01/10/2026
Yes to this!
When Caring Gets Complicated:
Introducing Horse-Human Emotional Entanglement 😱
I have another horse problem for you.
Well, technically it is a human problem. The horse just happens to be standing nearby, wondering why you have changed the rules four times in six minutes and are now apologising to him.🫣
I have been noticing a pattern for years among some of the kindest, most conscientious horse owners I meet. These people adore their horses. They notice everything. They worry about whether their horse is frightened, confused, frustrated, overwhelmed, traumatised, over threshold, under threshold and presumably satisfied with the general direction of the relationship.
They want to get it right. And sometimes that becomes part of the problem.
I have started calling this pattern Horse-Human Emotional Entanglement, or HHEE.
HHEE is my proposed term for what can happen when a horse's expressions of anxiety, frustration, uncertainty or resistance create enough emotional discomfort in the human that the human's own feelings begin influencing how they interpret and respond to the horse.
In other words, the horse has a feeling. Then we have a feeling about the horse having a feeling. Before long there are two emotional mammals in the arena and the purpose behind why they are there in the first place has been lost.
The problem isn't caring too much. The problem is becoming so tangled in what the horse is feeling that we lose some of our ability to work out what the horse actually needs.
Imagine asking your horse to move his hindquarters. You apply a light cue. Nothing happens, so you make it clearer. Still nothing. You increase it again and your horse pins his ears, throws his head and swishes his tail.
Suddenly, you aren't thinking about hindquarters anymore. You are wondering whether he dislikes what you are doing, whether you are forcing him, whether he is trying to tell you something, whether this means he doesn't trust you... or whether owning a horse and expecting them to do anything is even ethical. 😕
The hindquarters have been abandoned while we conduct an emergency review of the relationship.
So you soften. Perhaps you stop, stroke him, change the exercise or give him a treat because the atmosphere has become awkward and, frankly, comfort eating is a thing. 🤷♀️
The horse settles.
You feel relieved.🥲
And that moment fascinates me, because both of you may just have learned something.
You might think, "See? He relaxed when I stopped."
Yes. But that doesn't necessarily tell us why he was distressed or whether stopping was the right decision. Perhaps he was frightened. Perhaps he was in pain. Perhaps your cue was badly applied. Perhaps he didn't understand. Perhaps he was frustrated because the cue was too vague to make sense, so he decided to investigate whether he could influence YOU. All of those possibilities matter.
But something else happened too.
YOU felt better when you stopped.
Psychology distinguishes between empathic concern, where we care about another individual's distress, and PERSONAL distress, where witnessing their distress produces an uncomfortable emotional response in US.
Both can happen together.
This means we can sincerely believe we are acting entirely for our horse while also being powerfully motivated to make the horse's behaviour stop because it makes US feel better.
That doesn't make us selfish. It makes us human. But it does mean we need to become curious about whose discomfort is driving the decision.
This is where HHEE can become a loop. The horse becomes uncertain and expresses it. The human becomes distressed by the horse's reaction and becomes hesitant, withdraws or tries to smooth everything over. Communication becomes less clear. The horse becomes more uncertain or frustrated. The human becomes more distressed, and around we go.
The irony is that our determination to be kind can sometimes make things considerably more confusing for the horse.
The horse cannot know that you repeated an ambiguous cue seventeen times because you were desperately trying not to upset him. He just experienced seventeen ambiguous cues.
This doesn't mean we should ignore horse behaviour. Quite the opposite. Fear matters. Pain matters. Frustration matters. Resistance matters. But behaviour is information, and information requires interpretation.
Sometimes the correct response is to stop. Sometimes it is to investigate pain. Sometimes it is to make the task easier or change the environment. And sometimes the horse needs us to remain calm, become clearer and help them understand something they are struggling to work out.
Knowing the difference is horsemanship.
So here is the question I want you to sit with:
Am I changing what I'm doing because I have learned something important about my horse, or because my horse's reaction has made me uncomfortable? 🤔
Over the next five days, I am going to unpack HHEE further: why animal lovers may be particularly vulnerable to it, what happens when our horse's emotions become our emotions, how emotional entanglement can inadvertently create confusion for the horse, why becoming clear can feel so difficult, and how we can become calm, secure caregivers without caring any less.
Because perhaps our horses don't need us to feel everything they feel. Perhaps they need us to notice, care and remain sufficiently untangled to help.
Collectable Advice 302/365
Please consider hitting SHARE. HHEE can be remarkably difficult to recognise in ourselves, yet it may be a significant barrier to the very relationship with our horse that we are trying so hard to protect.❤
