Fact: Stressed people struggle to help stressed horses
If you are stressed you will struggle to help a stressed horse.
This is just a fact.
The problem is made worse because horses can trigger your stress response when it makes you feel threatened.
What results is this awful cycle goes like this:
Horse feels threatened and its stress response becomes triggered because it feels confused and insecure with you.
The escalation of the horse’s negative emotions then triggers you to feel threatened and your stress response is kicks into action.
This stress response then switches on your pattern of responding to stress. These include certain thoughts and feelings (e.g. “what ifs”, hyper-vigilance, sense of vulnerability, being out of control, being unsafe)..as well as certain behaviours (e.g. reactive fast jerky movements, attempts to appease, “people pleasing”, withdrawing, avoiding, lashing out).
The escalation of your negative emotions, thoughts and behaviours just make you more confusing, more alarming and more threatening and the horse…
When the relationship with your horse looks like this nothing good can happen. You cannot think, the horse cannot think and the partnership is in conflict.
Maybe this doesn’t happen all the time. Maybe it is only in certain situations. Maybe you avoid those situations. It might have stopped you riding or limited where you can ride and the activities you can do with your horse. But you find yourself in this situation often and it is not fun. It can lead people to feeling hopeless and horse’s lost.
There is a way to stop it, but the responsibility is in YOUR hands.
It is not in a new bit of tack, a calming powder, herb, sending your horse off to a trainer or getting someone else to ride it and hope they will fix the horse. These things don’t stop this cycle because the cycle is started by YOU - you trigger the horse - the horse triggers you.
Stopping this cycle is a journey and it starts by recognising when you get triggered and what patterns of feelings, thoughts and behaviours are unique to you.
It then requires you to learn more about what you need to do in order to form a partnership with a horse and not make it feel threatened.
You need knowledge and skills to be able to help the horse understand, focus, connect and follow you. These are the things a horse needs to learn in order to not feel threatened by you but emotionally regulated and safe when they are with you.
The journey to stopping this cycle is not be easy. It will require you to confront yourself. To overcome feelings of failure (because you aren’t!). If you want horse’s in your life, it is part of the deal that you will come across one that will need you to learn more. To step your skills up. To study, learn new things, struggle, put in effort and practice.
However, this journey will give you two gifts. The first gift, is the joy that horse’s can bring into your life and the insights to be able to help them.
The second is that it changes you. Horses make you a better person. They make you become aware of yourself, your thoughts, your emotions and gain a deeper understanding of yourself and greater ability to control your emotions and thoughts.
They say that wisdom is when you gain the ability to wrap your emotions in your ability to reason and control your thoughts. In this case, horses help you learn to be wise.
If you are interested in learning more about the process to stop this cycle I have written a book on it called “Confidence & Trust - Solving the Horse + Human Equation”. You can buy this book in hard copy or ebook formats here.
