Bonus - Horsin' around with Amanda Slugoski, equine therapist

It's the human experience that we carry into the pen, and it's the human experience that the therapist is going to be noting upon looking pretty quickly and easily past the horse in the pen. Welcome to Therapy is my therapy, a podcast where licensed counselor Olivia and unlicensed client Tanya delve deep into real and raw conversations in order to demystify what really happens in that 50 minutes hour. Heads up. This podcast contains strong language and sensitive topics related to mental health.

Inadvertently, I've been having a lot of animal assisted therapy because I have cats, so they'll wander into my session, and I was thinking of this moment where I was talking in therapy, and I was holding my cat Tyco in my arms, and I was really struck by this feeling of love and safety from him because he was just completely passed out in my arms, sleeping. And I just remember mentioning that I struggle with a lot of low self esteem and thinking myself as monstrous. But I remember telling my therapist, Katherine, I guess I can't be that bad of a person if something as sweet as this animal feels safe around me. I apologize for making you repeat yourself, but I would love to get into just how equine therapy or animal therapy has been healing for people who are, say, marginalized or have gone through things where they or society paints them as monsters.

Yeah, I can tell you what comes up for me when you say that shor kind of two things. One is the dual awareness that I referenced earlier, and I'll go into that in a moment. But also, what you're describing or what comes to mind is you're having a safe state. Experience would be some words to describe that. So you're having maybe for the first time in your life, certainly with some of the people I work with who have CPTSD and dissociation and have experienced homelessness or are experiencing homelessness and are from minority populations, visual minorities, sexual minorities, all of it. Right. Discrimination, violence for them. And I work primarily with adults. Being with a horse who is quiet and calm and just being a horse. Right. They're just, they're hanging out, they're grazing in the pasture. Or as you mentioned earlier, we certainly have some horses who are quite cuddly, so they'll come up. We had one boy, Winston, who was notorious. I could count on this if I needed to. He would come up and he would rest his head over a shoulder, anyone's shoulder, really. And it's like his head was just always too heavy. And he would just do this hug, and he would stay there until your shoulder got tired. Or until the session was over. And so for some of these clients, this is the first time in their world, in their life that they've had a safe state experience. Because humans, because of their CPTSD and their childhoods and what happened, humans aren't safe. Humans can never be safe. Even the safe appearing humans like me, their therapist, who's never done anything wrong to them, I still have the potential for danger because I am a human. And humans have hurt them so much in the past. Past. But horses haven't. Because most people don't have traumatic experiences with horses who are coming now. Some do. And that's a different. That's a different story. But most people, they're coming here, they're trying equine therapy, and they have this horse, or you have this cat in your arms, and for the first time in your life, you're having a safe state experience. Your nervous system is feeling safe. It's getting safety reflected back from this trusting being, which reinforces that nothing bad is happening. And you know that you can feel it. Nothing bad is about to happen. You didn't have that moment that the cat might then jump up and rip your eyeballs up. That is not what was happening because of how it felt. It's an entirely different experience than your nervous system has ever had before, especially if it was your first time. And so we have these safe state experiences and the early career psychologist will be quick to point out, yeah, but it was just for like 20 minutes in session and then they went back out in their life. When all these terrible things are happening and it wasn't good enough and it didn't count, and I need to fix their world so their world is safe. And we say, when we're training them, well, that would be nice. It's not going to happen. We're not going to change their world. And certainly in the case of folks who are safe in the present but have all this trauma in the past, you can't change their past, that all exists. But what you can do is to help them to have this experience and to know that it makes a profound difference in the nervous system. So you had that cat in your arms a year ago or six months ago, and you remember it. And if I were to say, and I won't do therapy with you, but if I were to say, hey, Tanya, just for a second, close your eyes and leave them open, but I want you to remember as clearly as you can what it was like to have that little munchkin in your arms feeling so safe. You could recall that. And when you recalled it, you could feel it. And if you went deep enough into it, you would have some emotion and somatic physical sensations that would come up. This tells us that you encoded that in a very specific way. You will possibly never forget that your entire life. It's similar, interestingly, to traumatic encoding, where you also never forget those things for the rest of your life because it's so special, it's so memorable, your nervous system needs to remember it. So even if your kitty never does that again, you have that as a resource in your brain so you can go there. So that exists now because of this animal. This is the safe state experience. Enter in dual awareness, and I'll try to be not so wordy. Dual awareness is where we can hold two incongruent states in our mind at the same time, where we can be aware dual attention, we can be aware of two different things. And in trauma therapy, we do this tricky thing where we help the client to have some safe state experience. And so if they're really trusting of me, that'll just be and you're here with me, and nothing bad is happening, and it's a Wednesday and present day orientation. But if you're not trusting of humans because you've earned the right knowledge to trust, but you have a kitty, or you have a recall of that moment with your kitty, or with my client, they have a horse in front of them with their head on their shoulder, they have this safe state experience, and we can talk about access or process the unpleasant or unsafe stuff, but because you have the dual awareness, you're here with the kitty. And tell me more about what happened when you were ten, but remember the feeling of the kitty in your arms while you're telling me we do this tricky brain dance thing to be in both at the same time. What that does, amongst other things, is it keeps your hippocampus, which is a part of your brain that is involved in memory encoding. It keeps your hippocampus chill. It doesn't let your hippocampus get flooded. If you have the safe state, we can process the thing. The hippocampus stays chill. As a result, memories can be re encoded and so your world can change. Because when you think about the thing we processed while kitty was in your arm or in your mind, it won't be firing up the same old networks, the same old traumatic networks, because we were able to reprocess it. That was probably much more technical than you wanted.

No, that was epic. I'm going to reflect back to you. You are enough. That was amazing. And we are very emotional creatures, and I. And it's fascinating how that is the other side of the same coin as trauma, because it's very. The body keeps a score, because a memory I had when I was eight still will make me feel the emotions. And until I process them, like you had so eloquently described, it will play in that same pathway. And those feelings that come with it. And that is a huge takeaway, is that the memories and these. These feelings and value assignments that we give to these things, they can be re encoded or we can view them from different vantage points. And that is a huge thing, especially when it comes to trauma. It feels perpetual and pervasive. And in those dark moments, it can feel like it's always going to be this way. I'm always going to feel this. I am XYZ. And it can never change. So Olivia had mentioned that therapists need therapy as well. And do the horses need therapy, in a sense, do they need aftercare? Because they reflect your emotions. So I imagine afterwards, the average therapist can feel spent and they get a break. So what do you do with the horses to help them?

Oh, what a great question. Thank you so much for bringing that up. That's amazing. Yes. And different practitioners will have different answers to that. Of course, I'll only speak for myself because there is no industry standard, but, yes, absolutely. So all of the animals, the anthropomorphic word that I use is need debriefing. They all get debriefing after the client is gone. And that just has to do with. Well, first of all, there is science. There is some research out there. Even back when I was in my graduate school, one of my fellow students was doing her thesis on the reaction of the horse and the physiology of the horse. What's happening to them during an equine therapy session. There are studies out there that are demonstrating empirically that the horse is absolutely impacted by just emoting around them, as I think any living being really is. So there is science behind it that shows the horse is impacted. And then for me, there's also a. I don't know if spirituality is quite exactly the right word, but there's a sense. There's kind of an unspeakable sense that I have not researched that energy is transferred, and some horses take on more than others. And just like people and other horses don't take on as much, and different sessions with different clients will impact the herd differently. And so, again, I can't. Maybe I could hire a researcher to measure that. But I haven't measured it. It's just a sense, right? Intuition, spirituality, who knows? And so because of that, I absolutely debrief all of the animals who are there. I trust that theyre better than us at not carrying trauma. Theyre much more present than we are. And so I maybe do this ritual as much for me as I do for them, but I will go out after I say goodbye to the client and they drive away and im still there and ill check in with them. And I have a deep relationship with them that is kind of deeper and more pervasive than the client relationship with them. I know. I know them in a different way outside of therapy. And so I check in and I'll just kind of feel, what do they need? Sometimes they just need for my brain, right? Super anthropomorphic. Sometimes they need to be told they're really good, and they did really good today. And like, how are you and what's going on? I'm like, let's go for a little walk. And so I'll get the energy up with them, or I'll give them lots of pats and lots of love. And sometimes if they're in a really quiet space, I'll do what I imagine a massage therapist does to me when I say, just like, clear, just do some clearing of whatever I'm holding. Right. Whatever all this means, I don't know. And so I'll just do really big, broad strokes to clear that, whatever that is. Sometimes I'll give treats. Sometimes. I was at a when I worked for someone else in their animal assisted therapy practice, our ritual was to always go and give a bowl of grain. We'd go and give them a reward, just some activity to indicate it's over and you can be fully restored to your natural state. So it doesn't look any one particular way. But I am very mindful about closing that space and expressing a lot of gratitude in the way that is right for me and making sure that the horses are back to normal. Yeah. So it's very non quantifiable, and I.

Love that because it is a more ethical approach because like you had said, it's about the relationship and power dynamic. You're not using these horses as a tool. And it's just lovely to hear that there is a sense of aftercare. And actually, I had a question for you because I saw that you had done a lot of dressage and competitions. Was there a shift or what was the shift in, if applicable, how you not regarded the horses but how that partnership dynamic changed when you went from competing to a therapy context?

Mhm. Yeah, good question. In a lot of ways, definitely it shifted more from that goal oriented that produced. Right. I'm going to go out, I'm going to do a thing, we're going to perform together. Having a sense of time pressure, having pressure, having a sense of time pressure, having a production pressure, having external world pressure for that versus now in a therapy space. And as I don't compete, I'm not competitive at all anymore. I haven't been for years and years now. I don't have that agenda. Right? So now I go out just to be, whether I'm with clients or just with myself, with horses, I go out and see what shows up. So to have that pressure change is very different, and to have that agenda change is very different. But I think a lot of it is less about competition versus therapy, and it's about my own growth and my own development. I was a teenager when I was competing, and I was on the canadian university equestrian team, competing overseas. And I started my undergrad at 18. I had just turned 18 like a day before I started. So I was 18 and 19 when I was competing overseas, which is very young. I was a very different person than I am today in terms of my own life and what was going on. I was just starting to come into some early thoughts about recovery from an eating disorder that I had as a teenager. So a lot of rigidity, a lot of harshness, self hatred to fill enough, you know, several Byberry's worth of self hatred, that harshness, that not good enough. Trying to be perfect, will never be perfect. All of those pieces in my own life. And so I brought that into competition. Not good enough, not good enough, not good enough. And that's what it felt like with the horses. And so now, as a much more, well, human today, I am so different. And so I'm capable of showing up in this space today without that agenda and without that sense of danger and pressure that I had. And that has very little to do with the change from competition to therapy. It's just coincidental that that also was happening as I was going through my own process. And so, and so if I were to compete, and I have thought about going back and returning to competition, quite honestly, actually, at this point in my life. And if I were to do that, it would feel, and look, I think an awful lot the way that therapy looks for me now. So I don't think it has to be. I don't think it has to be really different. It's about how I am as a being and how I show up to whatever it is I'm showing up to and not about the activity that the horse is doing.

And that concludes this episode of therapy is my therapy. If you enjoyed today's episode, please consider subscribing to our podcast so you never miss an update. Once again, thanks for tuning in. The content discussed on this podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only and does not act as a replacement for therapy. Although we may share tools that have worked for us and talk about symptoms that we've experienced, it is not meant to be used for diagnostic purposes and does not constitute medical advice.