Sara's Story 

I watched as Sara walked beside the orange and white Appaloosa, just friends together out for a stroll.  For that moment, the round pen--an enclosed sixty-foot circle of sand--seemed to disappear and all that mattered was the fragile connection between these two sentient beings.   Sara was working on “energetically joining-up” with Ginger--without a bridle, bit, or other equipment for controlling and telling the horse what to do--and things were going very well. 

As they came around to the point in the circle farthest from the gate, the little equine began to move into and push on her human companion. Sara stopped, disconnected, looked vacant and lost. The mare continued and the distance between them grew; I waited to see if Sara needed any assistance. My question was soon answered, for it didn’t take her long to follow Ginger to the gate, resuming the delicate dance of relationship, trying to get the little mare to “hook-on”, hoping to get her to walk on that “invisible lead” once again.  I smiled inside, feeling my body relax and my breath deepen, as they reconnected, and settled into a comfortable rhythm marked by the steady footfall of hooves.

Sara repeated the same interaction three times before I asked her a question to which she tearfully exclaimed:

I do that in all of my relationships.  The minute people put any pressure on me, I stop and disconnect:  in my relationships at work, with friends, with John.  

As she described her experience, I realized what had unfolded over and over with this horse and how she had repeated it with all of the significant people in her life.  By working with Ginger, Sara reenacted this unconscious pattern until it was able to break through into conscious awareness, where she could examine it, create choices, and practice new behaviors. Crying as she connected to the frustration of a lifetime, Sara asked me to come into the round pen--into the symbolic interaction--in order to help her learn to do things differently: to find a way to make new connections within herself, and between herself and others.

We acknowledged the ways Sara neither trusted nor honored herself, learning instead to please others in her family and in life. We began to identify the potential to learn something new and to practice that new way of being in the world with other people by doing something different right now, in this moment, in this round pen, with this horse.  I offered information about groundedness, breathing, body language, intention, focus, timing and other tools. She found some things helpful and others impossibly difficult.  We were able to use these reactions to further her self-awareness and to develop a plan.

In this example of equine-facilitated psychotherapy, an unconscious habit and its self-sabotaging consequences emerged from the shadows. In the months that followed, Sara practiced holding her own, while staying connected, with Ginger in the round pen, as well as in her personal and professional relationships. Working with the horses can help you develop skills that create a new level of personal and social awareness  which can transfer into your daily life as a deeper understanding of non-verbal communication, body sensations as information and guidance, the messages behind emotions, false-self patterns of beliefs and behaviors, emotional congruence and, ultimately, the authentic self.