In the weeks leading up to Christmas last year, Alice Brown found herself at breaking point. Her two young children seemed to be always out of control, her husband was working all hours — their marriage was suffering — and, to top it all, a host of relatives was descending on her house for Christmas Day.

“I felt that I’d lost control of my life,” says Brown, 35. “I was hugely stressed and constantly anxious. It had reached the point where I wanted to drop it all.” In fact, her problems had been building, ever since, six years ago, she had stopped work as an office manager to bring up her two boys, now aged 6 and 4, at her home in Cheltenham.

Then Brown stumbled on an article about the Stepps rehabilitation unit in Gloucestershire. The article described the unit’s work with a new form of therapy pioneered in the US and centred on horses. Practitioners of equine-assisted psychotherapy (EAP) claim that close work with horses, a trained counsellor and a horse trainer, can give patients insights about themselves and their relationships with others.

The treatment, they say, has helped to transform the lives of those with addiction problems, depression, anxiety and eating disorders. Asked to explain equine-assisted psychotherapy, its practitioners often quote an Arab proverb: “The horse is your mirror.” This is a reference to horses’ supposed special ability to notice, and copy, the emotional states of the people around them.

Wendy Powell, a counsellor, and Jeremy Davis, a professional horse handler, met Brown when she arrived at Stepps for a half-hour initiation session. They say that Stepps has treated about 150 clients. “As with many of the people we treat with EAP, a lack of self-confidence and assertiveness seemed at the heart of Brown’s problems,” says Powell. “Initially, she was nervous around the horses. That can be useful. Often when patients are in a traditional therapy setting they erect psychological barriers. But when patients are presented with a huge animal, they are so busy coping with this new experience that they don’t have time to maintain those barriers. The therapist gets access, more quickly, to true feelings and behaviours.”

Despite her nervousness, Brown booked six weekly one-hour sessions. She was relieved to be told that 90 per cent of EAP takes place on the ground, rather than on the horse. During therapy, tasks are set and while patients undertake them they are encouraged to examine their approach. Brown’s lack of self-confidence quickly became apparent when, during her first session, she was asked to catch a horse and put a halter — the equine equivalent of a dog’s collar — on it.

“We walked into the outdoor arena and two horses were running about,” says Brown. “I thought, ‘This is chaos. I’ve made a huge mistake’. I told Wendy that I couldn’t go near the horses. But she encouraged me to talk about how I was feeling, which was nervous and lacking control of the situation.”

The following week, though, Brown haltered a horse. More work meant to address her lack of assertiveness followed. In week three she was asked to stand in front of the same horse and, without touching it, to get it to back up three steps. “The horse towered over me. Then it backed me into a corner. All the time, Wendy was asking questions: ‘What is happening here? What are you feeling? What about the horse?’ “Eventually, I realised I had to change my approach. I spread my arms wider, stood taller and became more vocal. And I managed to make the horse back up.”

It was, says Brown, an empowering event. Crucially, by this time she had started to relate her EAP experiences to her daily life. “I looked at what was happening at home, for example, when the boys played up. I’d become frustrated and that led to conflict. But now I was trying a different way: stay calm, be assertive.

“I realised, for example, that tidying rooms didn’t have to mean arguments. If I told the boys what I wanted done calmly and authoritatively, I could get results. Next, I told the family that we wouldn’t be having them for Christmas Day. They said, ‘Fine’: it was that easy. A few weeks before I’d never have considered it.”

Further sessions, which included grooming tasks and lunging — in which the horse is made to trot in a circle — brought further useful insights into her perfectionism, and reluctance to ask for help. “In the lunging task, Jeremy and Wendy told me that I could use anything in the arena to help me. It took me 20 minutes — during which the horse didn’t move — before I realised that meant I could ask them to lend a hand. I saw how I had a deep-seated reluctance to tell people that I needed help.”

As the weeks wore on, the changes at home and a new-found feeling of control facilitated a much broader change in her mental state. “The terrible anxiety and stress that I’d been feeling started to lessen,” she says. “The benefits came quickly after three or four sessions.”

“We saw a big shift in Brown,” says Powell. “We can’t claim to have solved all her problems in six weeks but EAP kick-started change.”