Editor’s note: Free Press Indiana chose not to publicly identify the full names of the teens interviewed and photographed out of sensitivity for their safety and privacy.
The drive from downtown Indianapolis to Sheridan, Indiana, takes anywhere from 40 minutes to an hour depending on the time of day and flow of traffic, but skipping the highway is always a good choice. Though it’s the longer path, and a little more frustrating, the benefit is what’s seen along the way.
Watching the transition from urban to rural landscapes can be like watching an angry person calm down. The multi-lane roadways narrow to two, and the cornfields, blanketed in fog, close in on either side. Empty farmhouses, abandoned grain silos, and tractors operated by people unseen are not frightening or off-putting the way they appear in films.
However, here among the crops, animals and trees rapidly shedding their leaves, there are only feelings of peace and freedom. Through the haze, Harmony Farms appears — a beacon of warmth and wholeness, a safe space where emotional work can begin.
It’s the space where Lisa Condes, 62, chooses to do her life’s work.
A gravel road leads to a large barn where Condes has centered her mission of helping young people heal from trauma. Four cats, two dogs and a chicken named Gloria Gaynor roam in and around the outbuildings, showing guests around. And, at least on the part of the dogs, a yellow labrador named Paco and a mini-Australian shepherd named Fanny, eagerly await petting.
An orange cat named Julius walks across the stall doors, stopping in front of the biggest darkest horse, a skittish but gentle wild mustang who was given the moniker Modoc Sojourner — nicknamed Mojo — during a naming ceremony celebrating each incoming horse. In this space, even 1,000-pound animals are wild and kind.
“I think in anybody else’s hands, he would’ve been lassoed and broken,” Condes said, adding there are different ways to get a wild mustang, or anyone, to trust.
Condes created Harmony in Horses on her land to connect the known benefits of animal therapy to the needs of young people struggling with various kinds of trauma.
“If you’ve had empathy for human beings, but everybody you encountered in your entire life hurt you, you’re not going to keep doing it. We have to teach (people) how to do it in a safe way. And I don’t think all of them can do it with a human right away. So they come to spend time with the horses.”
Lisa Condes, executive director of Harmony in Horses
It’s here that she bridges the gap between her background in mental health programming, and her experience riding and caring for horses. She uses both skills to help children in Indiana acquire and manage therapeutic tools to heal emotional wounds and conquer mental obstacles, protecting their future well-being.
Observing, encouraging and correcting how the participants handle and react to the horses, Condes is able to assess how they might be feeling about themselves. As they become more comfortable with the animals, a connection blossoms between them. The relationship can be used to introduce emotional language and processes that readily apply to the horse handler’s real life. Part of the program uses this connection to talk about empathy.
“If you’ve had empathy for human beings, but everybody you encountered in your entire life hurt you, you’re not going to keep doing it. We have to teach (people) how to do it in a safe way. And I don’t think all of them can do it with a human right away. So they come to spend time with the horses.”
Condes described working with a woman who struggled to lead Seraphina, the second-largest and friendliest horse in the stalls. She directed the woman to command Seraphina to trot, and the usually happy-to-trot horse refused.
“Now other people would think, what a naughty horse for not doing what she was being told to do. But I said, ‘Do you feel like you have the right to ask her for this? Do you have a hard time telling people what to do and really feeling like you have the right to do it?’”
The woman admitted Condes’ assessment was correct. And the work continued from there, so that the woman could remember that interaction, and employ those techniques in all facets of her life.
“Controlling a 1,000-pound horse or a pony that weighs as much as you do — that is incredibly empowering.”
Lisa Condes, executive director of Harmony in Horses
Condes said she wants these women and girls to trust themselves to lead, especially in their own lives. She’s become familiar with the kind of biases many of the younger women will face in their communities, and wants them to have an unshakeable sense of who they really are and what they’re really capable of —no matter what anyone says or thinks.
“When I told people — at least initially — we’re going to be working with foster youth, a lot of them said, ‘You’re going to have those kids on your property? Aren’t you worried?’ And it’s like, ‘Excuse me. Those kids have not done anything. Things have happened to them.’”
She compared their experiences to the wild mustangs — rounded up, separated from family, shipped off to other places, and too often, abused.
“There are very dangerous wild horses who have been mistreated by humans and now they’re in survival mode. There are very dangerous kids because they’ve been mistreated, too. So we want to be able to create an opportunity for them not to be like that,” Condes said.
With practice, exposure and compassion, Condes walks the women and horses through a process of connecting to each other and to their own power and agency.
“Controlling a 1,000-pound horse or a pony that weighs as much as you do — that is incredibly empowering,” she said.
While there are many barns across the state engaged in equine therapy programming, many, if not most, focus on physical rehabilitation. Harmony in Horses not only centers mental and emotional health, it provides a special focus for girls who have grown up in some of the harshest environments and experienced some of the most cruel treatment imaginable. They carry the mental load of that treatment, often without critical opportunities to address it in real time.
In fact, Hoosier women aged 18-24 and 25-34 are disproportionately affected by Frequent Mental Distress, with the highest rates of FMD reported in these age groups — 35% and 28%, respectively, according to data from the Polis Center at IU Indianapolis that’s highlighted in the most recent Women & Girls report from the Women’s Fund of Central Indiana.
Some of the main contributors to this mental distress are societal pressures, economic instability, the pervasive influence of social media apps, or for some, a home life where they face various forms of abuse (including sexual assault), and often, significant neglect.
The girls who come to Harmony often have many experiences leading directly to their mental and emotional suffering. Typically, they have very few outlets to express their anger, sadness and frustration with those circumstances, and a life they did not choose.
Like the horses, Condes helps her participants learn to trust people again, themselves included.
“A kid who’s been abused and neglected most of their life, removed from their family, all those things… I mean, how do you build trust with somebody?” Condes said.
Harmony in Horses, accredited by the Professional Association of Therapeutic Horsemanship (PATH), officially came to be only two years ago, but has been busy with work ever since. And the need for its work only grows.
Young women and girls can be referred by schools to Harmony in Horses programs, like HorsePowHER and Poder Femequina, or they can be referred privately. Or they arrive at the barn in groups from partnering organizations like The Refuge Academy, Ben’s Ranch or Firefly Children & Family Alliance.
According to Lori LeRoy, 53, the President of Harmony in Horses, 95% of all referrals come from the Department of Child Services. Which is what makes the Harmony’s HorsePowHER program so useful, and unfortunately, relevant, LeRoy said.
The program primarily focuses on girls who have been in the foster care system. Other programs, like the one they employ in collaboration with The Refuge Academy, center on young women who have been sexually trafficked and/or frequently have run away from home.
Harmony in Horses receives some funding through fees from DCS, but they primarily rely on foundation and individual donation. They’ve also received funding support from Anthem BCBS of Indiana, which helped with the funding for the Horse PowHER program, as well as Women of Impact Boone County, Boone County Community Foundation and the Junior League of Indianapolis.
Neither Condes nor LeRoy receives a salary from their work on Harmony in Horses.
According to the Indiana Coalition to End Sexual Assault & Human Trafficking, after a woman has experienced violence, 81% of those women reported significant impacts such as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), depression and generalized anxiety.
It’s a heartbreaking reality Condes confronts with the arrival of each new group.
“When they get out of the car and I just, I’m like, ‘Can I hold her?’ Because of the humanity of these girls, it’s like when I read their referral, I think, ‘Can I do this?’ I cry sometimes.”
Working with animals as big as Mojo requires a lot of trust, in both the animal and the human, so typically, Condes begins by introducing participants to her two mini horses, Smokey and Blue, who are a bit easier to handle. Though they’re not without their own quirks and preferences.
Condes points these details out to the kids she works with, encouraging them to notice their own little quirks as well, but without judgment. She knows they all have a story. Some of them are inconceivable to the general public. She described a young woman who came into the program with a more dominating conversation style, which made a lot more sense once the girl shared more of her background with the group.
“Come to find out, she was in Guatemala in an orphanage for about six years, adopted, (then) two years later given up by her adopted family. She has lived primarily in residential programs since then and is a runaway, she has a (juvenile) record…so the only way for her to feel safe is to totally control her environment,” Condes said.
This made sense to Condes, she said, because most people have learned behaviors that helped them survive the circumstances into which they were born.
Condes was able to steer this young woman toward activities and challenges that addressed her needs.
“That ‘controlling’ skill got her surviving, but it’s not going to serve her as an adult. It is not going to serve her in her future. And so we just kind of work within that.”
Fifteen-year-old Joselyn, a participant from Ben’s Ranch in Noblesville, Indiana, said she always knew she wanted to work with animals.
“Just something about them,” she said. “It’s where I feel most comfortable.”
As she raked hay and horse dung from an empty stall, she described her plan.
“I’m going to college to become a horse vet. I’ve been looking at schools in Texas.”
Her blond ponytail pulled over one shoulder, she smiled, still looking down when someone in the next stall over, a fellow participant, encouraged her.
“And you’re gonna do that!” her friend said.
In addition to the camaraderie on display, some participants have lockers with their names on them, and Condes insisted, “They get to call the horse they care for their horse. It’s important they feel welcome and respected in this space.”
When girls from The Refuge Academy, located in Lebanon, Indiana, visit the Harmony barn, their group is quieter and smaller than the group from Ben’s Ranch.
They try not to seem too excited about the horses, but it’s clear everyone moves more quickly and with more determination once they’re brought into the same room. There is a subtle shift in the air, a release of tension; while grooming the animals, everyone looks at peace.
Outside the barn, the fog from the morning lifts and burns off, and the sun shines through the slats of wood surrounding us. Condes asks each participant to pick a horse to lead over to a sandpit obstacle course where both the horses and the girls will practice listening, watching, leading and moving forward.
One 17-year-old woman, Lily, has a special relationship with her favorite, Kiki, a curly-haired horse. The least talkative of the group, she bonded with Kiki by taking her out into the farm’s pasture and feeding her grass by hand. Each looked more content in the other’s presence.
Condes said sometimes this is what the best version of equine therapy looks like.
“I just honestly have so much respect and appreciation for the horses and the fact that I get to bear witness to somebody starting a little bit of that healing process with them,” she said. “I have learned in the last year, year and a half, to really trust the process. And trust the horses.”
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Ashley Ford is a Free Press Indiana reporter focused on issues affecting women and girls across Indiana. You can reach her at ashley.ford@freepressindiana.org.
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