Objectification, Dissociation, and the Horse–Human Nervous System
There is a particular kind of stillness that can look like healing.
A horse standing quietly at the fence…
A client moving through a session without breaking down…
A smooth, predictable interaction from start to finish…
From the outside, it can look like progress. It can even feel like success. But sometimes, that stillness is not safety; it is survival.
They Were Both Survivors
We had a client who came to us guarded in ways that were hard to name at first. She was either intensely activated — quick to react, hard to reach — or she seemed to disappear entirely, present in body but gone in every other way. We later learned she had survived human trafficking. When she finally told us, so much made sense. Dissociation had kept her alive. It had also become the only way she knew how to move through the world. Relationships, for her, were transactional. Safety meant control.
She chose to work with an off-the-track Thoroughbred. On the surface, he seemed like an unlikely match. He had a history of intense reactivity, and at one point during his racing career, he had actually passed out under saddle. Veterinary workups found no medical cause. No one could explain it.
By the time he came to us, he had been retrained and relabeled: safe, rideable, predictable. But anyone paying close attention could see that something was missing. There was no light behind his eyes. He wove in his stall. He complied, but he was not really there.
In other words, he had learned to do exactly what she had learned to do.
We could have let her ride him. We could have let her feel successful. But we knew what was actually happening between them, and we knew what would have been quietly reinforced.
Welfare Is Not Only Physical
When most people think about horse welfare, they think about the visible things: neglect, malnutrition, abuse, injury. These matter enormously, and they are rightly named as harm.
At Natural Lifemanship, we believe welfare also includes something less visible: relational harm. It is about how a nervous system is treated, repeatedly. Not just what happens to the body, but what happens to subjectivity — the lived experience of a sentient being with emotions, intentions, and perceptions, and the capacity to make meaning of what is happening in the world.
A horse can be physically uninjured and relationally harmed at the same time. So can a person.
What Objectification Actually Does to a Nervous System
Philosopher Martha Nussbaum developed a framework for understanding objectification, originally applied to the objectification of women, that Natural Lifemanship has adapted to understand what happens between humans and horses in therapeutic and experiential settings.
Objectification occurs when a being is treated primarily as a tool for someone else’s purposes. It includes instrumentality, the denial of choice, the assumption of compliance, treating individuals as interchangeable, disregarding boundaries, and refusing to consider the inner experience of another.
When someone is repeatedly treated as an object, when their responses are managed rather than heard and their distress is seen as inconvenient rather than informative, the nervous system must adapt. The primary way both humans and horses adapt to that kind of relational environment is through dissociation.
The Body’s Last Resort
A horse’s first response to threat is flight. Blood moves to the extremities. The body mobilizes. If flight fails, fight.
But when neither works, when there is no escape and no way out, the body shifts into collapse. Blood moves toward the core. Systems slow. Awareness narrows. And the body prepares to be injured.
Collapse is not calm. It is a survival strategy, and a brilliant one.
In both horses and humans, dissociation exists on a continuum. It can look like not being fully present, like fawning or appeasement, or robotic compliance, moving through the motions without actually being there. It can escalate to shutdown, to repetitive behaviors like weaving or cribbing, to fainting, to medically unexplained episodes like psychogenic seizures.
Dissociation saves lives. In situations where fight or flight will not work, and this is especially common in cases of sexual trauma and trafficking, dissociation is the nervous system doing exactly what it is designed to do.
The problem arises when it becomes the default response to stress. When it is no longer a survival strategy in a moment of genuine danger, but a patterned way of moving through the world, it stops protecting and begins to cost: in brain development, in relational capacity, and in the ability to remain present in the moments that matter most.
The Clinical Paradox of the “Bomb-Proof” Horse
With highly dissociative clients, the instinct is understandable. We want safety. We want predictability. We reach for the steadiest horse in the barn.
But what we are really saying, beneath that instinct, is this: we need the horse to absorb all the risk.
Extreme predictability in a living being requires extreme control, and control produces compliance. Compliance, as we have seen, sits on the dissociative continuum.
Here is where the clinical paradox becomes impossible to ignore. We cannot help people heal from objectification by teaching them, even implicitly, to objectify another. People who rely on dissociation already use it to feel calm. If we create an environment where a horse’s shutdown produces smooth sessions and predictable outcomes, we are reinforcing the very strategy that keeps our clients fragmented. We are offering them a familiar experience dressed up as healing.
This client did not need more ways to disappear. She needed to learn how to remain present. And a person cannot learn presence in relationship with a being who is not present.
What Healing Actually Looked Like
In this client’s work, we did not ride. We did not even touch the horse until he asked to be touched.
We slowed everything down. We taught her how to track when her horse shifted into compliance and why that mattered. We taught her how to invite him to be present, and how to make it safe enough for him to actually do so. We tracked when she shifted into fawning.
We noticed micro-movements, subtle tension, the quiet moment of softening. When she dissociated, the horse moved in that direction too. When she became present and attuned, so did he. She learned to track his nervous system, and in doing so, she learned to track her own. She began to understand, not just cognitively but in her body, what it actually takes to stay present. She practiced it. He practiced it. They began to embody it.
The Horses Who Help Heal Cannot Become Collateral Damage
It would have been easy, even socially rewarded, to let the horse dissociate so the client could experience something that looked like calm.
Allowing the horse to shut down would have deepened his trauma pattern. When a horse’s subjectivity is not safeguarded, the client’s healing is compromised. The dynamics of objectification and dissociation are reinforced across both species rather than repaired. And repair, genuine relational repair, is the goal.
These are questions we return to in our own practice, and we offer them to you now:
Where might compliance be mistaken for wellness in your setting?
Where might a horse who seems safe actually be dissociated?
What would change in your work if subjectivity were centered in both species?
There are no quick answers. But the questions themselves are worth holding.
Why This Matters for Our Work
The horse is not a tool or a technique. The horse is a relational partner whose own nervous system participates in the process.
At Natural Lifemanship, we understand that healing unfolds through secure, connected relationships. When we prioritize the subjectivity of the horse, when we ask not just “is this horse safe?” but “is this horse present?”, we shift the entire relational field of the work. We move from control to connection, from compliance to genuine co-regulation.
Objectification is a welfare issue. Dissociation is a welfare issue. Both are clinical issues. It is deep presence and a radical movement from control to connection that is protective and healing for both species.
The work begins long before we pick up a lead rope. It begins in how we show up, with the horse, and with the human beside us.
Your Invitation to Step Into the Work
If this resonates with you, we invite you to continue exploring these ideas through our Fundamentals training, the Intensive, or our attachment-based specialty courses, where we go deeper into what it truly means to create environments where both humans and horses can think clearly, feel safely, and choose connection.
I also recently did a free webinar called The cost of Compliance on this topic. I taught a bit and then we had some great discussion for the last 25 minutes. You can find the recording here.
May this be a beginning — of deeper questions, fuller presence, and a practice that protects the dignity of every nervous system in the room.
Within each day, sometimes moment to moment, the wind changes. Blowing first this way, then that. Rushing straight across our path, or swirling around us. Sometimes it is so quiet we don’t even notice the air around us, other days it threatens to topple us. Whenever I stand outside, I am flooded with the reality of our natural world – as well as the metaphors and symbols within it. (Yes, sometimes in NL we DO use metaphors!)
The wind is a very real aspect of nature – we feel it viscerally as it presses on our bodies and requires us to find our literal footing. How do we stand in ever-changing winds? It’s practice, really. In our infancy it is tremendously difficult, but as we grow and develop, our core strengthens, our feet become more solid on the ground. We ground our feet, find our core, and hold our heads high. We are much more capable of withstanding the push, the pull, the swirling. And as we gain wisdom in our minds and bodies, we know how to prepare when the winds will be too strong, and we know how to soften and receive when the winds are gentle and caressing. It is an embodied experience; but the same is true on a symbolic level.
Within our lived days, particularly as helpers and healers, we find ourselves surrounded by ever changing winds. Ever changing pressures acting on us. People, animals, and situations pull us and push us and swirl around us. Asking, telling, demanding, pleading, negotiating…how do we find our footing in this complexity?
For me, secure footing comes from secure attachment.
A professional, and personal, challenge
When I first became a therapist, I said yes to everything. Every client, every time slot, every invitation, every conversation. I wanted all the experience and was terrified of failure, so I assumed doing everything would be the best way to succeed.
“Can I call you this evening, I really need to talk!?”
“Can’t you fit me in at the end of the day, I really need a session!”
“I know our time is up but just one more thing….”
“We just met but I really trust you and I want to tell you about my trauma from when I was 5 years old…”
I felt the pressure of being needed – the push, the pull, the swirling – and I gave in, over and over. I allowed myself to drift in the wind. And over time I started to resent my clients, resent the extra time and the extra conversations, I was tired and overwhelmed, and sometimes, dangerously, found myself way in over my head. It was a professional, ethical problem – but also a personal one. Of course what was showing up in my professional life was also showing up in my personal life.
The pressure of being a wife, of being a mother, a friend, a daughter…all that pushing and pulling. It is so easy to get swept up, swept away.
When we work in this field, we often encounter people at their most vulnerable, sometimes this means their behavior is not easy to engage with. I’ve had clients cry in my sessions, of course, but they’ve also yelled, and stormed out, demanded results, and pushed at my boundaries, pushed me away and then scrabbled to claw me back, questioned my competence, and insisted I had hurt them. Talk about changing winds!
My own secure attachment is a necessary ingredient for me to feel, and be, competent, capable, ethical, and honestly, sane, as I do this work of supporting others in their most vulnerable moments.
Why Secure Attachment?
We define secure attachment as essentially the same thing as brain integration. An integrated brain has developed optimally – with strong neural pathways within and between regions so everything works as it should and communication travels smoothly from one region to the next.
Secure attachment is an experience in which we were offered an optimal environment of protection, attunement, soothing, delight, and unconditional support. This optimal environment results in optimal brain development. They reflect (dare I say, mirror?!) each other.
When these two things are alive in us, we have the space for calm in relationships, for regulation. We find flexibility and fluidity. We find rhythm. Not only do we feel protected, seen, soothed, delighted in and supported, we are able to offer these experiences to others as well. This doesn’t mean we are perfect, it means we have the capacity.
This is how we find our footing in the stormy winds.
Secure attachment is about a stillness, deep within us, that exists no matter the chaos around us. No matter which way the wind blows, we can still hear ourselves. Secure attachment means we have a core self to come back to when we doubt, when we wonder, when we feel the pressure of outside influence.
Secure Attachment Requires Practice
Unfortunately, for many of us, this is a foreign concept. A fantasy perhaps. Or a goal that we feel we fall short of, routinely. We did not get to choose to be securely or insecurely attached – it is a thing that happened to us, out of our control. I feel a grief in my throat when I say this. No one is more or less deserving, no one is securely or insecurely attached based on merit. We were babies once, and that is when we did what we had to to survive, and our attachment patterns are the result.
The silver lining here is that we all have brilliant, changeable brains. Our bodies and brains have information to give us, and are ready to evolve. Secure attachment can be learned, and it must be practiced.
As I grow my secure attachment, my fluidity and flexibility in relationships grows, including the relationship I have with myself. I can hold boundaries with empathy, I can find creative solutions to dilemmas, I can sense when it is time to soften in and down, or when it is time to summon my strength and stand tall. I can bring my energy up and make a request, or exhale and drop into relaxation and rest, or hold myself in a balance of the two.
This isn’t just personal work, it is professional development as well.
Showing up for our clients in a body, mind, and soul that is regulated, connected, confident, flexible, authentic, and ready to give is no easy feat. This work asks so much of us.
Practicing in Community
This community of people offers themselves in the aid of others – day in and day out. I am in awe of the work you all do.
My hope for you is that you find your footing, you find your calm in the ever changing winds, in order to prevent burnout, improve your boundaries, inform your choices, support your sense of connection, and leave enough for yourself when the work is done.
Secure attachment may not have been something all of us received, but it is something every one of us can build. And in work as demanding and sacred as this, it is essential. When we intentionally practice secure attachment, we strengthen our capacity to remain grounded in the winds of our clients’ pain, complexity, and growth.
If you are ready to deepen your footing, expand your resilience, and show up for your clients with greater clarity, regulation, and authenticity, we invite you to step into this work with us. Don’t practice alone, join a community committed to growing together in The Practice of Secure Attachment.
Many of us enter helping relationships with a sincere desire to be supportive. We want things to improve. We want movement, relief, or clarity to arrive for the people and animals we care about. Over time, that desire can quietly shift into an impulse to manage outcomes or steer behavior, often without us noticing when it happens.
For many of us, control is not about power—it is about safety. When things feel uncertain, painful, or slow, we reach for control in an effort to steady ourselves. We try to influence others because it helps us feel more secure, more effective, more at ease.
This pattern shows up across relationships. It appears in therapy rooms, within families, and very clearly in our work with horses. It usually does not come from a harmful place. It often comes from care, urgency, or a hope that doing more will help something feel better.
Yet control, even when well intentioned, can undermine connection. When that happens, the relationship starts to revolve around compliance rather than choice.
This work is not about finding better ways to control others, but about reclaiming choice within ourselves.
A Familiar Way of Asking
There are many familiar ways to ask a horse to back up. People often reach for a halter and lead rope. Some step directly in front of the horse and use posture and energy to push them back. These approaches are widely taught, and they often produce a visible result.
But there is another way to ask.
I have watched Tim, many times, demonstrate an approach that looks almost invisible at first. He stands near the horse’s shoulder, oriented in the same direction as the horse. They are both looking forward to the same thing.
There is no pulling or pushing – no blocking. Instead, Tim allows the flow of energy in his body to shift backward. The horse senses that change and steps back in response.
This is not driven by technique, but by internal organization. When we learn to communicate with our horses in this way—through energy, flow, and an abundance of choice—it becomes clear that this is not simply about horse training. To communicate this subtly, the nervous system itself has to change. The body must be regulated, coherent, and available for relationship rather than control.
The same is true for our clients. When they learn to communicate in this way, their bodies are changing. Trauma is not being managed at the level of behavior alone—it is being rewired at the level of the nervous system. Healing is happening through small, precise shifts in awareness and organization.
After all, it is often the smallest changes that create the biggest difference.
Horses Listen to What the Body Is Saying
When we talk about energy in this work, we are really talking about the nervous system. The nervous system organizes how we move, how we orient, and how we show up in relationships. It has direction and tone, guiding us to lead from balance: a soft, present front held by a strong, steady back. It shifts constantly in response to safety, threat, and lived experience.
Over time, long periods spent in fight, flight, freeze, or fawn shape how the nervous system organizes itself. These patterns influence how we approach others, how we handle proximity, and how we respond under pressure. Eventually, the ways we practice moving through the world become the ways we live in our bodies.
What’s fascinating is that horses are deeply attuned to these shifts. They notice posture, breath, muscle tone, and orientation long before they register words or techniques. When we are with horses, we are always communicating through our bodies, whether or not we are aware of it.
Horses offer immediate feedback in this process. When the body is organized and congruent, the horse responds with ease. When the body is unclear or carrying internal conflict, the horse responds differently. That response gives us real-time information about what is happening inside us—often before we have words for it.
For those whose self-trust has been disrupted by trauma, this kind of feedback helps us reconnect with our own signals, restoring choice, integrity, and a felt sense of coming back to ourselves.
Control, Choice, and the Body
The word “control” carries a lot of weight. In many spaces, it has fallen out of favor altogether. Even self control is sometimes framed as something rigid or shaming, something we fail at and then criticize ourselves for.
But that is not how we understand it in this work.
Control is not inherently harmful. Control becomes a problem when we use it to take choice away from someone else.
At its core, control is about where choice lives.
When I have choice within my own body, I can decide when to speak and when to pause. I can notice my posture, my breath, my tone, and adjust with intention. I am not pulled into reactions that I regret later. I am not overridden by impulses that do not align with my values.
That kind of self control is not harsh. It is spacious, responsive, and it allows for repair when things do not go as planned.
When we try to control someone else, we remove their choice. When someone controls us, our choice is removed. Healing relationships depend on restoring choice on both sides.
And this begins in the body.
Healing Happens From the Inside Out
Trauma is not only a story we tell. It lives in the nervous system. It shapes how we orient ourselves to others, how we manage proximity, how we track safety, and how we respond when intensity or urgency arises.
When we develop awareness of our internal state and learn to regulate with intention, the nervous system begins to reorganize. Each time we notice what our body is communicating and choose a different response—even a slightly different one—we are laying new pathways. We are creating conditions where connection can emerge without force.
With horses, this might look like asking with less pressure and more clarity. With humans, it might look like slowing down a conversation, noticing when urgency arises, or choosing to pause instead of pushing for resolution.
The principle is the same. Choice returns to the body.
An Invitation to Practice Differently
Letting go of control does not mean becoming passive or disengaged. It means becoming more precise in how we listen and respond. It means learning to notice what is happening inside ourselves before attempting to shape what happens outside.
This way of working takes time. It develops through experience, reflection, and supported practice. It grows in relationship, not in isolation.
These principles are woven throughout the Fundamentals of Natural Lifemanship. In that learning space, practitioners are invited to track their nervous systems, refine embodied communication, and build relationships rooted in choice and attunement.
Horses offer powerful feedback, and the body becomes a source of information rather than something to override.
There is no demand to arrive anywhere specific. The invitation is to begin noticing and to stay curious about what unfolds when choice is reclaimed from the inside out.
If this approach resonates with you, we invite you to explore the Fundamentals of NL and continue deepening this practice of embodied, relational healing.
Do you remember what drew you to the field of Equine Assisted Services when you first started down this path? Was it to help people? To help horses? Maybe Both?
If you are like me, you wanted to take your work to the next level – to take something that was working well (family therapy) and improve it by meeting outdoors, finding sensory regulation and movement, and building relationships with horses that were mutually beneficial.
Or maybe you are not like me, there wasn’t “work” you were already doing – it was the horses themselves who drew you in, maybe even gave you refuge, safety, a place to belong.
Whatever your reasons for beginning to consider Equine Assisted Services, now you are here at Natural Lifemanship, and if you are like many of our students you may be wondering how much training you need, wondering how far you should go?
And then the big question, do you have to get certified?
The quick and simple answer is “No” you do not have to get certified. The field of EAS is still fairly new and fairly unregulated – you do not have to be certified in order to partner horses with humans in a way that could promote healing.
Another quick answer is “Yes” you have to be certified, or moving through a certification process, if you want to be covered by insurance.
But, should you get certified? We emphatically say “YES” – and we’re happy to explain why.
Certification costs money, can be a lengthy process, and requires maintenance no matter where you go – we don’t enter into this long-term relationship with you lightly. Your learning and development and your care of your community are at the forefront of our thinking as well. We have created our certification process and maintenance requirements because it is our mission, our deeply held value, and our ethical responsibility to ensure you are offering the safest, most ethical, most effective services you can for the people we all serve.
We’re always coming back to that “why” – the people and horses we are trying to help.
Why Get Certified?
For most of us, the people who knock on our office (and barn) doors are some of the most at-risk, highly vulnerable people out there. Time and again we hear the story of the client who has “tried everything”, nothing has worked, and so finally they are willing to come to us and try this ‘weird’ thing called Equine Assisted ________ (insert therapy, coaching, learning, wellness, etc.). Most of our clients are people for whom the traditional system failed – their trauma, their challenges, their needs are just more complex than a traditional system can handle.
These clients enter into our professional realms, and in doing so, they are asking us, “Will you keep me safe? Can I trust you to have the experience needed to help me?”
Whether you are certified or not – your ethical obligation is to be able to answer “YES!”
Signing up for certification with Natural Lifemanship sets into motion a carefully planned learning experience and mentorship that is intended to help you feel informed, supported, and encouraged to grow into a capable, effective, and ethical practitioner.
But we aren’t the only ones who feel this way – insurance companies also need to know you are offering your best services – services that are ethical and safe. They will ask you if you are certified.
If you are in the process of certification they will need to know that you have done X number of hours of training, and that now you are moving through a process of consultation and mentorship with seasoned professionals, ensuring that your services are ethical and safe. And in the event a claim is filed, they likely will ask us about your certification status as well.
Not Just a Piece of Paper: Why is Certification a Process?
Certification can seem like it is about a piece of paper – but it is so much more than that.
With Natural Lifemanship, certification is a process, it is about learning and mentorship that is both personal and professional. It takes time to learn information and integrate it into the work that you do. It takes even more time if you are building a new scope of practice.
We intentionally require our steps of certification so that you have time to develop, grow, and practice applying what you have learned, while being supported and mentored along the way. What we teach – the neurobiology of trauma, the paradigm shift of horses as capable, autonomous partners, the “being” of healing relationships – cannot be learned in just a few days. It would be unethical of us to suggest otherwise.
Our certification process takes time because your development takes time. From trainings to individual consults to group consultations – we will walk alongside you as you internalize the art and science of healing relationships.
When you receive a certification from Natural Lifemanship, you know that you have been through an experience that has set in motion a powerful transformation for you, your horses, and your clients.
What you do after your initial certification matters just as much.
Image Source: Building Bridges Leadership
Maintaining Certification: Why Do You Need to Continue Your Education?
Have you ever heard of the “Forgetting Curve”? The Forgetting Curve is a concept that has arisen from research – it tells us that anything we learn quickly, we will forget quickly. Learning requires depth and meaning in order to take hold in our memories. The Forgetting Curve also tells us that anything we are not routinely reminding ourselves of, will also be forgotten over time.
Continuing education is the backbone of ethical practice. If we were to certify your learning and then never ask you to revisit that learning, or expand and deepen that learning – you would begin to forget, you would lose what you had gained. And then over time your work would suffer.
Here at Natural Lifemanship, we work hard to produce intentional and meaningful continuing education opportunities, this is one thing your certification and maintenance fees pay for. We are constantly trying to improve ourselves as an organization, and we are constantly working to support your continued growth and development as well. Consultation, webinars, video content, conferences…this is how you overcome the forgetting curve.
Certification is how you become ethical and experienced, maintaining certification is how you stay ethical and experienced.
Keeping up with your certification is also necessary to receive coverage from insurance should anything happen – insurance is how you protect yourself and your clients when doing this unique and sometimes unpredictable work.
Where Ethics and Liability Meet
Cassie* (not her real name) is a practitioner who did the work to get certified in Natural Lifemanship. However, over time, she felt maintaining her certification wasn’t justified, and let her certification lapse. She continued to meet with clients utilizing Equine Assisted Therapy operating under the premise that she was NL certified. Unfortunately, one day during a session a client sustained an injury (not entirely unusual when we are working with horses) and Cassie’s client filed a claim so she could pay for her hospital bills and rehabilitation.
Cassie’s insurance called us to ask questions about her certification, and we were forced to reveal that while Cassie was at one time NL certified, she did not maintain her certification with us. Because of this, Cassie’s insurance would not cover the claim. Both she and her client were left with great expense. You see, insurance companies also understand the importance of ongoing learning and the “forgetting curve”—which is why maintaining certification matters to them as well.
This is a sad story, but also a very real one. Working with horses, and involving ourselves in people’s most vulnerable aspects of their lives means a higher risk of liability. We are more at risk, and our clients are more at risk, when we allow ourselves to forget our learning, our ethical obligations, and our commitment to growth.
We Are Walking Alongside You
There are many sad stories like this. It is a good reminder of the power we step into when we offer to be a healing guide for someone else. It is necessary to remember the risk involved when we spend our time with horses, with trauma, and we choose to be an influence over someone else’s wellbeing.
We at Natural Lifemanship do not enter into this long-term relationship with you lightly. We, too, hold ourselves to a commitment of growth and ongoing development, of ethical considerations, as well as personal and professional reflection.
This is why the expense, this is why the time – so that you are not alone as you endeavor to care for your communities of humans and animals. We walk this path together.
Ready to Take the Next Step?
If you’ve been considering certification, or you’re already on the path, now is the time to take action. For a limited time, five of the six steps in the Natural Lifemanship certification process are on sale. This is a really good time to deepen your learning, expand your practice, and walk more confidently in your ethical commitment to clients and horses alike (while saving some money in the process!).
Check out the NL Certification Sale now and take the next step in your professional and personal development.
One of the questions I hear most often from students who have completed the Fundamentals of Natural Lifemanship is this:
“How much direction do I give my clients? Do I teach them exactly what I learned in the Fundamentals, or do I let them discover the principles on their own?”
It is an important question, and the answer is not as straightforward as we might hope. The truth is, the answer is both yes and no. It depends. . .
It depends on pacing. It depends on the practitioner’s experience and skillset. It depends on the client’s goals. And it depends on where they are in their process.
This question matters because the way we teach and offer guidance directly shapes a client’s ability to form authentic, healing relationships: with the horse, with others, and with themselves.
Teaching and Guiding
When we teach the Fundamentals, we offer a clearer, more structured path for building connection with the horse. We do this intentionally. Students need a solid foundation to understand how to build safe, connected relationships. We call this the “straighter line.” It helps you build more meaningful connections using principles that are grounded in science and lived experience.
But client sessions rarely follow a straight line. Healing is a winding path that unfolds in its own time. In those moments, the relationship goes beyond technique—it becomes a space for true healing, moving at its own natural pace.
With clients, I often slow things way down. I may teach less, and guide more. I may ask more questions. I may simply hold space. Sometimes it is best for a client to figure out the principles on their own, with my guidance. Other times, it is more helpful to teach them exactly what is learned in the Fundamentals, and then offer support and guidance when difficulty arises.
Both paths can lead to transformation. The key is in discerning which one is needed.
When Guiding Teaches – finding the answer
Tim and I once worked with an eight-year-old girl who had been adopted from the foster care system. Like many of the clients we meet in this work, she had endured an overwhelming amount of trauma. Her ACE score was a ten. And yet, she was the most delightful little munchkin you ever did see—when she smiled, her sweet button nose would wrinkle, lifting her pink glasses up off her face. She was a hot mess, in the very best sense of the word. Her adoptive parents loved her deeply, but they were worried.
In her world, safety had never been familiar. She would wander away from the bus stop and walk into strangers’ homes asking for snacks or to use the bathroom. She wasn’t reckless—just searching for connection in the only ways she knew. Her history had distorted her ability to sense risk.
When we worked with the horse, we didn’t tell her what to do. Instead, we asked questions and let her choose the path. She picked a horse with almost no training and, of course, on day one she wanted to ride. That was her pattern—leap before learning, jump in before reasonably assessing risk.
So we guided, but never handed her the answers. She dragged a saddle that weighed more than she did into the round pen, only to find her horse wouldn’t stand still.
“Have you taught him to stand still?” we asked. “Have you helped him feel safe with a saddle?”
She hadn’t—so she did. She learned about pressure, regulation, energy, and connected detachment. Then she decided to mount, but the horse wouldn’t stand at the block. To get him there, she first had to teach him to follow. That meant practicing connected attachment: backing up when he came toward her, lowering her energy, softening her body.
We talked about how prey animals respond to threats, and she problem-solved how to teach her horse that she is safe – that she is not a predator. She figured out why we back up when the horse looks at us, without us teaching it. She began to practice backing up, lowering her energy, and softening her body. And in doing so, she started to learn what safety looks and feels like—not just from others, but within herself.
Through guided discovery with her horse, she transformed moments of impulsivity into opportunities to experience safety, connection, and self-awareness—learning the principles of relationship from the inside out.
To learn more about some of the ways we guided her to her own answers, instead of teaching her the NL principles of relationship, check out this webinar.
When Teaching Guides – still finding the answer
Another client came to me after the devastating loss of a child. She sought therapy for other reasons (more on that in the webinar), and we were working on establishing connection with the horse.
I taught her exactly what to do: when the horse turns and looks at you, release pressure. Step back. Let your shoulders drop. Exhale. Lower your energy. Create space.
She understood the instructions. She even practiced them without the horse.
But when the moment came, and the horse looked at her, she stood still. Her body would not move. I reminded her gently. Still, she stood frozen.
So we explored what was happening. We tuned into her body. And what we found was this: Backing up required a bit of softening. Softening stirred a fear of collapse. Collapse was an incomplete movement that felt like letting go. Letting go felt like a loss of connection. And for her, that brought her straight back to the raw grief of losing her child.
What began with structured teaching became a doorway into something much deeper. We worked slowly. She started by softening ever so slightly at the knees. She practiced releasing energy in small, safe increments. Over time, she began to feel how softening doesn’t dissolve connection—it can deepen it.
In this case, I taught her clearly. But the transformation happened in the space where her body could not yet follow what her mind knew. That is where the therapeutic work began.
To learn more about how I guided her when her feet simply could not move, I invite you to watch this webinar.
Principles for Practitioners
There is no single right answer when it comes to teaching versus guiding.
Sometimes, clients need structure. Other times, they need a bit more space to explore and problem-solve. The decision depends on their goals, their nervous system state, and their capacity for relational engagement in that moment. It also depends on the practitioner’s comfort with uncertainty and their ability to attune, to both the horse and person.
When I first began this work, I taught a lot. I planned each session carefully, offered clear instructions, and guided clients step by step. And that approach worked—it helped people learn, it created safety, and it opened doors to healing.
Over time, my style evolved. I now step into sessions with fewer plans and more presence. I give less instruction, hold more space, and offer guidance that meets the moment rather than a script.
And remember—amazing things still happen when we teach. There are many roads to the same healing outcome.
You don’t have to begin with unstructured presence. It’s okay to start with more structure. As you grow more confident in your own embodiment of the work, you can gradually lean into guiding more and teaching less—allowing sessions to unfold organically.
The key is to start somewhere, with plenty of self-compassion and grace, and then gently challenge yourself to take small risks toward more guidance and less instruction.
Why This Matters (For Facilitators and Clients)
The relationship between client and horse often parallels the relationships they have elsewhere.Through this work, they learn what it means to feel safe, to have and set boundaries, to build trust, and to show up with authenticity.
When we strike the right balance between teaching, guiding, and letting go, we invite our clients into a space where they can explore these relational dynamics in a safe, embodied way. Teaching often creates safety and predictability, laying the foundation, but we learn not by being told, but by doing. Guiding can offer just the right amount of direction and support, allowing our clients to heal not just by understanding, but by experiencing.
And that is where the deepest change happens.
Want to Go Deeper?
If you have ever wrestled with the question of how much to direct your clients, you are not alone. It is one of the most common questions I receive, and for good reason. The answer is complex, but it is also learnable.
I recently talked about this topic in a webinar, where I shared these stories in great detail and offered practical, concrete tools to help you navigate this balance with more confidence and clarity.
We will also explore topics like this in the NL Intensive, where you will have the chance to practice, reflect, and grow in community.
When we launched the Natural Lifemanship (NL) Certification Program in 2016, we asked ourselves two important questions:
What does it mean to be NL certified? And what exactly are we certifying?
Many of us had been studying the Neurosequential Model with Dr. Bruce Perry. In our discussions, we kept returning to something he emphasized repeatedly when speaking about certification. He was clear that his program was designed to provide people with the experiences they needed to learn and apply the Neurosequential Model. However, he also acknowledged that the degree to which someone became competent in using the model was beyond the scope of what his program could evaluate.
Dr. Perry stated plainly: his certification program certified experience, not competence.
That framing deeply resonated with us. From the very beginning, Natural Lifemanship has taken the same stance:
We certify experience. We do not certify competence.
Competence Is a Moving Target
When we invest in our growth and learning, of course we want to become competent. With competence comes effectiveness and also confidence. We feel more capable, we know what we are doing, we achieve good outcomes, and as a result, we find our work rewarding and enjoyable.
However, what it takes to be competent changes with time and context. Just as you can never stand in the same river twice, you can never be assured that the knowledge and skills you possess right now will be sufficient to effectively deal with a situation you encounter tomorrow or a year from now.
True competence requires continual growth. One has never entirely “arrived.”
That said, accomplishments along the way are important. They demonstrate the extent of one’s dedication and striving to continually learn and grow. They show that you are moving along a path.
And at NL, being on the path is more important than reaching the end of it.
Engagement Prevails Over Competence
As a model that is deeply geared toward development—personal development, professional development, and even neurodevelopment—we are not in the business of asking, “Are you competent?” or, “Can you do this or that?“
Those are binary distinctions: yes or no; can or cannot. But real growth is a long process, with ups and downs, successes and failures.
The one essential criterion for growth is ongoing engagement. So instead, we ask: Are you engaged?
Engagement can be measured by both how often you show up and how you show up. You cannot be engaged if you do not show up at all. And once you do show up, the quality of your presence determines what you gain from any experience.
It is the quantity and quality of your experiences that reflect your level of engagement.
Engaging in experiences over time is more meaningful to us than demonstrating competence at a single moment in time.
Milestones, Not Endpoints
While your learning and growth with NL will never end (at least we hope they don’t!), we would love to help you celebrate and share your milestones and achievements along the way. That is why we are now very pleased to offer digital credentials.
These new digital badges and certificates of completion are earned when you reach certain milestones in the certification journey:
When you complete the Fundamentals of NL, you are considered Level 1 Trained.
When you complete the NL Intensive, you are considered Level 2 Trained.
The more experiences you engage in with us, the more badges you’ll earn. This is not intended to be a “token economy” or a system of rewards. Rather, it is a way to demonstrate a level of engagement and commitment.
Looking Ahead
We will be dedicating some future blogs to this subject as we aim to help EAS consumers better understand what to look for when choosing a practitioner.
These upcoming pieces will explore what our credentials actually represent, how they reflect experience and engagement, and why that matters when you’re seeking care rooted in connection and development.
We look forward to continuing the conversation, and we are honored to walk alongside you.
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