08/20/2026
There’s so much research being done about Equine Assisted Psychotherapy-beyond the questions of does it work, or how does it work? … tonight I am thankful for the curious minds that are asking brilliant, deeper, questions about what is the intention of the work?
What is the work we are doing that incorporates horses as the individual and unique beings that they are.
I have personally found my understanding and relationship with horses continually evolving over the past 35 years. And I truly hope it never stops evolving and that I never stop learning!
This writer captures it beautifully, removing the pressure on the horse to “know”, or to represent something, removing the pressure on clients to “know” what the horse may or may not be telling them, removing the pressure on the clinician to know “all of the things” as the expert. The explorer together in the present and that is what makes it profound.
This perspective spurs the question of how can we interact with horses in a way that we are able to be safe in the present, co-regulated, and self reflective in a way that guides us away from assumptions or storytelling and into a greater sense of embodied self -reflection.
When we shift the question and ask ourselves not what they are teaching, mirroring, or representing, and ask ourselves how we can engage in secure, safe, and peacefully relationships with horses-so can we engage in a secure, safe, and peaceful relationship with ourself…
Simply sated: when they are able to “just be a horse…and you are able to “just be a human”…THIS is where I see the acceptance, self-compassion, and nervous system regulation happening as a natural outcome…not forced or planned.
THIS ⬆️ Is the Magic of the Herd 💜🐴🐎🐴🐎
-n-Motion: Pferdeunterstützte/Equine Assisted Trauma Therapie
Heartland Therapeutic Riding, Inc.
Heartland Equine-Assisted Counseling
Building Relationships
When I first learned about equine assisted psychotherapy, observation was one of the first activities we did.
We would begin by watching the horses. But fairly quickly, we moved on. There were activities designed to explore boundaries, relationships, coping, communication, or whatever topic we were working with. Observation had its place, but there was usually somewhere we were supposed to go from there.
Over the years, I have found myself going in the opposite direction.
We spend a lot of time observing horses. Not because observation itself has become the goal. Ultimately, this work is about relationship. But over the years, I have become increasingly aware of how difficult it actually is to see the horse who is in front of us.
And by seeing, I don’t mean identifying whether the ears are forward or backward, whether the head is high or low, whether a horse approaches or moves away. Those things can be observed, but collecting observable details is not quite the same as seeing the whole horse.
The distinction can disappear almost immediately after the observation.
A horse walks to the fence.
He wants to leave.
A horse remains at a distance.
She doesn’t want to participate.
A horse approaches.
He is interested in me.
The first sentence tells me something I can observe. The second tells me what I have made of it.
That distinction has become central to how we work in our stabilization group. We stay remarkably concrete. What happened? What can we actually know from what we saw? And where did we begin to add meaning?
That is the epistemic part of the work in very practical terms: How do I know what I think I know?
And staying there has turned out to be anything but doing nothing.
We also don’t immediately move on to exploring the “falseness” or the root of an interpretation. Because doing so can quietly reinforce another dynamic: the client becomes the one whose perception needs to be explained, while the therapist or teacher becomes the one who supposedly knows more about what it means. And the horse can just as easily become part of that structure—the one who is said to be offering the solution, access, healing, or some hidden truth about the person.
Instead, when we stay with what is actually there, our own contributions to what we see become increasingly visible. Expectations appear. Wishes. Impulses to intervene. Ideas about what should be happening. Internal critics. Negative beliefs. Sometimes the need to find meaning at all.
We begin by learning to distinguish the horse from our interpretation of the horse. And through repeatedly making that distinction, I have watched that same capacity begin to extend inward: we become more able to recognize our own participation in perception.
A thought can be recognized as a thought rather than automatically becoming reality. An impulse can be noticed without immediately becoming an action. An internal critic can be heard without what it says automatically becoming true. A familiar belief can be recognized as something influencing how I perceive a situation rather than simply describing the situation as it is.
This is what I mean by developing an outside perspective on our own internal experience. Not stepping away or becoming detached from ourselves. But being able to be in an experience while also noticing how we are in it.
That matters when we become caught in thought loops, because from inside them, what is happening and what our mind is telling us about what is happening can become remarkably difficult to distinguish.
Perhaps that is why we have ended up spending so much time where we once only started.
With the horse in front of us.
Learning, as precisely as we can, to distinguish:
Something is happening out there.
Something is happening in me.
And they are not necessarily the same thing.
Not so that we can become better observers standing outside relationship.
So that we have a better chance of meeting who is actually there.
Ilka Parent/Minds-n-Motion
Picture generated by AI
