Horses And Adults

Chapter 8 

“If you don’t know that you, your beliefs, your attitude, or your behavior is the problem, then you need someone or something to show that to you. To change, you must see it, hear it, and accept it with one hundred percent certainty without feeling judged, criticized, or shamed. Amazingly, this occurs when one interacts with a horse.”
RIDING HOME – The Power of Horses to Heal- 2015

A few years after I began teaching University Equine Therapy courses I was asked to give an 1-Day Equine Therapy Clinic to a group of Iraqi war Veterans in a California Wounded Warriors Program called War Horse Creek. My University courses were educational and not for people seeking therapy for themselves. Even though War Veterans were likely to be men and women who might benefit significantly from Equine Therapy, I was not a professional therapist. However I thought if I based the Clinic on the same format as my University Course, the same personal breakthroughs might help the veterans in their road to mental and emotional recovery.

Not only was it a success and enormously helpful it led me to begin offering 1-Day Equine Therapy Clinics to participants from the general public throughout the U.S., Canada and Australia. My Equine Therapy Clinics were not for people seeking or needing therapy but for those who wanted to learn how and why horses could therapeutically help humans.

It was during these clinics that adult men and women not only had personal breakthroughs, they discovered that in trying to establish a relationship with a horse many of their lifelong personal beliefs and coping skills about people, places, things and most importantly themselves...had been wrong, e.g., to control a horse you must show him who’s boss, women should be mothers or real men don’t cry, etc. They also realized their beliefs had often been based on the sometimes faulty beliefs of their parents passed on to them as children. It was also during these clinics that I began to consider the difference in the parenting of horses and humans and the profound effect it had on both species. Most importantly was that only human offspring were vulnerable to acquiring emotional wounds from their parents.

Although the nature of everyone’s emotional childhood wounds are varied, the end result they caused and that have remained into their adulthood, is usually the same. It is a deeply held belief that in some way they are inadequate, They believe that as an individual they alone are either not enough or less than other people and that these beliefs have at times caused them to feel in some way defective, ashamed or different.

When I have finished working with all the participants I usually stop to address the entire group. When it’s a clinic this often includes an additional 30 to 50 auditors. I ask by a show of hands if like the participants with horses, any of the auditors has ever felt inadequate. In every clinic the overwhelming majority of them raise their hands. When I look back at the participants with their horses I see smiles and looks of shock and amazement. For many, it’s the first time they realize that when it comes to oftentimes feeling inadequate; they are actually not different but in fact the same as everyone else.

Throughout the world, most men and women who need or seek out professional help with mental health do so when functioning in their everyday life in a healthy way has become a problem. The help can be traditional talk therapy, pharmaceutical medication or, more recently, Equine Therapy whether it’s for trauma, depression, addiction or any number of other mental health issues.

Teaching the dynamics of Equine Therapy to people who are not seeking help but are simply curious to learn how and why it has become such a powerfully effective method of healing, has led me to discover something completely unexpected, seemingly universal and enormously consequential. It is a pervasive lack of the parenting knowledge necessary to raise children who will grow up with their own unmistakable feelings of self-love and self-worth. Though usually unintentional and never lacking in the best of intentions of most parents what is most often missing or misunderstood could simply be defined as Healthy Loving Parenting.

For years I have witnessed the life changing self-awareness that occurs from the emotional mirroring reflected back from a horse to a human. However my ability to recognize and often identify with the childhood emotional breakthroughs that many of my students and clinic participants were sharing was only made possible from having struggled with my own childhood wounds.

One evening after finishing a clinic in Newfoundland I decided to look back at the role my parents played in creating the person I had become. I looked at my childhood, my education, my struggles, my career choices, my three marriages and my love and passion for horses. It was like connecting seemingly random dots that suddenly revealed a complete picture of a person. I could see how everything I had become was essentially a direct result of the parenting from my mother and father. I knew I had experienced some painful times growing up but just like my students and clinic participants, I hadn’t realized the amount of influence they continued to have on some of my own lifelong coping skills and beliefs.