I recently wrote a post about Distress where I talked about yelling at my husband. The exchange went something like this: I complained about feeling frustrated, he offered a solution, I yelled at him about how his solution was ridiculous and not what I needed. He looked at me with a deer in the headlights look and stayed silent. I retreated.
Later he and I talked about the experience from his side. He said he knew in that moment that continuing to engage with me wouldn’t have been effective. Then he went on to tell me how he had been learning about this with his relationship horse, Gus.
Let me back up a bit. Way back. I was an obsessed equestrian in my young adulthood. I had adopted and trained a BLM Wild Mustang among other horses. When I met a young man who said “I have a horse,” it sounded perfect. We were married two years later, and by that time he had developed allergies and lost interest in his horse. Fast forward a couple of decades, and we can see empty nest on the horizon. My husband says, “I think I want a horse.” Naturally, I was a little apprehensive about this idea. So I suggested we lease a horse. There was a horse at the barn where I board mine who had been standing around for a few years due to unfortunate circumstances. We arranged to lease him and my husband started working with Gus.
Ethically I can’t be my husband’s therapist, but I can give him some pointers. So, I explained some basics of Natural Lifemanship’s Relationship Logic® One of the principles of pressure is to stay with resistance. As I explained this, my husband looked at me like I’d sprouted antlers, “I don’t know what you mean.” And I realized how difficult it is to distill the experience of hours of training, and years of integration, into a simple explanation. In order to get it, he had to experience it. So, I left him alone to work with his new horse.
At first Gus would explode into bucking whenever my husband asked him to do something. And this terrified my husband. But he kept thinking about what I’d said about pressure. By the time I had my outburst, hubby had been working with Gus for several months. He had been practicing staying with resistance. He noticed that when Gus started doing something other than what hubby had asked him to do, like trotting instead of walking, if hubby just stayed, rather than getting insistent, Gus would eventually figure it out. And Gus soon figured out that resisting took much more energy than he wanted to spend anyway, and his resistance got shorter and less intense. Now when hubby asked him to walk, Gus might take a few trot steps, decide that trotting wasn’t his idea and slow to a walk.
Hubby said he had learned that when I exploded his best course was to not engage with me. To not increase the pressure of the situation by yelling back or defending his actions. To just stay. And the outcome was I retreated. My nervous system started to calm down and I realized that my resistance had caused a rupture in our relationship. Now that I was calmer, my job was a to repair the damage I had created. So I offered an apology. Because my husband had chosen to stay when I erupted, his nervous system was already calm when I came back and said “I’m sorry I yelled at you.” He was able to respond with “I understand.” And I was then able to explain to him how frustrated I had been.
Resistance frequently isn’t deliberate defiance, more often it is the confused response of an overwhelmed nervous system. Hubby’s ability to just stay and wait out my outburst, and my need to retreat, improved our relationship. He learned this working with a horse and this is one of the benefits of Equine Assisted Psychotherapy, the practice of knowing and skills that transfer to relationships with other people.