08/04/2025
This 💯
🪞🐴 A difficult truth, rarely spoken out loud -
👊❤The (Subtle) Emotional Punchbag Relationship❤👊
Some people don’t realise they’ve chosen horses not for real partnership, but to have something to release their deeper feelings on.
The horse becomes the one they can constantly correct, control, pick at, tell off. A living target for all the frustration, helplessness, fear, insecurity, or pain that they don’t feel safe expressing elsewhere. It's not obvious — it never looks like abuse. But it’s a pattern. A quiet, persistent drip of disapproval. A constant ni**le. An incessant chorus of clicking and clucking. A need to always win the conversation. They may even call it love.
But somehow, the horse is always wrong.
Too slow. Too reactive. Too stubborn. Too much.
It’s the age-old story of “kicking the dog” — except now it wears the latest matchy-matchy, made to measure boots and a designer saddle, and calls itself horsemanship.
The tragedy is that these people often believe they’re doing things “right.” They follow the techniques. They say the right words. But their energy tells a different story — one the horse hears loud and clear. Underneath the cues is a constant pressure: be better, be less, behave, shut down, sleep walk into a zombie state of learned helplessness.
But this isn’t partnership.
It’s projection.
It’s a power play, disguised as training.
It’s using a horse to soothe something unspoken — an ache, a wound, a need, a deep dissatisfaction they haven’t dared to meet in themselves.
And the horse becomes their emotional punchbag.
But here’s the thing: horses don’t exist to absorb what we don’t want to feel.
They aren’t here to regulate our chaos, prove our worth, or make us feel in control of a life that isn’t working.
They are sentient beings with their own stories. Their own thresholds.
They feel it all — especially what we won’t name.
So if we really care about our horses, maybe we need to ask:
Am I showing up to connect… or to offload?
To build something… or to dominate?
To relate… or to offload what I can’t stand in myself?
Because they know the difference.
And deep down — so do we. We owe it to our horses (and ourselves) to put these things aside when we arrive at the barn.
