized the therapeutic impact of the horses and the relationship with the horses on my students. I also noticed that in my own relationship with horses growing up, that it was often when I felt most grounded and connected. I then started looking into how to go about setting that up in a more professional way, starting on my graduate program and looking into what the field of equine-assisted therapy looks like.
Maya Hsu: Yeah. How would you describe the field of equine-assisted therapy for someone who's never heard of it before?
Kelsey Devoille: Yeah. Equine-assisted therapy is anytime we bring horses into a therapeutic setting to promote healing or promote growth. It can look very, very different based on the models used and based on the preferences of the clients. For some people, it truly is just having a horse present while utilizing talk therapy models, simply to be outside and be more grounded, connect to their body a little bit more. In other models, it can be very, very relational and deep work, where the relationship with the horse is truly used to model relationships that happen outside of the therapeutic setting. It just depends on the goals of the patient and how they best engage in their own growth.
Maya Hsu: It sounds like you can really access a wide variety of types of therapy treatments with horses.
Kelsey Devoille: Yes.
Maya Hsu: Is there something specific about equine-assisted therapy that makes it therapeutic that's different from just interacting with horses or going for a horseback ride?
Kelsey Devoille: Yeah, I think, partially it's how the therapist directs the interactions, so knowing what the patient has to work on and knowing how we can bring in the horses to access areas in which they may be stuck or may be having a hard time experiencing the growth. It's very easy to talk about change in an office, but leaving that office, it's harder to practice. It's really about how the therapist can use the horse as the facilitator.
Maya Hsu: Cool. Could you give an example of how somebody with anxiety who wants to address their anxiety, how their interaction with equine-assisted therapy might look different from somebody who might have an eating disorder?
Kelsey Devoille: Yeah. I think that can vary. Given that eating disorders often are grounded in anxiety, it can look similar, but with anxiety, oftentimes, it's recognizing the person's internal experience and noticing how that may be affecting the horse. The horses often mirror the anxiety, and so it can make the connection with the horse a little bit more difficult when the person is less grounded and feeling emotionally flooded. Oftentimes, that's really where working to help the patient, in the moment, connect to their body, become more grounded through self-regulation methods so that they can interact with the horse in that way.
Whereas eating disorders, say, for example, someone maybe has a hard time using their voice or being assertive or feeling powerful in a room, it can be useful to then bring about those characteristics in their communication with the horse. Otherwise, often they get walked all over by the horse. It's activating fairly different communication skills in each of those different settings.
Maya Hsu: When you talked about anxiety and the horse picking up on a person's anxiety, it made me wonder, does it ever happen where the client and the horse both have anxiety and then it escalates because they are receiving feedback based off of each other and then they're just engaged in this co-dysregulation?
Kelsey Devoille: Absolutely, yeah, and that's the moment where we generally pause and say, "Okay, what are we noticing? What are you noticing in your body, and now what are you noticing in the horse? What are we observing? Is the horse becoming more vigilant? Is the horse becoming more nervous, spooky, reactive? and I wonder why," because oftentimes patients don't even realize that's happening in their body. Being able to see it in the horse is the feedback they need to say, "Whoa, what's happening here? Let's pause and let's check in to how we can break this cycle," because it likely is happening in their relationships outside of equine therapy.
Maya Hsu: That's so interesting. What about horses make them unique and effective for therapy?
Kelsey Devoille: Yeah. Well, the first is that they are thousand-plus pound animals. For a lot of people, it naturally brings about levels of fear, levels of vulnerability that can mimic some of the other areas in their life where they feel anxiety or fear come up. Automatically, we're tapping into that nervous system activity.
The other thing is that they, in the wild, are part of a herd and so they're very social animals. That means that when a patient does attempt to connect with them in a relational way, as long as it's skillful, most of the time the horse will reinforce that behavior and enter into relationship with them, whereas some animals are less inclined to want to do that.
I would say the third aspect, that's probably the most powerful, is because they're prey animals, they really pick up on the emotional states of the beings around them. They rely on being able to pick up cues that might tell them there's a predator in the area, which then makes them very highly attuned to the emotional states of the patients, and again, able to give that feedback that we were just talking about.
Maya Hsu: Are there other animals, other prey animals, that you know of that would also be effective in this type of work?
Kelsey Devoille: Hmm, that's a good question. I don't, actually. I know dogs and cats have been used in therapy, but they don't have those dynamics of being prey animals or herd animals. To me, that's why equine therapy feels really unique.
Maya Hsu: Yeah. How can horses be used for emotional regulation or healing from trauma?
Kelsey Devoille: Yeah. For the emotional regulation piece, it's the feedback that the horses provide and helping patients to recognize when they are regulating in their body. Like we were talking about, they might notice that they're becoming anxious and the horse is feeding off of them, and then they might be able to engage in some sort of self-soothing or some grounding work, some breathing work. Then they might notice the horse starts chewing or licking their lips or lowering their head, which is all signs of relaxation, which then gives the patient cues, "Oh, wow, something changed in my body. What happened? I just got feedback from the horse." That can be a positive reinforcer to learning how to self-regulate.
In terms of trauma, oftentimes the relationship with the horse can mimic or activate the neural pathways in the brain where the trauma is held. A benign example might be they're working with the horse and the horse turns around and walks away from them, which can then instigate the feelings that they had, say, as a child when they were abandoned or neglected. In that moment, those neural pathways are activated and that truly feels like that past experience for them. It's in that moment that we can stop, pause, and rewrite the script a little bit and change the way in which they interact in that moment. As opposed to, say, shutting down or feeling abandoned, they might be able to work themselves through engaging with the horse in a different way to achieve a different result, which then rebuilds more healthy neural pathways in those interactions.
Maya Hsu: It reminds me of ecotherapy and how sometimes therapists can go on walks in nature with their clients and use the scenery and just whatever organic things are happening in their environment, they can use that as jumping off points for conversation or for sparking memories. It sounds like with the horses there's sometimes an unpredictable aspect of working with them, where you don't know if they'll turn away, and if they do, what that'll provoke inside the client. It sounds like that's really helpful for just bringing up things that you might not know to bring up.
Kelsey Devoille: Yeah. I think oftentimes it can be really organic, like a deer could run across the pasture and spook them and then all of a sudden it's like, "Whoa, what did that feel like? Or what did you see in the horse that feels familiar to your experience when scared or in fight or flight?" That's what makes it a bit exciting, is sometimes it's hard, because what happens and those are interactions can be painful, but yeah, it ignites change in a way that feels less predictable.
Maya Hsu: Yeah. What type of people would you recommend equine therapy for, and also sort of related to that, are there certain disorders or challenges that people have that might not be best addressed with equine therapy, for instance, maybe social anxiety or ADD, off the top of my head?
Kelsey Devoille: Mm-hmm (affirmative), yeah. I love equine therapy for work with kids, teens, people who would be unwilling or uncomfortable to engage in therapy in an office-type setting, just because it creates such a more creative environment. As far as symptoms, I think working with the anxiety disorders, eating disorders, OCD, depression can be useful for working on the emotional regulation, and any time we're working on social dynamics, so relational issues, family dynamics, social skills. I actually do think for ADD and social anxiety it can be really useful because you have to be present to really, truly engage with the horse. It's an opportunity to focus on being mindful, being present, being focused. Again, the horse will give feedback when the person tends to check out.
Nothing really comes to mind in terms of a patient who would not be a good fit for equine therapy, just simply because it's so flexible that we can alter how we use the horse to determine how best to engage the client. There's really not a population that I feel like is a bad fit for this type of work.
Maya Hsu: Yeah. I'm curious, you might not have an answer for this, but as the therapist, your role is the facilitator and the observer. Are there any things that you intentionally do to try and mitigate any projection onto what you think you might be interpreting between a client and a horse?
Kelsey Devoille: Yes, and that can be pretty tricky given that I also come from a background of teaching and training. In that world, certain horse behavior always means something and there's always a right answer for how you interpret behavior, or how you respond. In a therapeutic setting, that's really not my job-- to interpret the relationship for the patient. Oftentimes, they see something in the horse and interpret it a certain way and my observation was different, but it's not really that relevant to me or to them. It's really accessing how the person is perceiving the engagement with the horse.
There may be times in which I'm noticing a theme, where the person might be interpreting the behavior in a way that doesn't really sit with me or that I'm not seeing, and so I might be able to just ask the question and say, "I wonder if it could be this. Is it possible that the horse is responding due to A, B or C," but it's really my job to be curious and allow the patient to interact in the way that feels the most powerful for them.
Maya Hsu: Yeah, that makes sense. I appreciate your response because that clarified what I was imagining a therapist's role to be in equine-assisted therapy. It sounds like you stick more to objective observations, like the horse turned away or-
Kelsey Devoille: Absolutely.
Maya Hsu: ... the horse is not making eye contact or something factual, and then piecing together patterns and connections just within the client's own interpretations.
Kelsey Devoille: Yep, absolutely.
Maya Hsu: What has been your most rewarding or favorite experience with equine therapy?
Kelsey Devoille: Yeah. I love when people are able to bring the experience in the therapeutic setting into their world. They experience something with a horse and then they come back next week and say, "Okay, I was having this conversation with my boss and I was able to really imagine how it felt for me when I was able to back the horse up. I was able to access the feelings in my body of assertiveness and confidence and trust in myself to make those connections." Or, for example, when it's the other way around, so they're working with the horse and they're like, "Oh my God, this is exactly how it feels when I'm fighting with my husband. I'm actually seeing my husband in the horse right now." Creating those metaphorical situations, where we're really joining the two experiences to make the bridge for what's happening in therapy and how it's being applied in their life, because they can get really creative with it in ways that I wouldn't have even seen myself.
Maya Hsu: Yeah, yeah. I also have an additional curiosity. Are there horses that have their own trauma that don't necessarily make good candidates for equine-assisted therapy?
Kelsey Devoille: Yeah, great question. I think it depends on your setting. When I'm working with kids, I tend to want to make sure I have horses who stay fairly grounded and regulated and predictable, just given the safety factors involved. However, if it's an adult who's pretty aware of their surroundings, actually, working with horses who've had past trauma can be challenging, but really rewarding. I had an older pony once who had a fairly significant trauma background and it took one patient six to 10 sessions to be able to even touch her, but the process of doing that and the end result was so rewarding that it really was valuable in the patient's growth. Whereas, a kid might not have the patience for that, but I think if you have the right patient-to-horse combination, it can be really useful.
Maya Hsu: Yeah. When a patient or a client finishes treatment, I imagine there's some attachment work that you might have to do to terminate working together. What does that look like, if they formed a really close bond with a certain horse?
Kelsey Devoille: Mm-hmm (affirmative), yeah. I mean, I think it often mimics how we end relationships in our own lives. You notice when, say, therapy is coming to an end, I think it's interesting to notice our patients purposely detaching and how they're doing that is really good awareness. I think it's being open and communicative in the process to say, "What are you feeling here? As we're starting to end this, are you noticing wanting to pull away or are you noticing wanting to find closure and an effective goodbye in that?" It just provides a lot of good information to how people handle goodbyes in their own life.
Maya Hsu: Right. Is there anything else you would like people to know about equine-assisted therapy?
Kelsey Devoille: I would just say that there isn't a rigid model for what it looks like and you don't have to be this lifelong horse lover to find it valuable and powerful. I think as long as you can be open-minded to what the horses can offer, in terms of growth, it can be really useful for most of the population.
Maya Hsu: I'm definitely interested in trying it at some point.
Kelsey Devoille: Yeah.
Maya Hsu: Sounds really helpful. Well, thank you so much for joining us on this installment. It was such a joy to speak with you and hear more about equine-assisted therapy.
Kelsey Devoille: Of course. Thanks so much for having me.
Please note: The views expressed by the interviewee are for educational and informational purposes only, are not meant to diagnose or treat any condition, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Seattle Anxiety Specialists, PLLC.
Editor: Jennifer (Ghahari) Smith, Ph.D.