“Brian” (a pseudonym used to protect his privacy) was a successful professional in a high-intensity career and seemed to have everything. Yet he felt trapped and overwhelmed by the demands of his prestigious job. His persistent feelings of being stuck occasionally led him to thoughts of suicide. When he was most desperate, he turned to Hawk’s Nest Counseling, an innovative counseling and therapy center in Lula, for some badly needed help.

Brian found his way back to stability and a better sense of belonging in his career with a therapist and an unusual duo of sidekicks—Buck and Lula Mae, who are the farm’s rambunctious, playful goats. He ultimately decided to remain in his profession, but with stronger clarity that it was a choice, not fate or an obligation, that put him there.

Animal-based therapy

Audra Hawkins founded Hawk’s Nest Counseling in 2019, after years as a therapist in other settings, and while continuing her work as a counselor at Wilbanks Middle School in Demorest. She and her husband bought an undeveloped farm in this rolling, rural stretch of Banks County, and she decided from the outset that bringing a veritable menagerie of farm animals—goats, cows, chickens, rabbits, donkeys, cats, dogs, and soon, piglets—would supply a crucial part of the therapeutic process.

“For many people,” says Hawkins, “talking is hard; feeling is hard. Relating to an animal is comparatively easy.”

She speaks fondly of an adolescent patient who willingly talks about her home, school, and life struggles—but only when she’s happily chasing chickens around the farm’s henhouse or petting them once she catches them.

The Hawk’s Nest model of animal-based therapy exists elsewhere in the country but appears unique in Northeast Georgia. The underlying idea is that many people feel at ease in an outdoor setting, stroking a soft rabbit or nuzzling a friendly dog, when they might feel less open about their emotions in a confined office space.

Nature heals

Another crucial part of Hawk’s Nest therapy, quite simply, is its locale. The farm and neighboring woods, with a designated nature-walk path, a firepit, and just the ability to breathe country air and be among the trees, is healing, Hawkins asserts.

“We like our clients to literally ‘touch some grass,’” she says. “There is a lot of research to support healing through nature.”

Patients come in for all the same reasons people go to any other kind of therapy: conflicts with family, co-workers, or partners; parent/kid dynamics; depression; and questions about sexual identity. But Hawkins started to notice, many years ago, that the right animal, combined with the right therapist, could effectively boost people’s ability to respond and deal calmly with whatever challenges they are facing.

The therapeutic staff of five is well-credentialed, but none more than Hawkins: She has a bachelor’s degree in Psychology from North Carolina State University, a Master’s degree in School Counseling from Florida Gulf Coast University, and a Specialist’s degree in Counseling from the University of West Alabama. She’s also a licensed professional counselor (LPC) in Georgia and a Nationally Certified Counselor and Certified Professional Counseling Supervisor (CPCS.)

Hawkins’ prize dog, Lugnut, who goes by the nickname “Lugz,” offers a prime example of the almost magical, soothing powers an animal can have.

Lugz, who is officially certified as a therapy dog, joins Hawkins both on the farm and at her “day job” at Wilbanks.

Loveable Lugz

Hawkins recounts the day a young student was called into her office at school after what the therapist delicately referred to as “making some poor decisions with her phone.” Hawkins asked the student how her father would react when he was called into school to discuss it; she accurately predicted he’d be furious.

As Hawkins tells it, the girl’s father arrived, and Lugz, who weighs 110 pounds, seemingly sensed the tension between the two and physically came between them, climbing up onto the couch between father and daughter. When the father began petting the dog, the anger and tension in the room began to deflate, and even more so when Lugz started licking the no-longer-angry man’s hand.

Hawkins is sure the session — and resolution — went much more smoothly because of the canine intervention.

“It was astonishing how much it calmed the whole situation down,” Hawkins remembers. The father “didn’t really know why he was calming down. But he did.”

Drawing the family

Hawkins and the other therapists also use more standard techniques when appropriate. Three little cottages on the farm hold comfortable, intimate offices where the therapists do indoor work. Hawkins says she often uses a typical therapeutic tactic with her youngest patients: asking them to draw their families. Through the artistic choices they make, she can learn a lot about how a child is feeling about their home circumstances.

Hawkins remembers an eight-year-old, whom we’ll refer to as “Maisy,” struggling with her parents’ divorce. The parents were worried, even alarmed, about their daughter’s adjustment. When Hawkins had Maisy draw her family, the result opened up a line of questions about the girl’s feelings and how she was psychologically managing the split.

“Ironically, I learned that at some level, Maisy’s perspective was changing; she came to think it was ‘a really neat idea’ that she would have a room of her own in each home and—maybe better—individual time with her mother and her father,” Hawkins said.

One of the farm’s adult patients, “Diana” (also a pseudonym), wrote movingly about her therapeutic experience. She said, “Animals have always been a source of safety and emotional security for me. They are kind, compassionate, nonjudgmental beings that have always brought comfort to my life.”

Diana added that her therapist’s specialties matched her needs perfectly.

“I found my way to Hawk’s Nest as they were the only ones I could find that had a therapist specializing in areas that I was struggling with–sexual trauma and law-enforcement related trauma.”

Diana’s therapist’s “day job” is working at a sexual assault trauma center. Thus, she draws on her background and the farm’s unique resources to offer targeted help on those difficult issues.

Regarding payment

Hawkins decided long ago that involvement with health insurance companies does not help her get where she wants, which is “moving each patient along as quickly and economically as possible.” She takes payment from patients or parents only directly, for a standard fee of $115 per hour for individuals of any age and $140 for couples or families. That’s less than big-city therapy fees, of course, and many people, regardless of income, seem to find it worthwhile; her patient roster is nearly full, and she has steadily grown her staff to meet the demand.

She says one of her adult patients drives three hours one way to the farm once a week. The youngest patient is four, and the oldest is 76.

Newest staffer

Gennesis Popovici is the latest therapist to join the Hawk’s Nest staff; she had been working at a clinic in Gainesville and may continue to do so, but as she said upon arriving on a February afternoon for her orientation with Hawkins, “I can’t wait to get to work here!” Hawkins said there’s a list of people waiting to see her. Popovici boasts a particular fondness for working with adolescents, who, as she notes, “have so many issues to deal with.”

Asked what crucial issues she thinks people most often overlook or brush aside, Hawkins said it was an easy choice: “Good communication.” People can be really bad at listening, and at expressing themselves, and therapy can help them do both.

“I had one married couple in here, and the woman made one comment about her husband that didn’t go well. We spent three weeks on ‘reflective listening,’ where one partner is asked to reflect back what their partner says, in chunks, to make sure the speaker is genuinely being heard. We spent three hours learning that technique,” Hawkins says, adding that it was necessary.

Popovici chimed in with a second, almost universal issue: “Boundaries,” both therapists agreed. “People just aren’t very good at maintaining them or about avoiding stepping across other people’s.”

Beating the bottle

Hawkins implored one of her earliest farm patients to allow her story to be told, and it is perhaps her most moving:

Early in the farm’s history, the patient, then in her twenties, came for treatment. She was initially dealing with work problems, sleeplessness, and the grief of recently losing her father.

“As we dug deeper and built rapport,” Hawkins remembers, “she shared that she drank a lot and came from a family who had all struggled with alcoholism and addiction.”

The woman gradually arrived at a personal goal to cut back on her own drinking, and that evolved into working for a few years on those issues along with her more general problems.

“She lost loved ones–some to addiction–watched siblings reach rock bottom due to drugs and alcohol, lost romantic partners…and suffered through all the turmoil that can bring.”

She surmounted it all, Hawkins says. “Even when she faltered, she kept at it.”

That woman is now married, a mother, an entrepreneur, a churchgoer, and has achieved sobriety with the steady support of Alcoholics Anonymous, on top of her regular therapy on the farm.

“She’s proud of the fact she did all the work to be where she is today, clean and sober for almost two years,” Hawkins says.

Hawk’s Nest does not offer addiction counseling services, but therapy on the farm works hand-in-hand with the “Twelve Steps” treatment—in this particular patient’s case, to the point of genuine triumph.

Blue

For patient Diana, the lure of therapy on the farm is partly due to the huge dog that keeps her company during all her therapy sessions.

“Of course, there is Blue, the Great Dane, who sometimes forgets her size and likes to lie or sit on my lap,” she says. “It can bring laughter to some hard topics. And I am also convinced that she has the softest ears of any dog I know.”

As the sun sets on that February afternoon, Hawkins and Popovici chat with a visitor. A sinewy cat, bedecked with straw matting her fur, which she’s just picked up strolling around the farm, winds in and out of the legs of the folks in the room. She zeroes in on the one person in the room who professes not to be particularly fond of cats, and she insists on being petted.

“They’ll do that,” Hawkins chuckles. “That’s a cat thing.”

For more information, visit Hawk’s Nest Counseling online