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The Difficult Horse
Karin Schenkel
“It is the difficult horse which has the most to teach us…..”
The shirt with this quote has
been in my closet since February and was given to me as a gift at a
workshop that I taught. The cooler weather required me to wear a long
sleeved shirt for my morning run so I pulled the “horse shirt” out. I
stood in front of the mirror brushing my hair and reading the quote.
There was something in this quote that just didn’t sound right to me.
The longer I thought about it, the more I started to dislike it. It was
mostly the adjective “difficult” in front of “horse” that struck me.
....
When I look up the meaning of “difficult” in the
Oxford American Dictionary and Thesaurus I get the following
information: “Troublesome, perplexing; not easy to please or satisfy;
uncooperative”. This information gives us a little broader spectrum of
what a difficult horse could be: A baffling troublemaker who is not easy
to please and who puts his own agenda above mine. OK, so far so good,
but is that all there is? Does that even apply to a horse? And if so,
aren’t there any moments of pleasant and joyful interaction? I can
hardly imagine it.
Even the most “difficult”
horse in our eyes, is just a horse when he goes along with wherever his
day takes him. If he can play on the pasture with his buddies, gets
his food on time, and if we don’t ask him to do too much “human stuff”,
we would hardly run into trouble with him. Besides, no horse would call
a herd member “difficult” even if they got kicked or bitten by him. They
simply move out of his space, or, if their herd position allows it,
fight back. Then, they just go back to grazing. Their world is simple.
It’s always action and reaction. Behavior is an adequate response to a
specific situation. Therefore, it can change in a split second. There is
a fight and once it’s over, there’s no bad feelings and let’s be friends
again!
So, if we let the horse be a
horse among horses there is no such thing as a difficult horse. It seems
that it only becomes ugly when humans and horses meet in the little
overlapping space between two worlds. This is where dissimilar goals
skirmish- and a skirmish almost always means bruises.
We want the horse to
participate in our world and therefore it is on us to try to understand
his behavior. If we only push him out of his comfort zone without
considering his goal we provoke trouble. It becomes difficult for us and
we blame the horse. We put a tag on him by generalizing his behavior and
turning it into a character or personality trait and this is exactly
what the above mentioned quote does. The horse is in the spotlight and
our part remains in the dark. By doing this, we don’t learn anything and
next time we interact with our horse, the situation will repeat itself.
Learning can only take place if we question our own behavior and look at
ourselves for the solution of the problem.
And this is exactly what I
had to learn on a sunny summer morning when I decided to take my 15 year
old Morgan gelding Columbo on a trail ride. I hooked up the trailer and
was ready to go. As I just had a couple of hours and wanted to get as
much riding done as possible, I was already stressed about the idea of
loading him into the trailer before I even got down to the barn to get
him. My thoughts were: “He is not going to load, I know it. He made a
fuss last time so why should he go in easily this time?” Therefore, I
thought, I had to prepare myself well and, taking all the advice from
other horse people into consideration, I put up a determined face and
tried to be as focused and assertive as possible. But inside I was
crumbling already. My heart was beating and my muscles were tense. I had
a narrow focus and dragged my horse over the pasture to the gate towards
the trailer. As soon as he spotted the trailer he stopped. “There we
go”, my thoughts went. “I knew it”. I tried to stay calm and assured him
that everything was alright and that we would just go on a ride. He made
another few steps towards the trailer and stopped again. After the
fourth stop and go, I felt my anger rising. My clock was ticking and I
thought of all this beautiful riding time that I had to spend here on my
driveway, convincing my horse to load.
The reaction of Columbo to my
altered emotional state should have told me that the whole set up was
designed to fail. But captured in my anger, I didn’t pay attention to
what the horse was trying to tell me. After having been in the power
struggle for 30 minutes, I was about to explode. I felt the strong urge
to hit my horse which scared me about as much as I might have scared
him. This was the moment I looked at him. I saw his eyes wide open. His
heart was racing and his head was high up. And all of a sudden, I
realized how my approach and handling of the whole project created a
very difficult situation that had almost gotten out of control.
Had somebody watched me, this
person might have come to the conclusion that I must have a very
difficult horse. But Columbo just simply fulfilled my prophecy and
reacted to my selfish behavior which was completely oblivious to his
needs. My goal was the only thing that counted and I wanted to win, no
matter what. Out of my frustration, I was about to punish my horse
because he behaved like a horse. Fortunately, I started thinking and
questioning myself before I completely lost control. In order to improve
our actions and change our behavior it is an absolute necessity to do
this. Only then we can learn and do it differently next time. What I
have learned from my trailer loading experience is the following:
Having a goal in mind which
includes the cooperation of others, we have to leave the communication
lines open and listen closely to our partner’s signals. We have to try
to see the world through his/her eyes and have to respect resistance.
This doesn’t mean that we can’t reach our goal; it only means that we
might have to slow down our pace, adjust our strategy and be able to
back up when the pressure turns into a threat for our partner. Only then
we create a win-win situation and our goal joyfully becomes the goal of
our horse.
And with this in mind, we can
correct the quote on my shirt which will be now: “It is the difficult
situation with my horse that has the most to teach us….”
Karin Schenkel is a Psychologist and an Epona approved
instructor. Before discovering the healing power of horses, she has
worked in several different Psychiatric Hospitals and had a private
practice, where she worked predominantly with cancer and eating disorder
patients. She now runs “Chiron Counseling and Consulting, LLC”,
an Equine Experiential Learning organization in Maple Valley, WA,
which is focused on Team Development, Leadership, Personal growth and
Identity and Eating Disorder.
Karin can be reached at
Karin_schenkel@msn.com
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