Draper Sensory Method
Draper Sensory Method is an innovative and a worldwide unique method based on scientific principles of the brain-body connection and a well-defined series of equine mounted activities. It supports and enhances participants’ abilities to think more rationally, make more socially acceptable decisions and receive hope for a successful and better life.
Experience
After 30 years of experience and development The Draper Sensory Method: uses a systems approach, predicated on principles that enable each participant to focus on individual needs – to recognize barriers in thinking and replace them with more appropriate methods. Each equine achievement plateau activity creates core muscle and rhythmic movement simultaneously within three body planes, relieving the participant’s stress level and developing opportunities for balancing participant’s neuro-chemicals that allow a more flexible and resilient brain. Balancing neuro-chemicals creates a calming effect, self-confidence, rational thinking, and feelings of creativity for our participants. All of these are necessary ingredients for the participants to focus, remember and reason in order to change their belief system – a necessary step toward a participant’s recovery. The skillful use of metaphors within the process permits the practitioner and client to translate this human/equine partnership into human interactions. Moving the participants’ issues into the world of horses helps the participants see their behaviors from a different perspective. They are then able to focus on the results of their choices, without the onus of anyone else telling them what they should or shouldn’t do.
Scientific and Evidence-based Program Methodology
Our methodology and systems approach has been developed through combining the following disciplines: Kinesiology, Neurophysiology, Sensory Integration Theory, Behavioral Psychology, Social Developmental Theory, Cognitive Development Theory, Relational Cultural Theory, Behavioral Research Methodology, Training and Organizational Development. These are all critical in supporting the equine-mounted activities. HBM’s interactive and holistic approach draws out the potential locked in the participant’s brain by learning how to receive information and express themselves simultaneously. Improvements in learning and behavior are immediate and profound.
With these behavioral, psychological, and evidence-based intervention principles, the program’s purpose is to enhance the participants’s competency strategies. Competency strategies are how our participants acquire knowledge and life values. Competency strategies are directly related to their relationships, as well as their living, learning, and working environments through establishing a normal integrated brain activity. The program activities provide the basis for our participants to be in a “ready to learn” mode, allowing them to work through stages of behavioral change, to increase and maintain positive interactions with others and simultaneously help them to see how their own thinking and choices affect and perpetuate negative behaviors. The participants progress through these stages by learning and exhibiting self-control, positive decision-making choices and relationship-building skills. HBM anticipates that, at completion of the program, the participants will be learning to replace antisocial behaviors with pro-social competency skills.