The Healing Powers of a Horse and a Ten-year Old Girl
By Brianne
The herd was gathered around a hay feeder. Slowly, we approached them. Emily is ten years old. She’s tiny, yet confident around horses. A natural horse person, as some people would say. Usually, it’s the child who looks to her mother for reassurance. Not here. “The horse picks you, you don’t pick the horse,” Emily turned and said to me.
I wonder where this wisdom came from. A book? A video online? Perhaps she learns these things from her instructor Heidi who spends time with her each week, moving at a pace Emily determines. The string of equine-related questions never ends, and witnessing her immersed in her element sparks in me a joy I find hard to put into words.
A wild horse is Emily’s spirit animal, and you need to look no further than her cowboy boots and plaid shirts and the wild, blonde tangles on her head to understand this truth.
We get close to one horse, and it turns and looks curiously in our direction. He takes a step towards Emily and sniffs the air around her. Payday, I think this one is called. I haven’t spent enough time at this farm yet, but Emily studied the brochure before our very first day and memorized every horse’s photo and name.
We are in the midst of the herd now. I stand next to a medium-sized brown horse. A chestnut horse, I should say. If I have learned anything from my daughter yet it’s that horses are never brown. Cherry bay or red dun or liver chestnut, maybe. But call a horse brown, and a horse aficionado will chuckle inside as you reveal your ignorance.
Suddenly, a large one saunters toward us from the meadow a short distance away. “That’s Thor!” Emily shouts. My heart pounds as a four-legged giant comes closer and closer to me, stopping only when we are nose-to-nose. Thor has chosen me, and he’s the biggest horse I’ve ever been near in my life.
This isn’t what I envisioned when the idea to ride horses alongside Emily struck me one day. I tend to think of many ideas, many of them good (but not all). And I follow through on many of them (but not all). I am glad now this is an idea that worked out. But that day, out in the middle of the herd, the confidence was not strong.
My life with Emily has involved a lot of anxiety. Some her’s, some mine, and some all of the people who love us and were worried sick when we both were ill. “Were ill” is a funny way to put it because there was no illness to contend with. We experienced medical traumas that put each of us in intensive care after Emily’s birth ten years ago. It’s still hard to pick apart what happened and explain it succinctly.
After a bumpy pregnancy that began with a significant placental bleed at six weeks, it became clear that Emily would need to be delivered early. Her kicks were slowing in the third trimester. Non-stress tests and biophysical profiles were non-reactive, concerning. The decision was made to bring her earthside two weeks early. A 38-weeker should be ready to be born, but Emily wasn’t.
She needed help breathing after birth and was taken to the NICU even though a relatively hefty newborn for that level of care—nearly eight pounds at birth. A day and a half later as she was on the mend, I was headed in the opposite direction. My physical symptoms suggested something was not okay.
At first, the signs were missed. Dismissed as a typical Caesarean recovery. The generalized pain, fainting, and extreme pallor seemed odd but not unusual. But the feelings of doom…those worried me, prevented me from sleeping despite my bone-deep exhaustion. I tried to explain how I was feeling to the nurses on call. They didn’t call the doctors.
They should have.
Eventually, thanks to my sister’s insistence and a cascade of events that quickly followed, my internal hemorrhaging was detected. There was an emergency surgery. An ambulance transfer to a different hospital. An ICU stay.
But I didn’t die, I lived. Between all of those lines are twenty more storylines and dramatic scenes that I sometimes think will run through my mind like a scary movie on repeat for the rest of my life.
>>Writing about these events, it feels like I am reliving them in real time. I’m overwhelmed, so let’s switch back to Thor. Let’s talk about horses again. Did you know that you can camp at Grayson Highlands in southern Virginia and see wild ponies grazing right there from your campsite? Someday, I will do that.<<
One thing that therapy has helped me understand is that trauma follows you long after the traumatic event is over. Memories can trigger physical sensations of danger, and flashbacks catch you at times you least expect them.
Trauma can drive your behaviors, even decades later and can prevent you from learning. It impacts all of your relationships and stunts your ability to develop trust in others because you continue to not feel safe. If you perceive a threat or interpret something non-threatening as a possible threat, all your attention will be focused on escaping or trying to determine if you are in fact safe or not. It’s not a fun way to live life.
Re-establishing trust in other people takes time when you have been traumatized. It takes spending time in proximity to them. Allowing them the chance to show you that you can trust people again.
Feelings of safety are not automatic. It takes hard work to find them again. What works is different for each person. For me, it has been therapy (lots of it), talking with my husband, family, friends. Yoga. Meditating. Crafting. Writing. Playing LEGO and cars and dolls with my kids. Most recently, my therapy is coming in the form of couples counseling with my husband and learning to skateboard with my elder son and riding horses with my daughter and teaching my youngest to pluck out tunes on the piano.
Horses are a favorite activity for Emily and me. Not schooling or working. Not cleaning up or cooking or doing laundry or the million other things a mom and a ten year-old girl need to do when in their natural environment of home. It's time with her that I cherish.
What If this had been one of the ideas I hadn't explored past the thought stage? Where would we spend our Monday afternoons? How else would we find ways to laugh and argue and grow together?
We struggle to figure out which halter fits which horse. We struggle with buckles and adjusting stirrups and figuring out how to let certain horses through the gate while keeping out the sneaky ones who want to follow us from the paddock to the shade of the barn. I think we both like the challenge of it all, almost as much as we like spending time together as mom and daughter.
I am less overwhelmed now, having spent some time lost in thought about horses, and of Emily smiling. I feel able to release a bit more of what I’ve held inside.
I am pissed that the medical staff I entrusted to care for me and my child let us down.
I am pissed that the trauma still follows me despite all of the time and energy I have put into healing.
I am pissed that I feel guilt over being pissed.
But more than all of that, I am glad to have been through it all in order to have Emily here.
I’d live it all over again for her.
This beautiful piece was written by a client who completed the Sanctuary framework with me.
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