Minds-n-Motion: Pferdeunterstützte/Equine Assisted Trauma Therapie

08/08/2026

I have never met a horse who asked me what happened to someone before deciding how to respond to them.

It sounds obvious. Horses do not know diagnoses, developmental histories, attachment patterns, or what someone has spent years trying to survive. They respond to what is present in the interaction.

And that simple fact has changed the way I think about trauma.

Because in trauma therapy, the past matters. Profoundly. When violations begin early, before there is language, choice, protection, or someone who can help a child understand what is happening, the consequences can reach beyond what happened into what could not develop.

Psychology gives us language for this. In Depth Psychology, we speak of structural capacities and deficits, of what was interrupted or never had sufficient conditions to form. That language can help us understand a great deal.

But it also creates a dilemma.

The moment we describe someone through deficits, we compare them to an idea of what should have developed. And if we are not careful, understanding what happened to a person becomes defining who that person is.

That is where I refuse to go.

A person may carry developmental gaps, unmet needs, and adaptations that once protected them and now create suffering. But the person is not the gap. Not the wound. Not the diagnosis.

This is one of the things I value most about working with horses. The horse does not know the story. When we genuinely interact with horses, they respond to what is perceptible now—not to the file, the diagnosis, or an idea of what this person should be capable of by now.

The past has not disappeared. But it is no longer the organizing principle of the interaction.

And that is also the position I hold in trauma therapy:

To understand the past without allowing it to become the person’s final name.

Ilka Parent / Minds-in-Motion
Picture created by AI

08/08/2026

Moving One’s Feet

Horses are much larger than we are. Not exactly a profound observation, until you stand among them and realize what that means. If I want to stay caught up with what is happening, I have to move my feet. I cannot stand in one place and expect the world around me to remain where I last noticed it. The horses move. The environment changes. Space opens and closes. Something that was in front of me is suddenly behind me. None of this requires interpretation. It is simply happening.

Of course, things are happening inside us at the same time. Thoughts come and go. Emotions arise. Attention shifts. And the more occupied I become with what is happening inside, the easier it is to miss what has changed outside.

We keep returning to this in our stabilization group. We started with observation: standing with the horses and trying to notice what is actually there without immediately turning it into a story. But observation does not mean standing still. Sometimes I have to change where I am standing to see something I could not see before. Sometimes I have to move closer. Sometimes farther away. Sometimes a few steps to the side completely change what is visible.

And I think internal movement works in a similar way.

What happens to what I see when my attention moves toward a thought? What becomes less visible when an emotion takes up more of my attention? And what happens when, instead of trying to get rid of that emotion, I notice it and allow my attention to move again?

That is the part I find most interesting: neither the world outside nor the world inside is standing still. And yet we can become remarkably fixed in where we are looking, perhaps without noticing that we are still standing in the same place.

And maybe that is why something as simple as moving our feet can change so much.

Sometimes we have to „move our own feet“ to see what was there all along.

Ilka Parent/Minds-n-Motion

07/08/2026

07/08/2026

I’ve spent thousands of hours around horses, and one thing has never happened.

Not once has a horse walked up to me and said, “This is who I am.”

It sounds almost absurd when put that way. Yet the longer I work in mental health, the more that simple observation stays with me.

Humans seem to spend much of their lives answering that very question. We describe ourselves, search for ourselves, defend who we are, and sometimes try to become someone else. Developmental psychology places the emergence of a self-concept in early childhood, but it hardly stops there. Entire philosophical traditions have revolved around asking who we are and what it means to be human.

And I find myself wondering what happens once we become convinced that we know the answer.

If I know who I am, how much of what I see is no longer simply what is there, but what fits the person I believe myself to be? How much of what I notice, expect, or overlook is already organized by that answer?

Then I go back to the horses.

I don’t know whether they have a concept of self. I have no way of knowing that. What I do know is that I have never encountered one introducing himself through an identity. I meet a horse - who is standing, moving, orienting, approaching, leaving, resting, grazing, or paying attention to something in his/her environment. The interaction unfolds without either of us having to establish who he or she is first.

Perhaps that is one of the reasons so many people experience being with horses as different.

For a while, the question shifts.

Not from „Who am I?“ to „Who am I really?“

But simply to „What is happening here, right now?“

Ilka Parent/Minds-n-Motion

31/07/2026

Entering the World of Horses

Sometimes, when I really watch horses, it feels as though I am stepping into a different world.

I become aware of how little I normally perceive.

When I try to perceive as much of the environment as I can—movement in the trees, distant sounds, changing light, the other horses, birds taking off, a car far away, subtle changes in posture—something unexpected happens.

Everything becomes easier.

Not because there is less to notice.

But because I stop attaching immediate meaning to everything I perceive.

Things are simply there.

They change.

Something draws attention for a moment, and then something else does.

It feels remarkably effortless.

And yet, after a while, I notice how tiring it is. The amount of information is immense, and sustaining that way of perceiving leaves me mentally exhausted.

I don’t know whether this is how horses experience the world. We cannot know that.

What I do know is that allowing myself to perceive more, while resisting the urge to immediately explain, interpret, or categorize what I perceive, changes the way I experience the environment. Everything becomes easy.

Perhaps there is something to learn from that.

30/07/2026

Last one for today… 🙃

Where Does Change Begin?

Much of psychology and psychotherapy is organized around going into the mind. The focus is on understanding thoughts, emotions, memories and symptoms, and on learning skills intended to change them.

That organization carries assumptions. Symptoms become something to change rather than something to respond to. The therapist occupies the position of understanding, while the person seeking help occupies the position of being understood. Even when the intention is to increase agency, the structure itself remains organized around that asymmetry.

For people living with complex trauma, this creates another difficulty. The mind itself can become a minefield. Thoughts, memories and emotions may be the very experiences that have become frightening. The search for change then often takes place in the same place that already feels unsafe.

Working with horses offers another possibility.

Not because horses help us look deeper into the mind.

Quite the opposite.

Horses are organized in the present. They respond to what is happening, what is being perceived, and how someone responds within that moment.

When horses are genuinely incorporated into the work as autonomous beings, the focus changes. The question is no longer, “What is happening inside my mind?” The focus shifts toward what is happening here, now.

What am I doing?

What am I perceiving?

What is actually present?

How can I respond?

The mind does not disappear. It simply no longer becomes the primary place where change is sought.

Instead, attention returns to the interaction itself.

From understanding ourselves…

to responding to what is present.

30/07/2026

Equine Welfare: Do We Harm Our Horses by Working With Patients?

There are days when I do not go to see my horses. Particularly after surgery, there were longer periods when I hardly saw them at all. Other people stepped in and took care of what needed to be done.

The reason I stay away is usually that I am too preoccupied with myself. When I am caught in my own thoughts, focused on my physical condition or occupied by my own internal processes, my ability to perceive and respond to another being is substantially reduced.

The same applies to my clinical work. When I do not feel well, I do not work. Part of the therapeutic process, as I understand it, is the capacity to see the person in front of me and to respond to what is happening within the interaction, rather than allowing my own internal processes to determine that interaction.

This has repeatedly made me think about equine welfare and the question of whether we harm horses by involving them in work with patients or clients, particularly people who have experienced severe trauma.

There is considerable discussion within equine-assisted practice about how horses should be supported after sessions, how they can be helped to regulate, or how the emotional effects of the work can be cleared. I have worked with people who have undergone severe trauma for many years. Within the limits of what I can observe, I have not seen evidence that my horses have sustained lasting harm through this work.

That does not mean that sessions have no effect on them.

There are times when the emotional content of a session is accompanied by considerable physiological arousal in the people present. The horses perceive this. Their own arousal may increase, and on some occasions I have observed that this remained visible after a session had ended.

Usually, I do not intervene. I trust the horses’ capacity to regulate themselves. That trust, however, is not based on the assumption that horses will simply cope with whatever we expose them to. It depends on the conditions in which they live and work, and on whether their responses are noticed and taken seriously.

We work predominantly at liberty. The horses can leave, and they do.

One of our ponies moves away when an interaction begins to carry an expectation that she should fulfil a human need. Based on what I repeatedly observe in her behaviour, she is clear about what she will and will not participate in. When something becomes uncomfortable for her, she removes herself.

My other horse presents a more difficult distinction.

Through years of interaction with people, he has learned to respond to emotional need. He may approach a distressed person and offer proximity. From the outside, this can look voluntary. He has not been restrained, and nobody has forced him to remain there. Yet tension in his body and other aspects of his behaviour sometimes indicate that the interaction is not comfortable for him.

His approach cannot therefore automatically be treated as evidence of consent or willingness.

Liberty matters because it gives the horse behavioural options. But liberty alone does not protect a horse from relational pressure. A horse may approach because of learning history, reinforcement, habit or an established pattern of responding to human emotional need. The fact that he is physically free to leave does not relieve us of the responsibility to notice how he is organising himself within the interaction.

This observation has increasingly changed the focus of my work.

The question is no longer only whether a horse approaches or leaves. It is whether we are able to see the horse beyond the function we have assigned to him or her.

When a horse becomes physiologically aroused during a session, this may need to be pointed out. Sometimes the person can recognise what is happening and respond differently. At other times, the person’s emotional arousal is so high that the capacity to think and reflect is temporarily reduced. The necessary intervention is then directed toward the person, not toward regulating the horse into continuing the interaction.

The horse should not be required to absorb what the person cannot yet recognise.

For me, equine welfare is therefore not primarily a question of techniques used after a session. Nor is it based on the belief that we must regulate horses because they have been exposed to human emotion.

It begins with whether we are capable of perceiving them.

That capacity cannot be limited to therapeutic sessions. In daily life, the horses need to experience that their behaviour is noticed, that their responses have consequences, and that the people around them respond to what is actually present rather than to what they want the horse’s behaviour to mean.

Perhaps the central risk is not that horses work with traumatised people.

The risk begins when human need becomes more visible to us than the horse.

30/07/2026

Training vs. empowerment

When I think about the difference between training and empowerment, I don’t think the distinction lies in whether a horse learns something. Horses learn throughout their lives. The question, to me, is what organizes the interaction. Where is my focus.

A friend recently said that when she rides, she doesn’t think about teaching the horse a movement or fixing something in the horse. She assumes that, if the horse is physically able to move freely, much of what we may describe as dressage already exists within the horse’s own movement. Her attention is somewhere else. She tries to become more responsive herself and to interfere less.

To me, this is closer to empowerment than to training.

When I look back at my own riding lessons during my childhood, I was told to focus on technique. I tried to look for the correct aid, the correct timing, the correct sequence of actions that would produce the outcome I wanted. Looking back, the riding lessons I experienced were largely organised around making the horse do something. At the time, I never questioned that. It was normal.

Luckily, things have changed. Horses are more and more no longer viewed as tools to the same extent they once were. An important development.

At the same time, I still think our underlying way of relating has not changed as much as we sometimes like to believe. Much of what I see still seems organised around producing a particular outcome in another being. We often call it training, education, guidance or support, be it with horses or other beings. The reference point then remains the same: changing the other.

But what happens if the focus shifts away from changing the horse and toward becoming more responsive ourselves? What happens if the question is not how to produce a movement, but how not to interfere with one?

This line of questioning has changed a lot for me in my relationship to my horses.

And not only horses - it has changed how I respond - in my personal life and my work - with any other being.

28/07/2026

What Stabilization Means in Our Work

Most people who attend our stabilization group say they can not explain the depth of their experience to others.

Stabilization is often understood as becoming calmer, feeling safer or learning how to manage distress. „Self regulation“, „calming techniques“, recognizing internal mechanisms etc come to mind.

That is not the centre of our work.

Our stabilization group begins with a different question: what has to become possible for a person to respond to the present, rather than remain organised by what has already happened?

Much of the work entails observing horses. Not because the horses are asked to heal, regulate or explain anyone. They remain horses, with their own attention, movement, relationships and responses. They are not turned into symbols of the people watching them.

That distinction matters.

When we observe another living being, we rarely perceive only what is there. Expectation, fear, memory, thought association and other familiar meanings enter quickly - most of the time so quickly that we are simply not aware of them. A horse stands still and is described as frozen. A horse moves away and is understood as rejecting. What has been observed and what has been concluded can become almost indistinguishable.

We do not replace or worse yet, correct those conclusions with supposedly better interpretations. Instead, we slow the process down.

What happened?

What did I observe?

What did I add?

And how did I organise myself in response? Meaning: what did I make what I see about me?

This is not an exercise in becoming a more accurate observer of horses. It is a way of making visible how one’s experience and perception is organised.

Trauma can narrow perception around what has once been necessary to notice, anticipate or survive. The present is then not encountered only as present. It is filtered through what is already known.

Stabilization, in this sense, is not merely the reduction of distress. It is the gradual recovery of the capacity to orient, to shift attention, to recognise what belongs to oneself and what belongs to another, to notice boundaries, and to discover that more than one response may be possible.

The horses make no demand that the participants tell their stories. They do not confirm those stories, contradict them or interpret them. Their presence introduces something that cannot be fully absorbed into the person’s existing narrative: another being who remains other. If we let them be horses.

Psychotherapy, to me, begins here not with explanation, but with a change in how the present can be encountered.

The question is no longer, “What does this mean to me?”

It becomes, “What is here, who is the other, and how am I able to respond?”

27/07/2026

About Boundaries

This morning I was in a hurry. I had several equine-assisted sessions ahead of me, things to carry, and instead of walking all the way down to switch off the electric fence, I decided to climb through it. I wasn’t paying attention, and the shock knocked me to the ground. It hurt like hell.

As I was lying there, I wasn’t angry at the fence. The fence had done exactly what an electric fence is designed to do. It hadn’t become aggressive, it hadn’t singled me out, and it hadn’t moved towards me. I was the one who had moved my body into the fence’s reach.

Almost immediately, I was reminded of a conversation I had with a friend some time ago.

We were standing in a pasture when one of the horses walked towards me. I remember saying something about the horse not respecting my space. My friend looked at me and asked, “Who isn’t respecting whom?”

I was standing still. The horse was moving.

Had I moved my feet, I would simply have been responding to the horse that was in front of me.

Back then, that changed my entire thinking about how I interact with horses and - ultimately - other beings.

The horse and the fence are, of course, completely different. One is an autonomous living being. The other is an object. But they reminded me of the same thing.

Neither needed to organize around me.

The only thing I could organize was myself.

It made me think again about how we talk about boundaries. We often speak about whether other people respect ours. That is certainly part of the conversation. But I wonder whether there is another part that receives far less attention: our ability to recognize the boundaries that already exist around us, to notice when we are moving into their reach, and to respond accordingly.

When I watch horses living together, I often notice how much of their interactions involves movement. They step closer, increase distance, pause, leave, return, yield, or hold their ground. I cannot know what they expect. What I can observe is that they continually adjust their own behaviour in relation to what is happening around them.

This morning, an electric fence reminded me of that.

It didn’t need to move.

I did.