12/05/2025
Trauma can separate the body and the mind resulting in the victim of trauma feeling disconnected from their body.
Dissociating from the body is something I’m intimately familiar with and I feel it has enabled me to relate to the lack of control of their own bodies that many horses experience.
For years, there have been times where I’ve been so out of tune with my body that I won’t even notice when I’m holding extreme tension, very anxious.
Or, I will have an injury, like cutting my hand, and I will be completely oblivious to the fact that I’m hurt until I notice bleeding.
This is not because I don’t have nerve sensation, but because my brains tunes it out after years of having to go through the motions of life, even when under incredible stress.
Horses, I think, experience something similar a lot.
They often operate their lives under immense control with every action being chosen and decided by people to some extent.
Equipment is often used to force body movement and compliance whether the Horse is physically comfortable doing so or not.
The harshness of training equipment is also leverage to force a response, even in times where the horse tries to say a hard no.
Horses often spend their lives outside of training, confined to small areas, with a little ability to socialize with other horses and engage in other normal behaviours for a free roaming herd species.
As a result, we can create robotic animals that are out of tune with their natural essence.
They won’t react normally to stimuli that should elicit a response in a healthy minded animal.
And this is a response to trauma.
Because, if they were to try to live life feeling everything to the fullest as they are supposed to, it would mean immense suffering.
They wouldn’t be able to cope with the unmet needs, the forced compliance and other ongoing difficulties in life if they allowed their body to fully experience it.
So, they disassociate. They tune out.
Often times, doing so is beneficial to humans because it allows them to create a highly obedient animal that does not possess the normal opinions of a living creature.
By many, it might even be perceived as superior training, but in the process, it has dulled a vibrant animal.
Dissociation is often a survival mechanism used to withstand hardship.
But, when it is for years upon a year, it is incredibly damaging to the body and mind.
Trying to ground yourself back into your body, after years of living on the fringes of it, is no easy feat.
And, when you do start feeling properly, after years of not practising doing so, it can often be overwhelming and traumatic in itself.
So, for people dealing with horses who have experienced trauma, consider this.
Once the horse feels safe enough to really start feeling, you might notice their behaviour become temporarily worse as they process everything that has happened to them and re-ground themselves in their body.
The healing process is not pretty and linear.
Sometimes you hit speed bumps that are part of the process of overall healing and necessary to overcome to find true homeostasis in the body.
Being mindful of this and normalizing the idea that healing trauma is a long-term journey helps both horses and humans in the process.
Trauma is complex. It’s time we stop down playing the complexity of approaching healing it.
Animals are not so simple in comparison to humans that they do not struggle with the same types of things when healing their nervous system.
So, it is time we up the capacity of our own emotional intelligence so that we can better understand traumatized humans and animals.
