Safety is the goal for mental and physical health, but it is complicated.
When we feel safe, we can relax. When we can relax others can feel safe around us. If a horse was in flight or fight mode and running back and forth in his pen, I would hesitate to go in the pen with him. I wouldn’t feel safe standing next to him. However, if a horse is standing relaxed, with one back foot cocked, I can feel quite safe standing close to him. He feels safe, I feel safe.
Often in therapeutic settings the idea is that “this is a place of safety.” But safety must be created and maintained. In the example with the horse, I’m talking about my physical safety—I fear the horse will run over me because he isn’t paying attention to me, he’s paying attention to whatever it is that is bothering him. Most likely it will be that his buddy, whom he feels safe with, is “missing.” In a therapeutic setting emotional safety is more often the key. In an in-office setting the office is set up to feel safe, it is quiet, has comfortable furniture, comfortable lighting. However, if the therapist is feeling anxious, then the setting might not feel as safe.
Equine assisted therapies start to mix both of these types of safety. The environment isn’t controlled by the therapist. Horses are big and unpredictable. But horses are also very used to providing emotional safety for each other in their herd. They are good at becoming alert and ready when needed and shifting back to resting and relaxing when things are okay. That’s their natural state, resting and relaxing. Because they need to conserve energy for the times they need to be alert and ready, then they will have the energy to run. Being around them in their relaxed state can be very relaxing for us.
Safety is the priority, but what is safety?
I was trying to think about how to explain creating safety to a group of people that I will training to assist in an equine facilitated environment. When you add giant animals like horses to the mix, how to provide safety becomes more of a concern. But what exactly is “safety” because there are various kinds. The two prominent ones I’m thinking about are physical safety and emotional safety.
As I was thinking about this, what came up is that physical safety and emotional safety are often a balancing act. I thought about this a lot when airline safety protocols were drastically changed after the terrorist attacks on 9/11/2001. The demands for physical safety on the airlines became more and more rigorous and less and less comfortable. I was traveling to see my grandparents one time and I had a darling little nail kit in my purse that my grandmother had given me. It was an embroidered pouch with a little nail file and a teeny tiny pair of nail scissors in it. As I went through security my nail kit was confiscated. I asked if there was any way I could get it back. No, they would just throw it out. If I wanted to keep it, I could get out of line, go back to the main terminal and mail it to myself. Which is what I did. But then I was very stressed about being on time for my flight. I could rest assured that no one would have scissors with which to threaten anyone on my flight—but I was stressed and distraught over the whole experience. The physical safety of the airline passengers was deemed more important than their emotional safety.
Boundaries vs Choices
When facilitating a therapy-based group involving horses, BOTH physical and emotional safety are important. As I started thinking about it, I thought about how balancing both of those looks like a horseshoe shape. This led me to create the infographic at the top of this post. At either end pure physical safety, or pure emotional safety or a combo of both (the top of the horseshoe) is feeling very anxious. An extreme example of this is people who don’t feel like they can leave the physical boundaries of their house. There are others of course, someone my feel okay with their physical boundaries but have so many emotional defenses that their choices of where to go and what to do are quite limited. I chose “choice” on my infographic, but comfort would have worked as well. When we feel comfortable, we also feel emotionally at ease. But I feel that comfort is tied to having choices. If I can choose to have certain people, things, ideas, sensations, etc… around me, that brings comfort.
The other side is having physical safety with good boundaries. I see this as being like wearing boots when working around the horses. The boots are a boundary between my toes and the horses’ toes. They let me get close enough to do my work but protect my feet from injury. (and if they are good, worn in boots they keep my feet comfortable as well!) Boundaries are important for both physical and emotional safety, but I put them on the physical side because boundaries limit choice. In the boots example I have a range of choices, I can wear paddock boots, roping boots, cowboy boots, jack boots, hiking boots (which is what I tend to wear) but I can’t wear slippers. Choosing to wear slippers would be sacrificing the physical safety of my toes for comfort.
At the bottom of my infographic is being unsafe. This is having no boundaries that you set, but also having no boundaries set for you with others. If someone can do anything to you, then they can harm you. And if you are never told “no” then you can cause harm—which also harms you in the long run. If people don’t say “no” to you and you do things that make them uncomfortable, then they will either distance themselves from you and make you uncomfortable, or they will defend themselves and attack.
Good Enough and Thriving
Often when we think about safety what we mean is survival. Which is great, survival is good, necessary even. But survival is the bare minimum. When I was doing my student teaching for becoming a therapeutic riding instructor, I was quite anxious about my first group lesson. Afterwards the supervising instructor told me “You did great, no one fell off.” Good that no one fell off or got hurt, but did they have a good time? Did they learn anything? A step up from survival is good enough. Good enough is the working ground towards improvement and growth. It is not falling off and learning a little bit. Thriving is reaching that optimal state where everything is in the right balance. In a healthy being we negotiate between good enough and thriving all the time.
The sweet spot in the middle is the balance between physical and emotional safety and having good enough or thriving boundaries and choices. And a lot of the time we will bounce around in this middle ground. When I get on the back of my horse I give a little bit of both physical safety, I could fall off, and choice, my horse could run off. If it is a windy day, and my horse is feeling up regulated, I might choose physical safety over the pleasure of a trail ride that day. Where I can choose to go becomes limited but I can’t fall off if I’m not on her back.
Levels of safety, Neurodivergence and Giftedness
Feeling safe is also a relative thing even when you get into that middle ground. It depends on what kind of brain we have and where we are in life. For example, when I was young (and had the immortality of youth) I felt physically safe in most circumstances (I had the privilege to feel this way as well). I wasn’t frightened of being on the back of a bucking horse, but I was terrified of making a phone call. Feeling safe emotionally was much more difficult for me than feeling safe physically. For neurodivergent and gifted people, the sweet spot in the horseshoe might look like a diagonal line, or maybe a wavy line! They might need stronger boundaries and more choices or more open boundaries and fewer choices.
What do you need to feel safe?