06/10/2025
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Horses are emotional sponges. If they can’t flee or fight (their natural coping strategies), the stress turns inward.
This is what I feel is happening in those moments of freeze.
What cannot be expressed, must be absorbed.
Horses, as prey animals, are deeply tuned to flight. It’s their natural form of processing overwhelm — movement is medicine for their nervous systems.
But in domestic life, this natural discharge is often blocked:
Fences replace open fields.
Halters and ropes limit choice.
Social dynamics may be fixed.
Humans may not recognize subtle signs of stress.
So the horse can’t flee, and often can’t fight (they’d be reprimanded). What’s left?
Freeze.
The third survival strategy, often misread as calm or obedience, is actually a state of nervous system shutdown — a silent scream.
The Freeze Response as a Philosophical State
Freeze is not just a nervous system condition — it’s a spiritual and existential posture.
It is:
A dimming of agency.
A withholding of essence.
A state of holding life at bay — not fully here, but not fully gone.
In this state, the horse is not being in the present. They're surviving it.
What is lost?
Vitality. Curiosity. Authentic expression. The very soulful aliveness that makes horses who they are.
Freeze is a kind of suspension of self, a quiet grief of not being able to be what you are: fluid, alert, and responsive.
Horses don’t just feel their own bodies — they feel ours. They read:
The invisible language of our posture and breath.
The underlying emotional current, even beneath the words.
The unspoken becomes, for them, a felt truth.
When a horse lives in chronic stress (whether their own or ours) and can't move it out, it doesn’t disappear — it moves inward:
Into the gut (ulcers, colic).
Into the fascia (tension patterns).
Into the behavior (aggression, withdrawal).
Into the soul (a loss of sparkle, curiosity, connection).
We say they are “sponges” not because they are passive absorbers, but because they are relational beings — deeply attuned to the field around them, designed to keep the herd (and now, us) safe through feeling everything.
The Path Back from Freeze
Coming out of freeze is not dramatic. It’s quiet.
A lick.
A sigh.
A blink.
A moment of curiosity.
The body begins to trust the present again.
Philosophically, this is a return to aliveness.
Not just survival, but existence with agency.
And that’s a sacred gift that we can give to our horses by becoming the guardian they need in these moments.
