The Good Practice

05/17/2026

05/15/2026

This weekend!

We are opening the gate!

On May 17th, The Good Practice and Angela Rothe Training are hosting an open barn event and we want you there. If you have been curious about equine-assisted psychotherapy, wondered what actually happens in a session, or just want to come meet some (very cute) horses on a Sunday, this is your invitation.

No experience with horses needed. No pressure to sign up for anything. Just come as you are and see what this work feels like in person. All the details are in the flyer below.

No RSVP needed. Bring yourself, bring a friend, bring your curiosity, but leave your dogs at home (sad, we know). There will be a potluck lunch, light refreshments, and local makers and businesses on site. All the details are in the flyer. We would love to see you there.

05/06/2026

She always knows.

This is Freya, my Friesian mare and one of my most honest teachers. Horses don't wait for you to figure out how you're feeling. They already know, and they meet you there anyway. That's the whole thing, really.

04/27/2026

Thoughts from the paddock:
If you are an equestrian or horse lover, I invite you to try something next time you are with horses that might shape how you see them (and, most likely, yourself). Instead of thinking about what your ride is going to look like today, or rushing to grab them from the field still thinking about work, just watch. Give it a few minutes and see what you notice.

Is their head high or low? Are their ears swiveling around, pinned back, or soft and relaxed to the side? Is their body still, or can you see tension moving through the hindquarters, the jaw, or their flank? Are they scanning the environment, or has their attention settled? Are they chewing, blinking slowly, letting out a long breath?

What you are seeing, without necessarily knowing it, is the horse's autonomic nervous system in real time. And horses are remarkably easy to read, because unlike us, they are not trying to hide it.

Horses and humans share something called the vagus nerve, a long wandering nerve that runs from the brainstem down through the heart, lungs, and gut, and plays a central role in how we regulate stress and connection. Polyvagal theory, developed by Dr. Stephen Porges, describes how this nerve governs three states: the ventral vagal state of safety and social engagement, the sympathetic state of fight or flight, and the dorsal vagal state of shutdown and freeze.

Horses move through these states all day long, and they do it visibly. Next time your horse gets startled, watch carefully. Their head goes up, nostrils flare, body tightens, all evidence of sympathetic activation. Then, watch what happens over the next few minutes as the threat passes. Their head slowly drops. Their jaw softens. Maybe they let out a long exhale, or even shake through the whole body, releasing the charge. That is their nervous system completing a stress cycle and returning to ventral vagal. The whole thing, if you watch it, is like watching a textbook come to life.

Here is another invitation. Can you do the same thing for yourself?

Not fixing, not judging, just noticing. Where are you on the ladder right now? Is there tension in your shoulders, your jaw, your belly? Is your breath high in your chest or low and slow? Are you scanning for threat, or do you feel settled enough to be curious? Can you catch the moment your own nervous system starts to shift, and get just a little curious about what moved it?

This is one of the quieter gifts of spending time with horses- they model something we have largely forgotten how to do. They move through states without shame, comple the cycle, and come back to rest. Watching them do it is, in itself, a kind of education. And sometimes, without meaning to, you find yourself exhaling right along with them.

04/24/2026

We are opening the gate!

On May 17th, The Good Practice and Angela Rothe Training are hosting an open barn event and we want you there. If you have been curious about equine-assisted psychotherapy, wondered what actually happens in a session, or just want to come meet some (very cute) horses on a Sunday, this is your invitation.

No experience with horses needed. No pressure to sign up for anything. Just come as you are and see what this work feels like in person. All the details are in the flyer below.

No RSVP needed. Bring yourself, bring a friend, bring your curiosity, but leave your dogs at home (sad, we know). There will be a potluck lunch, light refreshments, and local makers and businesses on site. All the details are in the flyer. We would love to see you there.

04/20/2026

Therapy for equestrians. At the barn, where you belong.
For a lot of equestrians, the barn is the place they feel most like themselves. The smell of hay, the sound of horses moving in their stalls, the particular quiet of an equestrian property: it is a world that makes sense in a way that a lot of other places do not. It makes sense, then, that some of the most meaningful therapy happens there too.

At The Good Practice, we offer in-person talk therapy specifically for riders, conducted at our equestrian facility just outside Portland. Sessions can take place in the private office tucked into the barn aisle, or as a walk-and-talk across the grounds, whichever feels right. The point is that you are not sitting in an unfamiliar office trying to describe a world your therapist has never set foot in. You are in an environment that already speaks your language.

Equestrians carry a particular set of experiences, and finding a therapist who actually understands the culture, the language, and the stakes can feel nearly impossible. This work is for the competitive rider who has started dreading shows she used to love, and for the recreational rider whose relationship with her horse has quietly become one of the more complicated relationships in her life. It is for anyone still carrying the weight of a fall, physically healed but not quite back to themselves in the saddle. And it is for the rider who cannot explain to anyone who does not ride why losing a horse feels like losing a person, because it does.

Grounded in the somatic and relational principles that inform everything we do at The Good Practice, this is talk therapy that pays attention to what is happening in the body, not just the mind. We trace the patterns that show up in the saddle back to where they started, and we do that work in a setting where, for once, you do not have to leave your world at the door to walk into a therapist's office. A barn is not a backdrop here. It is a therapeutic environment, one that for many horse people, has a way of surfacing things that four walls simply cannot reach.

04/18/2026

What does it mean for something to be good practice?

I found myself using this phrase over and over in sessions. When a client was sitting with something hard, not trying to fix it or rationalize it or push it away, just letting themselves feel it, I would say: this is good practice. Sitting in discomfort without escaping it. Staying with grief instead of rushing past it. Letting an emotion move through you rather than slamming the door on it. Good practice.

The phrase stuck because it captures something I really believe. The work we do in the therapy room is not just about feeling better in the moment. It is practice for the rest of your life.

Relational therapy is good practice for relationships outside the therapy room. When we build a secure, trusting connection between therapist and client, we are not just talking about connection. We are actually experiencing it, exploring patterns, practicing something different, from within the safety of that container.

The same is true with the horses. The safe attachment that forms between a client and a horse in the round pen is good practice for relationships beyond it. When you learn that it's safe to be present with a 1,200 pound prey animal you also learn that it's safe to be present with yourself. That is not practice for the real world, it's the real world meeting you where you are.

04/17/2026

She is not worried about what comes next.
Spending time with horses has a way of making that contagious.

04/15/2026

Your horse is not your mirror, a metaphor, or your therapist:

A note from an equine-assisted therapist who knows the irony of writing this.

In equine-assisted psychotherapy, the mirror is one of our most used concepts. Horses, we say, reflect back what we bring. Their behavior can illuminate parts of ourselves we have cut off from, the grief we've been outrunning, the anger we've learned to suppress, the softness we forgot we had. A horse who won't come close might be showing you something about how available you actually are. A horse who leans in might be meeting a part of you that rarely gets met. I use this framework too. It's useful, and it opens doors in-session.

But a mirror is an object. Your horse is not.

There's a quiet assumption embedded in the way a lot of people talk about horses in healing contexts, including sometimes in equine-assisted psychotherapy models, and it's this: that the horse is there to do something for us. To regulate us, to reflect us, to hold our hard feelings for a while. That we can bring whatever state we're in into the arena and the horse will meet us there and do the work.

I want to gently push back on that.

Horses are sentient beings with their own nervous systems, their own preferences, their own capacity for stress. They can experience the burden of being someone's emotional processing space. When we walk into the barn flooded, activated, and dysregulated, and we expect the horse to be the thing that brings us back, we are putting work on them that isn't theirs to carry.

That's people work.

This isn't a new problem. Older models of equine-assisted therapy leaned heavily on metaphor. A facilitator might ask "who does this horse remind you of?" and the client might say: my father. My ex. The part of myself I can't stand. And there's something to that, the horse as a projective surface, a way in to feelings that are hard to access directly. But it's worth naming what's happening in that moment: the horse has disappeared. What's left is a symbol. A prop in someone else's psychological drama. The field has moved, and for good reason. When we relate to horses as metaphors, we are still not really seeing them. We are looking through them at ourselves.

This doesn't mean you can't go to the barn when you're struggling. It means you owe it to your horse to do some of that work before you arrive at the gate.

In equine-assisted therapy, we take this seriously. Before a client ever sets foot in the arena, we spend time grounding. Noticing breath. Feeling feet on the floor. Getting in contact with what's actually happening inside, not to perform regulation, but to arrive with some awareness of what we're bringing in. The horse didn't sign up to absorb a hard week. Consent matters, even here. Especially here.

This is true in the therapy context, and it's equally true if you ride your own horse, lease a horse, or take occasional riding lessons. The relationship is better when we take responsibility for our own state first.

Your horse may mirror you. They may also be tired, or distracted, or simply not interested in being your therapist today. And here's where consent gets real: if the horse walks away, let them. If the connection isn't coming, don't force it. That moment of turning away, of disengagement, of clear "not right now" is communication. It deserves to be respected, not overridden.

This is harder than it sounds. When we come to the barn needing something and the horse doesn't give it to us, that brings up feelings. Rejection, maybe. Disappointment. The urge to try harder, to coax, to earn the nuzzle we came for. But those feelings belong to us. Sitting with them, without putting the horse back to work to fix them, is actually the (good) practice. That's the thing equine-assisted therapy is pointing at. Not that horses are magical creatures who make us feel better, but that they are honest ones who show us where our work is.

None of this is a critique of the impulse that brings people to horses in the first place. That impulse comes from somewhere real and beautiful. Horses have been companions to humans in many ways, and there's a reason we keep finding our way back to them when we're hurting. The invitation here isn't to stop bringing your full self to the barn. It's to remember that the horse is bringing their full self too. When we show up having done our part, giving ourselves a moment to ground ourselves, having taken responsibility for what we're bringing to them, we make room for something that isn't just healing for us. It becomes a relationship. And that, in my experience, is where the real work happens.