Ep. 75 The contagion of (dis)regulation

Hello, I'm Mary Wanlis welcoming you to podcast number 75 in our series for 2025. Those of you who know me will know one of my favourite sayings, which does the organised rider organise the disorganized horse, or does the disorganized horse disorganise the organised rider? And with that, I'm thinking mostly of their biomechanics, their physicality, their body organ. We could equally well thinking about the autonomic nervous system, say, does the regulated rider and handler regulate the dysregulated horse, or does the dysregulated horse dysregulate the regulated rider and handler? And the bottom line is we're not going to have well regulated horses if we're not well regulated ourselves. But turning that around, it is so true that horses can help us become more regulated. And now that's been really formalised and put out in the world as equine assisted learning and equine assisted therapy. And I'm all for it. Without horses in my life, I dread to think who I might have become. I owe them everything in many ways. And I heard the story from someone I taught who told me that when her husband proposed, she said to him, you really do appreciate, don't you? I need to have either a horse or a psychiatrist and this is probably for the rest of my life. And I really think the horse is going to be cheaper and I think it's going to work better. And he probably really and truly already knew that. But as far as I'm aware, they agreed and lived happily ever after. Training horses is influencing their regulation, their body organisation within their fascial net, their agility, their adjustability, their suppleness. And it's also training them to want to work with us, to want to please us. And both flighty horses and shut down horses may not have that at the beginning. The more we praise the good and largely ignore the bad, the better it works. And of course, genius is knowing when to stop going on too long could be enough to make your horse hate it, to make him sore and just overdo it. And I know some people, and actually some really young people who are very good trainers. I think the best animal trainers carry that animal along in a wave of their love and enthusiasm, almost in the way that a really good musician carries an audience into an altered state. And there's nothing more wonderful than a really good concert. I'm going to tell you the stories of a few more riders and horses bringing out the idea of regulation from various starting points so one of the coaches in my network, a guy who's a fairly heavy guy, had to retire an older horse a few years ago and started looking for a new weight carrying horse for him. And every horse he looked at within his budget was not sound and he was looking more at the draft end of the scale than the warmblood end of the scale. And in the end he bought a two year old. I met that two year old as a five year old and in in the meanwhile he came on some of my coaching courses but we couldn't find him a horse big enough to ride. So by the time he bought his horse on a course with me, there'd been quite some build up. And I'd heard about this horse but not seen it. And a mutual friend of ours told me that before the clinic he came to that he was running this thing in his head about what if she doesn't like my horse, what if I'm all over the place, what if it goes really badly? And our mutual friend kept reassuring him that I'd meet him where he's at, not judge him whatever I saw and help him find some really good doable next steps for him and his horse. And this is really the contract that I and we as ride with youh Mind Coaches have with the people who come up in front of us. And when he arrived he clearly was a bit nervous. So his mind had been racing. He'd got into that flighty fighty sense of too many words, telling himself a story about how bad it was going to be raising his cortisol levels and probably his heart rate when it came to it he was probably fairly nervous. He was wearing an air jacket. It was his horses maybe third time away from home. And we started in gently and had a great time. And he had a couple of really big body breakthroughs that made a huge difference to his horse, which could do a very quick sudden push back is in his chin. We virtually got where that went away and I quite believe him that he had already made a huge difference to him. And the truth probably is for all of us that uncertainty magnifies whatever's inside us and what kind of route I our nervous system tends to take when we lose it and when we start talking to ourselves and telling ourselves stories, everything can go downhill from there. He left the clinic, I think telling himself a very different story. And I realised that there could be other people who've never had lessons where the coach really wants to interact with the rider, really wants to hear what they're perceiving before offering their own feedback as coach. And for a lot of people who are used to just being told what to do and to get on with it and be obedient as best they can, and aren't expected to have a voice, that might be a scary and potentially dysregulating scenario. And they may have a very different conversation going on in their head before a lesson. But I can pretty much guarantee you that by the end of a rider biomechanics lesson within this framework, whether you're working with us live or on the Internet, that conversation would have changed. Here's another rider, a very bubbly hollow backed up for it, Delightful woman, very caught in green light reflex, I would say, in that hollow back, who had to ride a borrowed horse on a clinic and rode a Cobb on the first day, who wasn't very fit. And actually she did a great job. He took a little bit of motivating. She did a good job, she worked well, it was a really good lesson. And the next day she rode a different horse. And that horse is another cob with a more difficult body type. It's not easy to get water through his hoses to get him reaching into the rain. And what's more, he has a really skilled rider. That means that the horse really knows what good bear down and good organisation is, and another rider gets on. And for the horse, that's a bit like being in the gap, not the gain, like, sorry, dear, you don't match up, you don't really bear down. I know you think you know what you're doing, but it's a bit iffy. So my rider was struggling on this horse and a colleague of mine who was assisting me in the clinic asked her a brilliant question, which is, so when it's not going right, what happens for you inside? Her answer was, I get disappointed. And that disappointed began to spiral her down a little bit, as in, oh, I can't do this, it's all too difficult, he's just not listening to me, it's not going well. Whilst during that lesson, she really began to understand what was happening to her and she got things a little bit better. She was still struggling and I think she was actually very grateful on the last day of the clinic to be back on the cob, who was a much more straightforward and also has to be said, less discerning character. This story is about me. When I first met competitive riding as a university student, and in our competitions we'd be riding a horse we didn't know unless it was held at our home base. And we'd have 10 minutes before riding a dressage test and two practice show jumps before a round of show jumping. I fairly regularly fell off in the show jumping and after I'd fallen off, I'd then get on and ride much better. So it didn't take too much disorganisation in front of a fence. Maybe I'd realised I didn't have enough impulsion, the striding wasn't quite right and I'd freeze. But after I'd hit the ground and realised that was the worst thing that ever happened. And in those days I bounced really well, I got back on and did a much better job. Years later when I was a much more experienced rider and competitor and I jumped a lot more fences, I always had to watch myself in front of show jumps because I could have a little bit of a kind of a wobble. But I knew better than to do that in front of a cross country fence. And when the issue really was do or die, I would keep myself in that state that we talked about last time of being in the social connection system really well, together with a little additional bit of fight or flight that just spices it up, but doesn't overwhelm the baseline of being regulated. It could totally overwhelm that state when I was in front of a show jump. And sometimes horses freeze too. And when horses come out of freeze. So remember, freeze is equal amounts of the activation, the mobilization of fight or flight and the shutdown of the dorsal vagal system. And sometimes horses freeze. When horses freeze as they come out of freeze, I think that's where they are least responsible for their actions. They are quite likely to explode in flightiness. And legs could go anywhere at that point. And if you're ever on a horse that freezes, do what you can to keep him moving. Just step one front leg to one side or the other front leg to the other side. But keep him moving if you can, because coming out of frieze is not good. Going into frieze isn't good either, mind you. But if it happens, get yourself out, get your horse out as soon as you can. There are a lot of horses in a state of dorsal vagal shutdown. They're not very motivated, they're pretty lazy. Their eyes can be a little bit glazed over and they're often bought for novice and or nervous riders. The bottom line is the horse's body is in that state of conserving its resources, veering towards hibernation. And as that veneer comes off, the horse is going to change now. It's not likely to be such a quick, explosive thing as the freeze. And when it works well, the horse gets a little bit more responsive, a little more back in his body, a little more organized, and the rider gets a little more together and the horse gets a little more together, and the rider gets braver and more organised. And I have really known this happen and known it go very well. But I have also known the horse change its living situation. And I think going into a new yard and the shock of that for a horse can be substantial and become not the horse that someone thought they'd bought and a much more dysregulated horse than someone thought they'd bought. But very often the buyer has not recognized the dysregulation that's already there and isn't just a horse with a phlegmatic character. At the other end of the scale, I teach two young women who both live fairly close to each other in a part of America. They come to the same clinic, they've often written in the same lesson. I've known one of them since she was a small child, the other one for quite a few years, and they are both operating at the cheap end of the market with very few resources. And of course, they end up buying thoroughbreds off the track. One of them goes eventing, the other one doesn't. But they have appeared in front of me in the arena in a variety of thoroughbreds that were all over the place. Both of them are well organised, biomechanically confident, brave, sensible riders who can do a really good job up there. But there have often been times when I suspect the audience watching have been sitting there going, I'm glad it's not me up there. Now, budget constraints are a really big part of this. But I did one day sit down with them in a workshop and ask them, somewhat tongue in cheek, okay, so I know about your taste in horses. I wonder if you need to tell me a little bit about your taste in men. And they cracked up, and everybody cracked up, and we didn't really talk about their taste in men, but I did make the point that we often choose the same equine and human partners over and over again. These two women have done some very good jobs with these horses and made them a lot more rideable. But of course, not everyone would have those skills. And the truth of the matter is that the autonomic nervous system wants to take roads that will be predictable. It goes for replicating the past, it goes for familiar, because it has strategies for that it knows what to do. And it also has the thought that maybe we can make it different this time, have it turn out differently and change the past. And, of course, what that tends to mean is we draw in the same horses over and over again. I've had conversations with people with a new horse and said, he's reminding me a little bit of your old horse. And the person goes, no, no, no. The old one was 16, two chestnut and a mare. This is a 15, three bay gelding. It's nowhere near the same. And I'm going, we're not talking about size and colour here. You may know from your own life, or you've got friends where they've introduced you to a new partner and you've gone, oh, my Lord, I think they've done it again. Now, the corollary of this is that what is good for us and for our nervous systems does not always feel good at first because it's not the known. Now, I talk about this a lot in relation to riding and weird. The new feeling, that is the new breakthrough, that is the way forward, that is the next step, is almost always really weird. And you're kind of facing a choice between embracing weird or being stuck on the plateau where you always do what you always did and you always get what you always got at the beginning. That correction is not quite a fit. And your job is to get it, lose it, get it, lose it, get it, lose it, till it becomes a fit. When it comes to horses, when it comes to relationships, our autonomic nervous system at times will actually stop us and put an obstacle in our way and have us back off or procrastinate. All of us get to, if we're not really stuck, grow into our lives. Think of the ultimate example of this. Probably Oprah Winfrey grew into a life from such an impoverished background, and she's still growing into her life. What it will be six months or a year from now, she probably doesn't have the capacity for right now. And that's true of me and it can be true of you. And this begins to sound very much like incremental improvements at the margins of our skill, which is the ethos of coaching, not just as I do it, but. But as more elite coaches look at skill development, those little tiny steps that you take beyond your comfort zone, not leaping into the deep end, but one step at a time, learning to tolerate difference as you go, and building on differences and building things that are more right and righter than right and righter than righter than Right. And that sure beats telling yourself the stories. That can be really disempowering. Here's the last thing I want to say, and this really shocked me when I discovered it. The original research on Fight or Flight was done with men only and just assumed to extrapolate to women. This has happened on so many occasions. Research done on men just assumed to apply to women. And it's beginning to change, but slowly. So eventually, research showed that women are equally or more likely to please and appease somebody than to get fighty or flighty. And that means to subjugate their own needs and put the other's needs first. Now, we went through a stage societally where women were supposed to do assertiveness training, and that was the answer. Interestingly, Stephen Porges, who's the founder of Polyvagal Theory, thinks that please and appease is a very conscious, very sophisticated use of the social engagement system which you resort to when you need to survive. And he thinks Stockholm Syndrome, that was talked about after a bank robbery in Stockholm in the 1970s and proposed the idea that the hostages fell in love with their captors. Stephen has interviewed a number of people since who've been abducted and says they're very resentful of that idea. It is absolutely not true. They. They used a very deliberate strategy to get their oppressor to trust them, to keep themselves out of physical harm and ultimately to survive so they would get back to their family and not leave their children, never knowing what happened to the parent who had disappeared. Many riders, many women do need better boundaries in their riding to be less willing to go. Come along, come along, come along, come along. And more willing to go. Hey, horse, you need to listen. And that can be done, too, in simple steps that work for people, work for horses. Have fun with your horses, enjoy riding, and I'll be back with you soon.