04/14/2025
Love this ❤️ I always say as dressage riders we not only ride 1600lb animals. But the modern dressage horse are nothing short bur elite athletes! They have been breed for many years to be extremely athletic, sensitive and reactive. Riding horses is more than riding its psychology too !! Fear keeps us alive but knowledge channels the fear into rational thought! Learning the horse takes more than a lifetime but I feel lucky everyday to work with such amazing creatures .
FEARING THE EMOTIONS OF THE HORSE
(Or: “He’s Just So Sensitive”—Says the Human Who Can’t Cope With Emotions, Theirs or His)
Look at this horse.
Go on.
Soak it in.
Majestic.
Explosive.
A four-legged emotional TED Talk 🎤🐎
Head high.
Eyes wide.
Nostrils flaring like twin cannons of “I’M NOT OKAY.” 🔥
It’s beautiful, isn’t it?
At least… until you're holding the lead rope.
Then it’s suddenly less “freedom of expression” and more
“I didn’t sign up to die in trackpants near the float.” 😬
You see, humans say they love horses.
And we do.
We love the idea of horses.
The curated, emotionally-muted, Instagram-filtered kind.
The kind with a heart-shaped star and a head tilt that whispers,
"I’m here to heal you, Karen." ✨
But real horses have the audacity to feel things.
In real time.
Loudly.
And physically.
And that’s when we panic.
Because it turns out most of us don’t fear horses—
We fear our horse having emotions near us 😱
Which is awkward.
Because horses are horses, not yoga instructors.
They don’t sit in stillness and “breathe through their concerns.”
They bolt.
They snort.
They express.
They react with their whole body, which feels less poetic when you’re standing next to a ballistic missile on hooves 💣
And we then label them “sensitive.”
As if it’s a personality flaw.
As if the goal is to transform a thousand pounds of flight animal
into a scented candle 🕯️
Now here’s where it gets delightfully ironic:
We call ourselves empathetic.
“Oh, I’m just so in tune with my horse’s feelings,”
we say, right before we try to crush those feelings
under a giant weighted blanket of avoidance 🛑
We say we don’t want to “trigger” the horse.
Which really means we don’t want to deal with the horse being triggered.
Because when they feel big feelings, we feel big feelings,
and suddenly we’re both spiralling like a bad date at a vegan cooking class—after admitting you love steak 🥩
So we try to switch off the horse.
With gadgets.
With groundwork.
With supplements.
With a small army of professionals who say things like,
“He needs to feel seen to be connected,”
or
“He’s remembering trauma from when he was a foal and it rained once.” ☔
We spend years diagnosing the horse
like an undergrad psych student at a family reunion 🧠
We treat their fear like a bug in the system—
Instead of what it is:
the system working as designed.
And when they do get emotional—
When they tell us clearly and honestly that they’re confused, or scared, or uncertain—
we get annoyed.
“Stop it.”
“Settle down.”
“Don’t be silly.”
The equine equivalent of telling your sobbing friend to “calm down” while handing them a chamomile tea and walking away slowly 🫖
But here's the twist in the comedy:
It’s the fear in us—of their emotions—that creates most of the chaos.
Our flinching, our overcorrection,
our nervous energy humming like a power line in a thunderstorm ⚡
that turns a horse’s flicker of doubt into a full-blown existential meltdown.
There’s a saying—
Fear is the mother of the event,
and humans? We’re excellent midwives 👶💥
So, what actually fixes this?
Not detachment.
Not sedation.
Not pretending your horse is a misunderstood therapist with hooves and childhood trauma 🛋️🐴
What fixes this is competence.
Skill.
The quiet confidence that comes from knowing what to do when your horse feels something.
You stop fearing their emotions when you know you can help them through it.
Because fear loses its teeth when you know what you’re doing.
When you can hold space and lead the way.
When you’ve got the tools to say,
“Hey buddy, I see you—and I’ve got you.” 🧰
That’s when you stop white-knuckling the halter clip like it’s a hand gr***de.
That’s when their snort becomes information, not a trigger for a hypertensive crisis.
And that’s when both of you can start breathing again.
To work with horses is not to remove emotion,
but to recognise it.
Respond to it.
And respect it 🙏
You don’t need to turn your horse into the Dalai Lama with a forelock.
You just need to stop acting like their emotions are a breach of contract.
Because when your horse reacts, they’re not being difficult.
They’re not being disrespectful.
They’re not trying to ruin your day or your carefully choreographed liberty session 🎬
They’re giving you feedback.
And if you actually want to be empathetic—
Real, adult empathy,
not “I bought a rose quartz necklace from a saddle shop” empathy 💎
then you’ve got to let them feel.
Otherwise, you don’t have a relationship.
You have a hostage situation.
So, next time your horse gets a little “emotional”...
Take a breath.
Loosen the reins.
And stop trying to spiritually euthanise them into calmness.
Because that’s not a horse.
That’s a malfunctioning lawn ornament 🌱
And you, my friend, didn’t get into this for lawn ornaments.
You got into this for truth.
And movement.
And connection 🐎❤️
And horses, with all their feelings, give you all of it.
No charge.
No filter.
No apologies.
And if you can stop fearing that—
If you can build the skills to support it—
That’s when the real magic starts.
Not the fairy kind.
The earned kind.
The grounded, gritty, glorious kind ✨
IMAGE📸: Incredible photography by Lynn Jenkin
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