December 2011 Newsletter
November 30, 2011
Size Really Does Not Matter
Take the case of our therapy partner in EAP (Equine Assisted Psychotherapy). She is an eight month old miniature horse, but comes fully equipped with all the intution and reflective insight to be a perfect mirror in the arena. Already in the arena she has been described as “bratty,” “sweet,” “patient,” “petulant,” “ornary,” “curious,” “caring,” “connecting,” “loving,” “standoffish,” “shy,” “funny,” and “uncaring.” In other words, she has been a powerful reflection of what the two-legged folks project or perceive in this horse and in people and reality.
Other EAP Notes
(As reported by Lynn Thomas in EAGALA in Practice Magazine, Vol. 4 No. 1)
Much of the difference in understanding as to how horses can actually help people put their finger on how they are feeling is related to the fact that horses do not respond to people in the same way that people do. Horses are said to be much more intuitive to human defense mechanisms, and are not easily bluffed. Where another person may not recognize the projection of a troubled other, the horse will indeed have a response that is reflective of the very emotion from which the person is trying to defend….
For example… A person who projects his anger onto the horse, proclaiming that the horse is actually the angry one, will not necessarily produce an angry horse. Rather, the horse will respond to the person’s hidden anger by attempting to bring it to the surface. This can be done in several ways. The horse may “haze” the client, circling around him in progressively smaller circles in an attempt to dominate space. The horse may also repeatedly move into the person’s space, nuding him/her out of the way.
By using his/her body, the horse essentially places the person in a position where anger would be a healthy response. This is all done to draw the anger to the surface, out of the unconscious, thereby making the person “readable” to the horse, and a viable herd member. In order to understand this, it is important to remember that herd animals relate predominantly through physiological responses, and [these] unconscious drives, emotions, and motives have physiological traces.
For horses, hidden emotions are like hidden physiological responses, making communication, and the establishment of the horses’s safety, through a congruent and connected herd, impossible. So in order to preserve his/her own safety then, the horse must make the person, his/her current herd member, more congruent, through evoking [the person’s] hidden unconscious material. For while people can operate with closeted emotion, horses cannot, and, therefore, identifying any emotion that is covert and responding to it is an automatic process for the horse.