About us
I set up this business in order to help fund a project to take horses to the Bethlem Royal Hospital so that patients could spend time with horses. Anyone who engages with Bree will be contributing to this amazing project. I offer a range of different pathways and prices which reflect your different situation and which make sure the horses are well cared for.
Spending time with horses can have a profound affect on humans, but few of us have the time or can afford to keep a horse and not everyone wants to take riding lessons.
My name is Janet Haney, and I have been a practicing psychotherapist for twenty years. I created Bree in order to offer carefully supervised and safe individual encounters with equines. I will help you to understand and translate what is going on between you and the horse.
Bree offers three different ways to think about what you want to do:
- For people who rarely have a chance to get close to a horse, Bree welcomes you if you want to begin to know the impact of meeting a horse. Perhaps you have a desire to re-acquaint yourself with horses after many years absence, and gain new insights into your relationship with these wonderful creatures. Come for some sessions (I suggest at least three) to initiate or renew the relationship.
- For professionals who care for other people (e.g. therapists, blue light card holders etc) and who are curious about what facilitated equine encounters might offer them, their colleagues, and those they care for. I would suggest a set of six sessions to give you a chance to experience the way this works over time, and it would give you a chance to experience a few different activities with some different horses.
- For people who would like to try equine facilitated psychotherapy for regular sessions over a longer period of time. This would be suitable for anyone who wants to work on a particular issue. This would also be suitable for anyone who has plenty of experience of horses, or who owns a horse, but who is currently facing a crisis or a difficulty in their life.
I am an experienced and qualified therapist (more details of my training and experience below) and can help you through this amazing journey. The horses are key partners in the work, and together we will translate what's going on between you and them.
Training, qualifications & experience
When I was about 30 years old my life began to fall apart. Luckily I was working at Brunel University where a colleague had created a brand new MA which I signed up for. This was how I got my MA in Psychoanalytic Studies (1995) and found out about the innovations Jacques Lacan had introduced into Psychoanalysis. This lit a fuse which began a quiet but profound process of change in my life. I gave up academic work and took a job as an assistant nurse in adult acute psychiatry. This gave me an experience of working with people at their wits end and introduced me to the field of psychiatry in the country. At the same time, I began my own analysis and entered a training with the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research. But what proved decisive was my attendance of the Freudian Field events which were run by what was then called the European School of Psychoanalysis. This European school became the New Lacanian School (NLS) in 2002 and I was proud to be accepted as a practising analyst of the NLS and the World Association of Psychoanalysis in 2008. I still take an active part in the work of this school alongside colleagues across the world. My practical work is supervised within this international community. In 2006, I joined the The British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy where I am registered (No. 78429).
Around 2022, my analyst made a casual remark as I left the session: "what about your love of horses?" I immediately began searching online for ways to study equine facilitated psychotherapy and decided to join a course run by LEAP in Bracknell, where I qualified (Level 5) in 2024. (https://leapequine.com/practitioners/janet-haney-facilitated-equine-encounters/). At the same time, I began seriously studying Sharon Wilsie's "Horse Speak". What caught my attention was the points at which Sharon's work echoed aspects of psychotherapy. She seemed to be using Freud's discovery of what Lacan formulated as "the psychoanalyst's discourse." In a nutshell, she listens to the horse, learns its language (a body language based on gestures), then replies to it by speaking its own language. This is the golden rule of psychoanalysis: to listen to the person who comes to consult (the analysand), and to reply using the same words.
I was delighted to discover through Sharon and others that a mare must transmit the language to her foal and that this leads to the process by which a foal learns how to become a member of a herd. Language is transmitted via body language that the foal must learn if it wants to become a horse! This serves as a wonderful metaphor: humans also learn a language from their mothers and others who take care of them in the first years of life, and also learn how to form a bond with others in order to join the social order of life. Horses give us a tangible living metaphor for something fundamental to life: language. Probably this is what makes them so valuable in a therapeutic endeavour.
Freud famously used a horse and rider as a metaphor to explain the ego's relation to the id. He said: "[the ego's] relation to the id it is like a man on horseback." To harness the physical power of a horse and to find a way to work together, we can use language instead of brute fore. And as in everyday life, language is not an absolute guarantee, but it opens up an interesting and potentially satisfying pathway to get to something new (Freud 1923, "The Ego and The Id").
Member organisations *
BACP is one of the UK’s leading professional bodies for counselling and psychotherapy with around 60,000 members. The Association has several different categories of membership, including Student Member, Individual Member, Registered Member MBACP, Registered Accredited Member MBACP (Accred) and Senior Registered Accredited Member MBACP (Snr Acccred). Registered and accredited members are listed on the BACP Register, which shows that they have demonstrated BACP’s recommended standards for training, proficiency and ethical practice. The BACP Register was the first register of psychological therapists to be accredited by the Professional Standards Authority (PSA). Accredited and senior accredited membership are voluntary categories for members who choose to undertake a rigorous application and assessment process to demonstrate additional standards around practice, training and supervision. Individual members will have completed an appropriate counselling or psychotherapy course and started to practise, but they won’t appear on the BACP Register until they've demonstrated that they meet the standards for registration. Student members are still in the process of completing their training. All members are bound by the BACP Ethical Framework and a Professional Conduct Procedure.
Areas of counselling we deal with
Other areas of counselling we deal with
There is a very long list of labels of thing that try to name every kind of mental suffering. I have only ticked two of them, anxiety and depression, because they are the generic search terms most people use, and anxiety is the foundation of mental suffering (Lacan, Seminar X, 1962-63). It is not necessary to have a label to come along for an encounter with the horses, what is important is what you say. If you want to know something about how things work in your life, then you are welcome to come and ask the horses to see what kind of help they can offer. If you want to come simply for the experience, that's ok too.
Therapies offered
Fees
Concessions offered for
Health Insurance/EAP
Additional information
When you come for your first meeting you will be able to say more about your situation and what you hope to get out of the work. We can then discuss the rhythm and duration of the work and find a price for future sessions.
The initial meeting might last up to about an hour, and includes time with the horses.
You can call me to make an appointment and clarify any questions and ask about the fee.
I will accompany you throughout your time at the equestrian centre.
Part of the fee goes towards funding Equine Encounters for patients at the Bethlem Royal Hospital.
