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Loudoun Therapeutic Riding Has a New Executive Director
Loudoun Therapeutic Riding Has a New Executive Director
By Sebastian Langenberg
Laura Smith might be new to Loudoun Therapeutic Riding, but she is hardly new to therapeutic riding or horses.
The Lovettsville organization’s new executive director grew up in an equestrian family in Fairfax and “I was fortunate enough to grow up in a family where my father was into thoroughbred racing and breeding, as well as endurance. My sister showed horses and I did pony club and managed the barn with my mom. So, that was my childhood.”
Laura’s mother actually started Cloverleaf Equine Center (formerly NVTRP) in Clifton, so therapeutic riding is in her blood. Laura moved away from Virginia to Lexington, Kentucky for ten years, but not away from horses.
“My day job was horse racing and my volunteer work was therapeutic riding,” said Laura, who also is a talented equine sculptor and painter. She and her husband Bruce, now a Middleburg attorney, moved back to Virginia when they had their children. She was involved in other local therapeutic programs before joining Loudoun Therapeutic in April.
Loudoun Therapeutic riding offers many different programs. One of the most remarkable therapies is particularly effective helping non-verbal children begin to speak. These children have a hard time focusing on tasks in a therapists’ office. Perhaps unexpectedly, putting the child on a horse allows them to focus even more on the therapy at hand by taking them away from the structured office and directing that energy to the horse.
They have partnered with North Spring Behavioral Health Center to help children and adolescents. This helps children learn how to express and work on controlling their emotions. The children explain how they feel before and after a session, which helps them develop these emotional muscles.
Horses also provide a mirror to the patient to learn themselves in ways they might not realize.
“They sense things that people don’t,” Laura said. “The common expression is that horses react to incongruent behavior.”
If, for example, you move aggressively, a horse will pick up on that and reflect if back to you in an obvious way. This feedback loop allows you to modify your behavior, and that modification transfers over to life outside the barn. This therapy is especially beneficial to veterans with PTSD. In fact, Loudoun Therapeutic Riding has a large group of veterans that come weekly for treatments.
Loudoun Therapeutic is also a training facility for other therapeutic centers, helping to spread the healing of therapeutic riding around the country.
“We’ve been a training center for other instructors all over the country,” Laura said. “They would come in and train to be certified and sent back to other places. So we were kind of an evangelist of therapeutic ridding.”
They also are hosting the Therapeutic Riding Association of Virginia in August to do continuing education for instructors around the state.
Loudoun Therapeutic keeps fees low to help as many people as possible, but this comes with a different cost: these fees only cover 20 percent Loudoun Therapeutic’s overhead. The rest is made up by donations.
There are many ways to support the facility, including by volunteering, donating or attending one of their events.
For more details, go to the events calendar on the website at www.Ltrf.org.
