Clearer Perspective
What working with horses can show us about ourselves
6/17/20263 min read
Clearer Perspective
There's a pattern I've noticed in myself. It shows up in the field with my horse. It showed up in the school playground decades ago. It turns up anywhere I feel out of my depth and someone seems to have power over me.
I feel threatened. And something old fires.
This afternoon I had a session with my horse trainer. He's one of the best people I've ever worked with — patient, flexible, perceptive, works to be at ease and meeting whatever is in front of him. The pressure in that field, I've come to recognise is entirely my own.
My horse Douglas is big. Five hundred plus kilograms of big. When his movements came into my space, I said to my trainer: it feels like he's bullying me. Not that he was. That's important. It was a feeling — information about my history, not a fact about Douglas. But my body didn't know the difference. Something that had been swallowed a long time ago rose up, and I found myself lost. Unable to create a boundary. Frozen between the old responses: attack, or disappear.
I've been working with horses for over fifty years. I know, technically, what to do. But knowing and being able to are entirely different things when the nervous system has its own story to tell.
The roots go back a long way. Being humiliated at school. A grandmother who bullied me about how I should be living. Situations where fighting back would have cost too much — where survival meant going quiet, going small, swallowing it whole. That strategy worked. It kept me safe. But what gets practised gets learned. And what got learned was that a boundary is formed by making yourself disappear.
Except you can't disappear in front of a five hundred kilogram horse. He needs you to be there.
So I asked my trainer: what do I do? How do I create a boundary with him without it becoming a battle?
He said: get in your boots. Feel the ground. Then gently raise your hand to his cheek and ask him, physically, quietly, to come back to neutral.
That was it. Not force. Not absence. Just presence — and a clear, gentle request.
I've been thinking about that ever since. Because "get in your boots" is the opposite of everything the old survival pattern required. It doesn't ask me to fight and it doesn't ask me to vanish. It asks me to be fully, quietly here. And from that place — grounded, present, unhurried — to ask for what I need.
What made this session different was that it was witnessed. My trainer saw the pattern playing out in real time and stayed steady. And Douglas — with no agenda, no ego, no interest in managing my feelings — showed me the effect of my inner state immediately and without filter. Horses don't soften the truth. They just respond to what's actually there.
Three perspectives on myself at once. My own — tangled in old memory. My trainer's — clear and without judgement. And Douglas's — honest in the way only animals can be. Between the three, there was nowhere to hide. And I didn't hide. I looked.
When my trainer asked at the end what I would take forward, I said I didn't know. Once, that would have been a door slamming shut. This time I let it stay open. And then, quietly, it came.
That my work with Douglas needs to be informal right now — organic, unhurried, more like learning to drive, getting co-ordinated, oriented.
That I need to respect the fear rather than fight it or turn it into something else.
That Douglas is a newcomer and finding his way just as I am.
And, most importantly, that a boundary doesn't have to be a battle or a surrender.
Get in your boots. Feel the ground. Raise your hand gently.
Ask.
Douglas can do the more formal work. Just not with me.
Yet.
