09/03/2025
BOUNDARIES vs EMOTIONAL ENMESHMENT
COMMUNICATION vs APPEASEMENT
GRACE vs GUILT
I watched a TikTok video this morning where a handler had to escalate pressure to get their horse to give them some personal space, because things were getting a little unsafe, and what struck me wasn’t the horse’s response, but the handler’s…
They were overcome with guilt and shame that they hadn’t been able to train ‘perfectly’ to prevent it.
Meanwhile, the horse appeared completely unbothered. If anything, the earlier confusion about whether the handler wanted closeness or distance seemed more stressful than the correction itself.
I’ve seen this pattern often, and have experienced it myself.
And rather than brush it off as a skill issue, I think we need to take a much deeper look…
This often mirrors how many of us experience boundaries in our human relationships.
TO ERR IS HUMAN…
It’s unrealistic to expect ourselves to recognize and navigate boundaries perfectly 100% of the time.
Like the frog in boiling water, sometimes we don’t recognize there’s a problem until things start to heat up.
And while I think it’s great to use these moments as learning opportunities and allow hindsight to guide us, guilt and shame shouldn’t drive us.
We need to give ourselves a little bit of grace instead of guilt.
It’s not healthy to shame spiral every time we have to set a boundary.
This often comes from confusing a boundary with punishment.
In this example, what the horse experienced wasn’t harm, it was clarity, and this is where it’s really important not to project our own experiences and feelings about boundaries onto what the horse is actually experiencing and feeling in the moment.
WE CAN’T SET BOUNDARIES WITH POSITIVE REINFORCEMENT…
We can positively reinforce behavior around our boundaries.
For instance, “Thank you for giving me some space, I really appreciate that!”
But we cannot communicate the threshold of a boundary through positive reinforcement.
Read that again.
Because it’s a lot deeper than a technique, and it’s absolutely applicable to our human relationships.
In human relationships, trying to maintain boundaries with positive reinforcement alone translates to fawning and appeasement behaviors, and I see this leak into our interactions with our horses all the time.
We often try to navigate boundaries solely through positive reinforcement because we’re afraid.
If setting a healthy boundary risks severing a relationship, that’s often an indicator of emotional enmeshment, where individuals aren’t allowed to BE individuals in a relationship.
COMMUNICATION ⧣ CONFLICT
In this situation, the horse wasn’t wrong, and the handler wasn’t wrong, and this is a common dynamic in human relationships, as well.
But settings boundaries can feel jarring to both the one setting them and the one receiving them, because we’ve been conditioned to equate boundary-setting with failure or conflict.
In horses, navigating proximity and distance and practicing collision avoidance are natural, and have nothing to do with dominance, and have no negative impact on relationship.
Maybe we could learn something from that.
Horses model that mutual give and take is what makes room for real connection.
