11/23/2023
Well said, Emotional Horsemanship by Lockie Phillips đź’•
Is it me or my horse?
Dear horse human, who is deeply invested in being deeply caring towards your horse. There are a couple of graces to afford yourself. Before I list such graces you can gift yourself immediately, let’s call a thing a thing
Many of us have witnessed horses handled and trained with techniques and methods which are nothing short of abuse. We saw atrocities. Many of our horses bear those scars, physical and memorial. We swore to ourselves and to our horses to never do that to a horse again.
So we over corrected.
We saw situations where the horse was “Always to blame, always at fault”. And we shouldered that instead. Now we can barely think about our horses without feeling
- guilty
- responsible for all of it
- wrong
- bad
- always to blame
So we set ourselves up for everyday catastrophies. We ask our horse to do a thing, and if their response is not totally perfect, we immediately assign all and I mean ALL of the blame onto ourselves.
Sometimes, this blame shift leaves our bodies and we find ourselves perpetuating this to others too.
“Your technique isn’t good enough”
“You’re not doing it right”
“You’re bad, and that’s why it’s not perfect”
I would like to offer a point of view of counterbalance. I see this cultural over-correction as a very important stepping stone for the equestrian community. We needed to spend a couple of decades standing in the shoes our horses held for so long, to feel how wretched it feels to always be wrong.
But this over-correction was never a long term strategy. We could touch base with it, get an empathy top-up, then move forwards
I’m about to say something dangerous in the circles I run in;
“What if sometimes, it is the horses fault? And what if it is sometimes ours?”
And another layer even deeper than that
“What if our horsemanship was no longer about right and wrong, good and bad, correct vs incorrect? What if it was endless fruitful explorations of shades of grey and nuance?”
And lastly, if we keep digging…
“What if fault, the correctness binary, what if it was always a lie? What if this was a fabricated human paradigm. And what if we broke that paradigm and resdesigned it in new forms?”
After all, even when I make mistakes (and I make plenty) I’m never made to feel “bad” by those who really matter to me. Horses included.
