March/April 2025 Issue

Page 48 March/April 2025 EAST COAST EQUESTRIAN A Different Cohort for Equitherapy: Saly Glassman’s Focus Is First Responders By Suzanne Bush Saly Glassman has been involved with horses for most of her life. Well, some might say that horses have been her life—along with her family, her community involvement and her enormously successful 40-year career at Merrill Lynch. “I was already kind of thinking about what am I going to do? This offer (from her partners) to buy me out really gave me an opportunity to think about what I wanted to do next.” Glassman is the sort of person human resourc- es folks used to call a “self-start- er.” Meaning, she doesn’t wait around wondering what she should do. “It was very important to me to be my own boss,” she says, “having worked for a large institution for almost 40 years.” Typically, Glassman, who for decades competed at elite levels in show jumping as an adult CC, an 18 hand Oldenburg-Westphalian Sport horse, participates in a train- ing exercise with first responders in the Kindle Hill Foundation’s Equine Assisted Learning and Therapy program. All the horses that participate in the therapy program are or have been competition horses, in Dressage, jumping and/or the hunter ring. Photo credit: US Equestrian Federation amateur, thought about ways horses could play even larger roles in her life. She considered her interests, her education and her experiences. “I asked myself who needs help?” and who could benefit from her experience. Glassman was thinking about all this during an epochal winter of sickness, death and danger that would reverberate around the world and upend health care sys- tems, government and virtually every aspect of life. When COVID 19 began its lethal rampage across the world in early 2020, it revealed a lot about our health care and public safety institutions and the people at the heart of them. The stress pushed them all to the breaking point. “It turns out the answer was obvious,” she says. “The people who need help are the people who are least likely to ask for it.” She said these are the first responders, people expected to run toward—not away from—cri- ses. “The people who are trained to just keep saying they are fine because there is a stigma about getting mental health help when you’re a first responder. After all,” she says, “you’re supposed to be the person who really has it together so you can take care of everybody else.” The dilemma faced by the people who are supposed to take care of everybody else, Glass- man says, is that they don’t often follow what she calls “the oxygen mask rule.” It’s what every airline passenger hears in the safety briefing. “Put your own mask on first, before you help anyone else.” In other words, Glassman says, “If you don’t take care of yourself, how can you help us?” The Things They Can’t Unsee Glassman looked around at her Kindle Hill Farm in Whitpain Township, Montgomery County, PA, and thought about the space, the horses and the resources she could invest in the newly opened chapter in her life, a chapter she titled Kindle Hill Foundation. Its focus: Equine Assisted Learning and Therapy. (www.kindlehill.org ) The foundation has several programs in which horses are used in therapeutic settings. Kindle Hill’s staff includes equine assist- ed therapists, licensed professional counselors, equine specialists and a team of extremely motivated horses. Even the horses have extensive resumes of successful competition! For the first respond- ers’ program, she consulted local police chiefs and experts who work with first responders dealing with profound stress. One of the experts she cites is Kevin Gilmartin, author of Emotional Survival for Law Enforcement. In his publications and his seminars, he explains that the human brain is not wired to handle multiple traumas in short periods of time. Gilmartin is (Continued on page 57)