When you purchase a horse from a kill pen there often isn’t much history that goes along with them. When I adopted Holly, I was told that she was in foal (She wasn’t, just a big mare.) and that she had worked in a feedlot pushing cattle. I have my suspicions on her breed (Probably half draft, I’m hoping to get her DNA tested soon.); she’s probably a draft cross, but I don’t know anything else about her. What I did know is that when she arrived she was skittish, distrusting, and not quite sure that she was in a good place.
I rescued Holly in December 2018, and although she’s know nothing but love and a kind touch here, with plenty of food and treats and good grazing, it really wasn’t until this year that I noticed she had settled down to be one of the herd and enjoys attention from me. This got me to thinking about how there’s so much talk about healing trauma or getting over trauma, and how that process can take a lot longer than anyone ever imagined. It’s also going to take longer for some compared to others, and no one can dictate how long it takes to re-regulate your nervous system.
Building safe relationships takes time
We never know what happened in someone’s past, especially when it comes to their relationship to religion or spirituality. Recreating those safe relationships takes time. What we can do is meet the person (or the horse) where they are at, offering kindness, compassion, and working to ensure each interaction is one that builds upon the next.
What does this mean for your spiritual story?
If you’ve experience trauma in your past relationships with religion, or religious teachings have caused trauma in your life, it means that it will take time to understand this, process it, and move forward with this knowledge so that you can create safety for yourself when it comes to your spirituality. If you have a mental health professional or spiritual counselor to help you through this, then that may make the process of creating safety and deconstructing and recreating your spiritual connections easier. But there will still be work to be done, and it will take the time it takes.
Those who push you to get over things or who dismiss what happened aren’t doing you any favors. They’re perpetuating the harm, and in many cases making it worse.
When it comes to horses, especially when you rescue them, you have to accept that the relationship that you want to have with them will have to be on their terms. Holly still isn’t the cuddle bug that my other horses are, and that’s okay. She’s an individual with individual wants and needs. She enjoys attention and treats, certainly asks for interaction when she wants it, and those are huge steps from where she was when she’d arrived. I couldn’t have dictated how long the process took, and I don’t think even if I knew what exactly had happened in her past, couldn’t have made that prediction.
Regulating our nervous systems after trauma, creating safety, is a unique process to each person and each situation. Understand that it takes time and the best gift you can give yourself and others is compassion, understanding, and the lack of pressure to create a certain kind of relationship. Instead stay in the moment, remain mindful of each interaction, and let the future unfold as it will. You may be surprised to see what blooms.
