You’re toddling along and making steady progress, you’re being calm and patient, working at your horse’s pace, when BAM! You’re right back at square one. All that careful, mindful work you’ve been doing over the past days, weeks, months…. it was all for nothing. How does THAT make you feel?
Do you know what? It happens. It happens to EVERYONE, all the time. Linear progress is a human obsession and even though we never experience it, we all expect it.
We can’t keep our horses in a bubble; they will have experiences which they find stressful. That in itself is not a problem if we can help them come back from that stressful experience and reconnect with their own peace of mind.
Grace has always suffered with separation anxiety – I’ve spent hours helping her with this, 1 step forward, 1 step back, 2 steps forward, 2 steps back…. At the beginning of the year she went through a particularly difficult time with it. Someone even kindly showed me a newspaper article by someone who was looking for problem horses for a case study!
There was a time when I would have joined Grace in her stress, but we’d been here before (a lot) and we’d made it out the other side and we would again, of that I had no doubt. Grace isn’t a “problem”; she just needs me to hold it all together when she can’t. Roll on a few weeks and the separation anxiety is GONE, gone in a way it has never been gone before. Grace is 14 years old, this was a deeply ingrained pattern, and it can take a long time to get to the bottom of it. Patterns of behaviour developed out of traumatic experiences don’t just disappear overnight. You have to work at them in layers, and when you hit the next layer it can be interesting! But know this is not a setback, stay with it until that layer is breached and one day all the layers will be gone and peace will prevail.
So please don’t lose heart when it all goes pear-shaped, when your hard work seems to be for nothing, you’ve just reached the next layer and positive change is afoot. You’ve been here before and you’ll be here again, but it is repeating the steady path back to the top of the hill (where the view is fine) that builds confidence and resilience. And the more you do it, the fitter you get!