06/26/2026
The secret of „just standing with“
„Just standing with“ is a sentence someone said many years ago in one of the first equine-assisted workshops I held, and I have not forgotten it. He was describing what one of the horses did while he himself was experiencing a great deal of inner turmoil. The horse did not solve anything, did not explain anything nor did he move into the human story. He was simply there. Simply standing.
There is something in that sentence that I keep returning to.
We live in a world that is organized around „doing“. Around production, usefulness, achievement, performance, response, improvement. Even when we talk about slowing down, we often turn that into another task, another method, another thing we are supposed to do correctly.
And we bring that same reflex into relationships.
When someone cries, we want to console.
When someone is angry, we want to calm them down, argue, explain, defend, or withdraw.
When someone is overwhelmed, we want to offer tools, words, meaning, reassurance, solutions.
Often this comes from care. It is not necessarily wrong. There are situations where action is needed, where safety matters, where intervention is necessary.
But there is another question that is easy to lose:
Can we be with another being without immediately doing something to them, for them, or about them?
I often think of learning to ride a bicycle. You can explain balance as often as you want. You can describe the mechanics, the pedals, the handlebars, the movement, the direction, the posture. But at some point, the person has to feel it. They have to find the balance in their own body.
That does not mean you throw a child onto a bicycle and say, “figure it out.” That would not be support. That would be abandonment.
In the beginning, someone may need to hold the frame. To walk beside. To create enough steadiness so the child can begin to sense what balance feels like. But the point of that support is not to become the child’s balance. The point is not to ride for them. The point is to stay present long enough for them to discover their own.
And at some point, the hand has to let go.
Not disappear.
Let go.
There is a difference.
I think this difference matters deeply in therapeutic work, and perhaps especially in work with horses. People often come with emotions they have never been allowed to have, never learned to name, never learned to stay with. For some, emotion itself has become frightening. Not because feeling is wrong, but because feeling has so often been followed by shame, correction, rejection, collapse, or loss of control.
So when emotion appears, the old expectation is often already there:
Something is wrong with me.
I am too much.
I need to stop this.
I need to become acceptable again.
And then, very quickly, the people around them may confirm the same pattern without intending to.
They move in too fast.
They explain too quickly.
They soothe too intensely.
They organize the moment before the person has had a chance to experience that an emotion can arise without immediately becoming a crisis.
This is where “just standing” becomes more than passivity.
It is not indifference.
It is not doing nothing because one does not care.
It is not a refusal to help.
It is the ability to remain present without taking over.
In this field, we often say that horses do not care about achievement, status, gender, appearance, biography, or the many categories humans use to define one another. That sentence is repeated so often that it can almost become sentimental. The deeper point is not that we should become like horses. We cannot. We are human beings. We have language, memory, interpretation, history, and responsibility.
The point is that horses remind us of something we often forget.
A horse responds to what is present and perceived in the here and now by the horse, without the human narrative and meaning-making scheme. He or she does not enter the story in the same way we do. And that can create a space in which the human being is not immediately reduced to the emotion, the symptom, the past, the diagnosis, or the performance.
As facilitators, therapists, or simply as people in relationships, we cannot copy that. But we can pay attention to what it reveals.
We can notice how quickly we want to help in ways that make us active and the other person dependent.
We can notice how quickly support becomes instruction.
How quickly care becomes interference.
How quickly presence becomes management.
And we can ask whether the framework we provide actually increases the other person’s ability to respond, or whether it quietly confirms that they cannot.
Being with is not dramatic. It does not look impressive. It may not even look like much from the outside.
It is holding the frame without becoming the balance.
It is staying present without taking over.
It is allowing emotion to exist without immediately turning it into a problem to be fixed.
It is trusting that another being may need steadiness more than explanation, and space more than rescue.
Perhaps that is one of the hardest things in a society built around doing.
To stand there.
To remain clear.
To not abandon.
To not invade.
And to let another being find their own feet.
Ilka Parent/Minds-n-Motion
