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Trauma & the Nervous System Part 2

General | Tue - December 30, 2025 6:03 pm | Article Hits:272 | A⁺ | a^-

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A Dance Between Protection, Healing, and Connection

When we hear the word trauma, we often imagine something dramatic — a major event, a single overwhelming moment that only “some” of us experience, and that can be true!
But in reality, small trauma is often part of daily life — for humans and for horses.
For instance: A sudden noise, a misunderstanding, a moment of unexpected pressure, a separation, a freeze of uncertainty.
This is how the nervous system learns, adapts, protects, and survives.
Horses experience this just as we do.

How the Nervous System Responds

Both humans and horses share the same basic biological survival system — the autonomic nervous system.
It has one job: keeping us alive.
It does this through responses like:

Fight – pushing against pressure
Flight – trying to run to safety
Freeze – shutting down when overwhelmed
Fawn – appeasing to avoid conflict

For horses, these responses are incredibly fast and incredibly sensitive.
Their nervous system is designed to notice the smallest shift — a breath, a heartbeat, a tension, a rustle — long before danger reaches them, so they are able to survive in the wild – most of the time.
Their system reacts instantly. Sometimes the reaction passes. Sometimes it gets stored.
And sometimes, the body holds it for years — even long after the “danger” is gone.
This is how patterns, fears, shutdown, or hyper-alertness can develop.
Not because a horse is “difficult”,
but because their nervous system is trying to protect them.

Trauma goes far beyond the Moment Itself

Much of trauma is not the event —
it is what the nervous system somehow couldn’t deal with.
A horse who wanted to flee but was restrained.
A horse who froze instead of fighting.
A horse who endured pressure without escape.
A horse who absorbed our emotions without understanding them.
When a survival response cannot finish its natural cycle, the nervous system holds the energy inside.
This is where tension, bracing, reactivity, and emotional instability live.
This is trauma — not as drama, but as biology.

Horses Hold Stories Beyond Their Own

Trauma is also carried across generations and collective consciousness.
Just like us, horses inherit:

patterns,
fears,
sensitivities,
attachment wounds,
and learned survival strategies.

The Power Of LOVE

People often don’t realise the most powerful antidote to trauma is unconditional LOVE.
Love brings empathy and understanding in a non-judgmental way and holds space for healing to move the unbalanced nervous system towards balance.
Horses show us this every day.
They mirror our incoherencies and untruth — not to frustrate us, but to invite us into awareness.
They guide us into the flow by asking us to release tension in order to dance and flow with them.
They ask us to drop our fears and learn to trust and they invite us to join them living in the present.

At Humans Horses Harmony, this is the heart of our work.
Helping humans understand the nervous system of the horse.
Helping horses release what humans have held for too long.
Helping both return to balance — gently, respectfully, naturally.

#HumansHorsesHarmony #EquineTraumaHealing #HorseNervousSystem #EmotionalFitnessForHorses #TraumaInHorses #HealingWithHorses #EquineFacilitatedLearning

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- Unknown Author

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