We spoke to counselling psychologist, Dr Emily Walters about her equine-assisted therapy CIC, sharing her passion for horses, and why equine-assisted therapy can be misunderstood.
07 April 2026
I work at Hope Meadows Equine Assisted Recovery, which is a not-for-profit organisation offering equine-assisted therapy, therapeutic horse riding and alternative education for adults and children.
I'm the CEO and I'm also a qualified counselling psychologist. I'm split between running the organisation, oversight of all our pathways, and I also do my own clinical work. I have a caseload of clients, who I work with in the equine-assisted psychotherapy way.
It was a bit of both really. I've ridden horses since I was five, and had horses since I was 10. My family weren't horsey at all, but I just got into it as a kid and absolutely fell in love with everything horse-related. I was really lucky to have my own stables and then got what's now the organisation's current site when I was 18. While I was studying psychology at university, I also ran a riding school for a few years.
I had two parallel interests, academics and psychology alongside loving horses and teaching people how to ride. I got a job as a worker in crisis mental health – my first job in mental health and so many of the guests were interested in horses too. I'd stopped running the riding school, but I had this idea that there might be something where my two passions could come together, and I could offer something that's really needed in the community.
Our closest similar service was an hour away, and if you're struggling with your mental health, you might be on a low or no income, and it's too much to travel that far. I set up Hope Meadows before I had any of my proper training or qualifications and we started out doing equine-assisted activities, where people struggling with their mental health could come and spend an hour grooming, leading, and mucking out the horses.
I absolutely loved it, and it grew from there. It went from being something I did for a couple of hours on a Saturday to now, where we have over 100 clients a week and we're a team of 10. I've built the organisation alongside doing my doctorate and training.
Yes, I was really lucky, and I've always been really passionate about sharing the land, stables and horses I have. I'm not the kind of person that wants to keep it to myself – it should be for the community to enjoy. I had four horses when we started and a little bit of land, but we now have nine horses, and rent extra space.
As we're a CIC, we can apply for grants and funding to run projects and build the facilities and buy horses. This means we can keep everything as low cost as possible for clients, and we've always tried to have some affordable options, especially on the therapy side.
Any horse can do it to an extent. It's a big question in the industry as well as for us at Hope Meadows. Ideally, a therapy horse is very in touch with their own feelings and natural behaviours, and will give responsive feedback to therapists and clients. You don't specifically train horses for it, and you don't need them to act in a certain way.
Obviously, some horses have had a difficult history or had really bad experiences with humans. We do take those horses on too here (I'm a bit of a soft touch) and I tend to enjoy working with those horses. You have to be really careful because if you're putting a horse that's in a process of healing with a client that's also going through that process, it can get a lot for both sides.
We have a range of horses, of all sizes, all personalities, all types, because then when you get clients coming through the gates, generally there's a horse that they click with or feel drawn to. We are always monitoring the horse's emotional wellbeing and assessing if they're psychologically and physically healthy enough to do what we're asking them to do.
It can be so different from person to person. One of the things I love most is that it's so varied. Generally, we do a typical 50-minute one-to-one with just the client, therapist and horse or horses. It always starts as you would a typical therapy session, with a check-in, seeing where the client is at. We might do an embodied and somatic check-in before we go into the horses' space and spend time with them.
We don't want to take all our dysregulation up close to them, so some clients might need a little bit more time to kind of walk around the site.
A session might involve watching the horses from the fence line, grooming, or we might go into the arena, and think about how we interact with the horse. Essentially, we work on an embodied and relational way of being. We focus on building relationships with the horse, therapist and client. We see it as a triad, and doing that brings the whole body into it.
As it's outdoors, we've got the weather playing a part, and horses that are unpredictable that bring up all sorts of feelings for us. We want to try and build relationships within that and have relational learning taking place, without forgetting that ultimately horses communicate without language. We need to be very good with communicating through our bodies.
I thought that I wanted to go onto the clinical psychology training, and it was only because I set up Hope Meadows and was growing a business that I couldn't do a fulltime course. I had a rethink and looked into the counselling psychology doctorate as an alternative because of the flexibility with study hours. It's still a fulltime course, but I only had to be on site there for three days in year one and one day for the other years.
The more I read about it, the more I realised that it actually aligns a lot better with what I wanted. We're a non-profit, and there was the social justice element of the counselling psychology course that really appealed. I wasn't planning to apply that year (2022), but when I realised that the deadline was two weeks away, I thought it was worth trying and then got onto it, which was amazing.
I absolutely love the course. I can't in good faith recommend building a business alongside doing the doctorate training because there's been times where I've thought it was going to break me. It was incredibly intense running a business, alongside doing that level of study and training.
The personal development and growth that comes with it means that I've become a different person through doing the course, while at the same time trying to run a business that needs me to be quite consistent. That has been probably the biggest challenge, but it has been incredible for my motivation.
There's never been a point where I've thought 'I'm just going to give up on this'. I can see what we're building and how I'm going to be able to really make a difference working in this way. I was able to do my thesis research with people who were going to equine-assisted therapy. It's been a lot of seven day weeks and late nights though!
I think it's getting there, but still at times is seen as bit of an 'out there' alternative therapy. I think it's becoming more well-known because what's offered on the NHS is getting a bit more restricted, and maybe even CBT-heavy. There's that need for support that's a bit different.
There's no other modality that brings horses into it, which I think is amazing. I think there's sometimes confusion about what it is, as some people think it's just stroking a horse for an hour, but it has a lot more depth and complexity than that.
I also think it suffers from real and perceived financial barriers. It can be well over £100 an hour usually. We try and match standard therapy rates, so ours is £50 an hour. I think although awareness is maybe impacted by how inaccessible it can be for some people, it's not something that's generally offered in a wide and affordable way.
It's interesting because no one really talks about what happens after your training. I think so much of psychology training is geared towards getting the doctorate, and then afterwards you realise you've got a whole career to fill.
My plan was always to use the qualification at Hope Meadows, as I'm really passionate about the equine-assisted psychotherapy modality. It's has got a long way to go in terms of research, and evidence-based theory, as it doesn't have a general consensus across the UK, or internationally about what it is and how it works. When I started the course, I wouldn't have said research was my passion, but through doing it, I've become a lot more interested in contributing to that for this modality.
I'm going to work clinically with Hope Meadows and have a caseload of clients, and I really want to go into research at some point. Although I probably need a break after the intensity of everything I've just done!
Find out more about counselling psychology by visiting the Division of Counselling Psychology microsite.
The British Psychological Society is a charity registered in England and Wales, Registration Number : 229642 and a charity registered in Scotland, Registration Number : SC039452 – VAT Registration Number : 283 2609 94
© Copyright 2000-2026 The British Psychological Society