02/09/2025
A great read about showing up for trauma in the horse and in ourselves. ❤️
The T word
I was recently asked if I had experience with bodies in trauma response. My immediate response was, yes, I’ve worked with traumatized horses since I started doing bodywork. But it made me stop and think about this, because the answer is both simple and complicated.
How does one define trauma? Here’s my definition: any horse that is not living in functional physical and emotional balance. Functional balance being the body’s ability to move with the least amount of pain and/or restriction possible for that particular body; emotional balance being the ability to self-regulate and return to emotional stasis as quickly as possible when the sympathetic nervous system is activated.
By that definition, most of the horses I work with are living with some level of trauma. By that definition, so are most of the humans.
We tend to think of trauma as being at the extremes - either highly reactive or shut down. Trauma must come from some big horrific event, or severe mistreatment or drastic training circumstances, right? Wrong. Most of the horses are somewhere in the middle of this spectrum. We just tend not to see it - or we choose not to see it, whether through choice or lack of our own education.
You might say we have normalized trauma.
I recently worked with a horse with whom I spent the entire session helping her find some basic ability to self-regulate. I simply will not put my hands on a horse who says nope, is screaming at me that she is unsafe, she can’t trust, until I allow the time it takes for her to begin to connect and be present in her body and mind. She did settle, quite remarkably, by the end of the session, but no traditional bodywork got done. What did get done was the creation of some semblance of safety for a horse that was sorely lacking it. Will I be invited back to work with the horse again? Probably not, for two reasons: I didn’t do the “job” (bodywork) that I was hired to do. And my work with her to help with self-regulation exposed the lack of it in this horse’s daily life/training/handling.
Ego can try to override trauma, but in the end trauma will always win. And it might be a bloody victory.
I recently came across the story of someone asking for help with her suddenly-aggressive pregnant mare, who went from docile to very reactive. She had been separated from other horses on the property after displaying aggression. Medical issues had been ruled out by a vet. One night, the other horses she had been turned out with broke down their fence to get to her and she then returned to her mostly calm self. Often the way we keep them creates daily, situational trauma - whether it’s obvious, as with this story, or not.
It's not always easy to see the trauma - it is for some just a part of life, that low-ish hum of anxiety and lack of safety that we just get used to. We tell the horses to do things, we don’t give them much margin of error or choice, and they learn to comply and perform (or not) when meanwhile part of their system is always “offline” to some degree or another. The “perfect” horses, the horses that “love their job” if/until they actually get a choice and are allowed to express themselves. The “misbehaving” horses that we need to correct, control, dominate.
I see this a lot in my practice - horses who were one way (shut down, unengaged or high strung and overly-engaged) who change over time as their physical and emotional issues begin to get addressed. Shut down horses begin to express opinions. High strung horses lose some of their energy and settle more. Most owners are delighted to see the true nature of their horses; others feel like they don’t have the same horse they thought they had and that can be perturbing and revealing on many levels.
Tik Maynard recently talked on a podcast about handling/riding horses’ anxiety through entire weekends of competition - from the moment they step on the trailer to the moment they get home, most of us are just directing the anxiety in the direction we want it to go for our own means. He has changed how he trains and competes to avoid this, but the realization was a big one.
Ego can try to override trauma, but in the end trauma will always win.
I think we are increasingly dealing with the same in ourselves: levels of trauma that we are perhaps not fully aware of or try to ignore. How we deal with ourselves has a direct impact on how we deal with our horses and their ability to self-regulate. Do we muscle through without much empathy for ourselves? Life must go on, after all, s**t has to get done, no matter how I am feeling.
We ask the horses to operate like that, under duress. We do the same to ourselves. These two things are deeply, deeply connected.
Trauma can be used as an excuse to give up, walk away, to write off a horse. This tells me more about the human than it does the horse.
I used to think trauma was an over-used word with horses. Now I think that it might not be used enough. Do I work with horses in trauma? Yes, and I think most of us do, whether we realize it or not. The question is: are we willing to begin to try to recognize it - on the daily - and to do something, learn something, to positively address it and not blow through it?
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