Hemera’s Story: Experiences With Equine Assisted Therapy

**Trigger Warning: contains mentions of distress and trauma

My name is Hemera, and I live in the Netherlands. For many years now I have been struggling with life in general.

There are two things in particular that I find difficult to deal with. First, knowing exactly what I want, and to have focus in life. Instead, I often feel pulled in many different directions, running around like a headless chicken and being all over the place, which leaves me feeling scattered and exhausted. The other is connecting with people. On the outside, in any given social situation, everything looks fine and “normal”, while the whole inner experience is one of meaningless, hollowness and emptiness. Since my teenager years, I have been wondering what is wrong with me and what I am doing wrong.

Eventually things started to shift in 2019 when, by coincidence, I discovered that as well as “normal” trauma, complex trauma also exists - and one year later the penny finally fell in place when I read something of depersonalization and derealization. Of course, I had heard about dissociation before but DPDR was something totally new for me.

These two discoveries put me on a self-driven therapy path towards change and (hopefully) recovery. I started to figure myself out; and look at what kind of therapies were available, which ones spoke to me (and which ones did not), where they are offered etc. I then set about making a decision of what to do, where to go, and getting the referral for the healthcare insurance coverage. Although it has been a bumpy road at times, it eventually got me to the place where I am now - a specialized trauma center located in a former horse-riding school in a green rural area. So here I go now, every Friday afternoon to meet my therapy team: Annelies (the therapist) and Aafke (the horse).

The kind of therapy I do is a mixture of exposure (reliving painful experiences), somatic experiencing (how does it feel in the body), creative expression (making the feelings/experiences visible through different objects and materials) and of course the horse.

We work within a huge indoor riding ring. While Annelies and I are focusing on the therapy session, Aafke walks around freely and does what she wants to do and likes to do. Freely letting it happen and giving space to the horse to respond the way it wants respond, I experience the special value of the presence of Aafke.

To give one example, in one particular session of a couple of weeks ago I was going through a painful pattern of always ending up in the same mess. I stood outside of my mess, which I had expressed creatively, watching it. Then I realized “this is my mess”, so I decided to step into it. While I stood there, surrounded by objects and materials symbolizing the mess, out of the blue, Aafke appeared and came to stand next to me. I felt and sensed her presence on a physical level and while we were standing there for a moment, and I had the experience of feeling solidity under my feet; the emotional pressure lifting up; and the blinkers falling off. Like a return to myself and this reality. The opposite of DPDR.

Letting my guard down this way in the presence of a horse is 1000 times easier than with human beings, because it can simply can be what it is, and how it is. Aafke will not start asking me all kinds of questions which will give me the feeling I need to explain or justify myself of how and why and when etc. What also helps in situations like this is a therapist who also knows when to take a distance and let things happen the way they go.

It is of course not the case that in one magical-horse-connection-returning-to-this-reality moment, my whole DPDR has disappeared. It’s more a start: a moment of knowing, remembering how things can be different, and feel differently. It’s just one step on the long road towards recovery.

There are many different modalities and ways of working within the equine assisted therapy world. Each with their unique features and specific approaches of working. So anyone interested in it I would advice to do your own research and see which approach might work for you.