26/06/2024
❤ ?¿?DE-sensitisation or RE-sensitisation?¿? ❤
❤ I have had my beautiful mare, Amira, for 3 years now. When she arrived I couldn’t even look at her without her shaking, let alone touch her.
Over the last two years I have focused on love, trust and time. Every day I greet her with love, show her she can trust me and have given her the time she needs to heal old wounds. All the trust techniques I have used appear to have worked for our relationship and Amira has changed in so many ways. She has become more trusting of me and my actions, and also forgiving towards me when I’m not having such a good day. She reacts in a calmer way to new and old situations. She walks calmly next to me and when we meet something that unbalances her, she is much more open to follow my guidance.
❤ Question: Does this mean she is becoming less sensitive? Desensitised?
❤ ....bare with this one... ❤
❤ Recently, I was searching for inspiration and ideas how to improve (or lessen) Amira’s hypersensitivity, to help her feel better about day to day ground work with the goal of eventually some ridden work.
Nearly every video on my search brought about the word ‘desensitisation’ which involves techniques I am very familiar with, have used for many years, had a lot of ‘success’ with, but … well… these common desensitisation techniques haven’t worked that well with Amira.
❤ While we have achieved a great partnership through no-pressure desensitisation, and as far as anyone can see, Amira is far less reactive and very trusting of me.... Oh how she loves to smile, copy my steps, come and stand at the mounting block, follow my every command at liberty... Yet, she is still sensitive when I step into her bubble, especially on a lead or when something I do triggers her anxieties, she is super reactive and can spiral away mentally and, or physically, it doesn't happen often but it happens.
❤ The way I am seeing desensitisation is like this. Yes, you can stick some scary plastic on a stick and certainly train a calmer reaction to THAT stimulus, but how often do you see a fox wielding a stick when out on a ride? Or a dog flapping a tarp up and down? The truth is we can’t predict or prepare for most events, and we certainly cannot protect our half tonne horses like we would a child.
❤ ‘Desensitisation is a psychological process by which a response is repeatedly elicited in situations where the action tendency that arises out of the emotion proves to be irrelevant. Desensitisation is sometimes used to treat phobias by gradually and repeatedly presenting the frightening stimulus under nonthreatening conditions.’
❤ Most popular desensitisation techniques involve exposing the horse to the stimulus and keeping the horse from running away with a rope. I’ve seen this done very badly and also very well, both achieving a horse who no longer reacts in an outwardly negative way to the stimulus.
❤ However, aren’t you only are ever desensitising to that particular stimuli? …and, depending on methods / energies used, maybe we are shutting our horses down, quietening their voice, rather than the horse actually understanding the question and answering?
I feel as though we are setting our horses up to visit a fun park rather than the real world.
❤ When a horse goes into the fight or flight red zone, blood is pumped faster to his ‘retreat’ organs. He is no longer searching for an answer or looking to calm his thoughts, he is in a way ‘desensitised’ to rational thoughts, and desensitised to anything or anyone around him. He shuts down senses that he doesn’t need in that situation.
When he sees Mr horsemanship fox jump out of the bushes he will run through any person, horse, fence to get away, he has to be pretty desensitised to do this, no time to feel pain when your life is on the line!
❤ So shouldn’t we sensitise our horses?
When that fight or flight question appears surely it’s more beneficial to you that your horse keeps as many senses and as much common sense as possible? Keeps the awareness of his feet and the space he is in?
❤ So can sensitisation help to create calmer and calmer reactions to unwanted stimuli?
❤ Hell yes! ❤
❤ I believe we can teach our horses the tools they need so that when scary events arise, they themselves can reduce their own anxieties to below the red 'don't touch me' zone, start searching for an answer in the orange ‘thinking’ zone that will take them into the green 'calm' zone.
❤ My journey with Amira has been as much about sensitisation as desensitisation. I am sensitised to the way she reacts when I approach her, to her breathing, to her needs, to her personal space, to her NOs, sensitised to her need for love.
❤ Likewise, Amira is sensitive to my footfall, my breathing, my mood, my wants and my boundaries.
I am more sensitive to my own thoughts and feelings too, and owning such a sensitive mare has changed me in such positive ways.
❤ One day I hope that we can all be more sensitive to our horses and each other, because wow it makes for a smoother, happier, love-filled road.
❤ The best thing about being sensitive to your horse, and when you have a horse who is really in tune with your thoughts and feelings, he will feed off your calm attitude in stressful times. The quicker the cells of your body tell him that you aren’t scared, the quicker he picks up that there isn’t a killer leaf on the ground or man with machine gun behind the tree.
❤ Think about ourselves, as children, when we got scared of an aggressive looking dog or spider running across your pillow, what did you do? Stand and think about your choices or get the hell out of there? Yeh, we desensitised what we didn’t need in that moment and got the hell out, right? But now your older and you have greater intelligence and awareness, maybe you have learnt to deal with stress differently, you can engage your brain to look for other answers… drop your energy and stand quietly because you guess the dog is scared? Maybe the spider no longer sparks a reaction because you have repeatedly affirmed to yourself ‘it’s only a tiny spider’?
And it’s ok that we are still stressed when we see a spider, we are allowed to feel stress and we should expect it to show up from time to time, after all it’s designed to keep up safe from harm.
Likewise, it’s ok for your horse to stand looking at invisible monsters, it’s ok that his heart races when he sees his mates running round, it’s ok that he jumps when a dog pops out of the bushes… I feel that we have to allow time for our horses to process their emotions rather than learning to become numb.
❤ By teaching a horse the tools to use his senses, to search for an answer you already have him thinking forwards towards the stimulus, rather than running away from it.
By using training techniques to show a horse how to bring himself down from anxious behaviours to the green ‘ok’ zone, we can over time create new neural pathways and patterns, that he can use at any time when he needs them. By making him more aware (sensitised) rather than less aware (desensitisation) we can truly help horses to be ok in most situations.
❤ Amira usually plays her fight or flight card when things get scary. Her triggers can be my quick hand actions, a look from a human, picking up tension in me, walking past human areas. She has a lot of triggers and I can work on them one by one or I can teach her how to play a different pattern when she feels anxious and unsafe.
We are still a work in process but in a short time I have noticed her rapidly changing and she no longer spins off into an anxious mess until the stimulus disappears. She is starting to search for answers and this forward searching is allowing her to come back into the green zone much more quickly.
I rescued her wanting to give her a healthy, happy horse life which she has, until the other h appears… ‘humans’ …and I can’t protect her from vet or dentist visits or heavy hands, but I can help her to keep her senses intact and not fall into an anxiety spin out, teach her to follow the feel of the rope instead of block and brace against it, teach her to search out answers, and recondition the way she behaves.
The word ‘desensitisation’ just doesn’t sit right with me anymore…
