Charissa Schmidt

My Teacher and Mentor and I replay some of our conversations over the years and tie them to current issues, and struggles of the horse world, the therapy world, our political landscape, and Equine Thereapy and  Equine Learning.  We also discuss bullying, our shadow sides, ethics, neuroscinece, and relationships, what is and is not abusive to animals and the conversation continues in the second part.

Charissa wears many hats, including Mental Health Therapist and Clinical Supervisor and Horse Trainer, 

Transcript

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Hi, this is Ishi Abel with the Horse Human Connection Matrix. Tonight I have a really special guest that I've been waiting a very long time to interview, Carissa Schmidt. And I'm going to let her tell you about her qualifications and we'll both chime in a little bit about our history together before we cover a Rather broad selection of topics about equine assisted practices and therapy and horse training and just all the real important things. Welcome Carissa. Thank you. It's. Yeah, it's good to be together on this platform, finally. We have been brainstorming and imagining this for a long time. We have. We have very much so. In fact, the whole purpose of the podcast, The Quiet Revolution is something that we began talking about like eight years ago. Have we really been working together that long? It's 2016. Yeah. Oh my gosh. So, Okay. For the sake of the listeners, we are in 2025. It is like five years post COVID. We worked together quite a bit before that and then the world turned upside down and here we are finally reconnecting, so. Okay. So I guess, yeah, I can share a little bit about me. So we were introduced 2016 ish by a mutual friend. And this is a friend who knew I had horses and would come and help me with my horses just around my place. And then was like, oh, horse people, horse people, let's connect. And that's how we met. And. I think our relationship evolved from just like acquaintances into a partnership where really worked together and wrestled through a bunch of stuff. And I feel like you call me a mentor. I feel like I've done a lot of consulting. And I guess we're here to talk about the place that I've been consulting from. So my day job, I work as a mental health therapist. I have a master's degree in clinical mental health counseling, and I'm a licensed professional counselor in the state of Oregon. And then I'm also a board approved clinical supervisor, which kind of adds another perspective to the clinical process that Not everyone in the horse world, I think, is aware of so my job in the mental health field is to oversee the clinical work of people coming up and make sure that we're adhering the best practices and then practicing ethically. And like, we have an ethic to do things like do no harm. So I'm a gatekeeper and I. But also my job is to nurture and grow and develop clinicians, in the field, so it's a different, it's a different perspective than working directly with clients. It's a different role. And I do still work directly with clients. Most of my clinical career has been working with 2 different populations. 1 is working with children and I'm a trained play therapist and play therapy supervisor. And the other is working with adults with complex trauma. And so I hold a developmental perspective on things. And I originally got into the counseling field because I was just, Completely fell in love with dream work, and I wanted to find a pathway to incorporate that kind of things into my daily life and my daily work and and help people explore their inner world, explore the world of the unconscious, explore the world of symbols and myths and storytelling. My undergraduate degrees and English literature and political science. So. I kind of have a broad education and then my horse career goes way back. I started riding when I was six. So, and then I started teaching when I was 15 and started training when I was like around the same age and then went to a small equestrian college where. I got introduced to a lot of equine science, veterinary science, but a lot of also an academic approach to different writing theories. And we got schooled in western writing, breaking and training which I now call cult Starting, like I'm on that side of the fence. And then also dressage and cross country. And so we just got like. exposed all of it. We got, again, basic pre vet stuff, business classes. That's where I first started trimming hooves. So we just did a little bit of everything there. And I've had the opportunity to work for some pretty large programs where we were managing herds of like 30 to 70 horses. And getting hundreds of people connected with horses in a short amount of time. So I've worked as a trail guide, worked as a riding instructor, worked as a head wrangler. Some of these large programs were like summer camps and things like that were, we're getting people that have never connected with horses before connected with horses yeah, credibly broad range of experiences and knowledge. It's so broad. It's so broad. So I've had to narrow that in my development, and the thing that I like studying is classical dressage. And then I also, so some people might know what this is, I was exposed early on to the basic handle, which goes back to Monty Foreman, and Which comes out of the military, the American military tradition and Fort Riley. So if we hear about the American seat or the forward seat that I got schooled really deeply in that during my middle school, high school years. And if you don't know, Monty Foreman was a American cavalry officer. He was one of the last. And he, after he was out of the military, he did a lot of work in the racing industry and polo. And then also this was like back in the 50s and 60s when we were first developing like the American Stock Horse and the American Stock Horse Association. And but his big, I think like innovation to the horses was he was the first person because he had access to cameras in the military back in the, 40s, like before civilians had cameras. He was able to be one of the first to use slow motion analysis of a writer's movement and balance and biomechanics to really, really start a conversation, which is. The big conversation or a big conversation in the horse industry now, which is like how a writer's energy movement and own balance impacts the balance and movement of the horse and vice versa. So, yeah, as you're mentioning. Monty Thurman, I am really appreciating the saddle that you found and helped me pick out. It is saddles and is a balanced ride saddle. And I've been riding bareback for the last five years because the horse that I've been riding gained so much weight that the saddle didn't fit her, which makes sense. And, but it fits, but now my new horse has has filled out enough that the saddle fits him. And so to be back in that saddle and feel my body and that kind of alignment has been wonderful. Yeah. So if people aren't familiar, Monty Foreman developed his own stock saddle, so a Western saddle that fits more like an all purpose English saddle. So it puts you closer to the horse and it. What's your body in the same position your body might naturally be in if you were sitting right back on the horse? And so it, like, it is a different kind of experience than, like, being in a big wade saddle or a ranch saddle where there's a lot of bulk, so. Yeah. Yeah. Quite different. Yeah. Wow. So yeah, we worked together. You came and began teaching me. And I remember, I remember the very first thing that you did with Sipsi is, is you stood in the round pen with her, not in the middle. You just stood in there with her and I, I had no idea what was going on and I watched you connect with her and read her and her read you and you later you explained all this to me. And then the other thing that you did was you put a lead rope on her and you just stood there with the lead rope in your hand for like 10 minutes. That's right, because you, oh my gosh, I remember the energy of that day too, like, because. You've told this story on the podcast I think in previous episodes about her. She had a thing with trauma There was a block in her mind and a block in your mind because of her block about ropes And so we just sat there and kind of like neutralized the charge about ropes and it it took time Yeah, I remember asking like what are you doing? And you said I'm I'm telling her that the rope is And you were doing this energetically that like you were trying to communicate through the rope that the rope wouldn't hurt her and that it was a learning tool. And yeah, I just, I remember that. And the other thing I remember is getting headaches whenever you came, I had this like pressure in my head. Yeah. Yeah. We had some breakthroughs around that too. And like, do you remember? What you ended up connecting to the headache trying to become ready to learn and knowing that I needed to open myself to, to the knowledge and that, is that what you remember? You remember something else? I remember something similar and I, but I remember it took us a while, like it took a few months to get to that place and like, every time we get together, the headache would come up and we'd sit with it and we'd sit with it and like, it would like. We'd work with it a little bit each time. Yeah. It was hard to get open enough to be able to absorb everything that I wanted to learn from you. I think it took both of us time in our relationship to learn. It took me time to learn what it is that you wanted or needed to learn from me, too. And so that question became a part of our dance. And I think, just simply, yeah, yeah. I just, I know we have so much to talk about, but this seems, I think we have a lot of talking points. I think we're going to have more than one conversation. Yeah. So let's take our time with it. Awesome. That's awesome. So there was, there was a particular lesson with my horse pie, the the Mustang Appaloosa gelding, who had a mind of his own. Like Like Alpalooza's do and, and you were teaching me to move him forward. And, and this horse was like such a war pony because every time we would strategize something, he would come up with a counter strategy. So I was moving forward a few steps at a time and practicing like keeping the doors keeping my reins and my legs in a way that I was. Directing him with those and trying to move forward, but then I would look at where we were, and somehow, even though we were moving forward, we would be way back from where we were the trajectory that we were trying to make up. That was a big metaphorical learning day. Like, we were so successful in his learning that day, even though he ended up shimmying and squirreling and fidgeting himself backwards in space. Like, the mental forward progress was so much more important than the physical progress. Yeah, yeah. And I I also remember becoming really dysregulated on him and he and I got in this loop and you were witnessing it and yeah, and, and you were aware of it before we started working together. You had that pattern really well defined because it had been happening before we started partnering. Yeah. Yeah. And somehow the lesson became about. I mean, I knew how to calm myself down, but I didn't realize how it was interactive with the horse in a loop. And somehow you got us through that. I remember that lesson. It felt more like therapy than a riding lesson. Well, I think, okay, this is, I guess we'll open this to like, we've had this conversation a lot where I've had to get clear on defining what the scope of our relationship is. Because I'm not your therapist and I was, I'm not your clinical supervisor, but I have this knowledge and this training and these skills. And and I think one of our mantras or one of my mantras that I've developed out of our time together has been like, well, like I can't prevent therapeutic things from happening, you know, so. If therapeutic things happen while I'm in a teaching role, I can witness that, but I don't have to be the therapist in order for the therapy to happen. Right. For the healing to happen and the learning to happen, the growth to happen. That is such a great point because it really illustrates what happens when we can't like this, the power of witnessing. Right. Right. And intention. Yeah. So not too long ago you sent me a a video with Dr. Oh my gosh, I'm blanking on his name. The one that likened a horse's Movement to it. Oh, okay. Yeah. Dewey Friedman from the Gestalt Iturquain Institute. So I got excited when I found his work and I sent that to you partially because I think it's like as a reference, if other listeners are curious, like it's, he does a really good job of kind of explaining like what the work is energetically that's happening in a very clinical way. And I'm familiar with some of his students, like Lisa Dion in the play therapy world is known for creating a modality called synergistic play therapy, which works with like interpersonal neurobiology, but also working with the somatic experience of the provider and the inner world of the provider as being equally important in the room. And especially like when we work, maybe this is a good segue to start talking about some neurobiology stuff. As we're going to, as we're going to go into that, because I felt like comparing and contrasting the takeaway from Dr. Dewey and the takeaway from Rupert. Isaacson are like they both. We all know that there's this magic. We're all having the same experience, but they're explaining it through science quite differently. You know, one is neuroscience with oxytocin in the hips and the other is the thing that you're about to talk about. So I think they're right. Right. Okay. Well, Okay, let me back up then and we'll get into more of like, I'm going to put on my clinical supervisor hat a little bit first and and maybe help lay people understand why there might be all of these competing camps and schools. And so. In my job, as I'm training clinicians I have to adhere to my professional ethics, and I have to adhere to the ethics that are given to me by the licensing bodies that allow me to do the work that I do. So for me, here in the state of Oregon Oregon adopts. In the counseling world we adopt the ACAF, Access to the American Counseling Association. And then there's also an ethical code that is very, very similar for psychologists. There's an ethical code for a marriage and family therapist. There's an ethical code for. Clinical social workers, and they're all like overlap in lots of ways, but they all have their little tweaks and differences that, like, make the different professions what they are. But, like, some of the universal principles, though, are going to be things like do no harm. And, or, you know, to respect your client's identity without bias or discrimination, or things like that like the social work world has a big focus on social justice, the marriage and family world has a big focus on groups and systems, and they use a lot of systems theory, so it's more about, like, how The way that we move and interact in our social environment impacts our identity and who we are the counseling world has very much like a, a growth mindset and is more individually focused and is really, really focused on how the nature and dynamic of relationship as the agent of change. And then psychologists are more like the clinical researchers. They're going to be more like apt to do assessments and diagnosis and things like that. That's a really simple breakdown. But one of the things, like I have an ethic to either practice in an evidence based way or in a theory based way. It can be both, but they're different. And what I offer my supervisees is a conversation and a clinical supervision practice that engages in reflective practice and parallel process. And I can define that too. And we focus on theory, we focus on theory. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah. So I just want to break this down for listeners a little bit that are not as familiar with the The jargon of. Yes, we can. We can go back and define all these things. So these different categories that all have to do with ethics for different job titles that all kind of fall under that broader category. And these are good. It's not just job titles. This is different degrees. Different areas of clinical focus, clinical focus. Okay. That's yeah. So between and you and I have talked about this a little bit. And in the last interview, Kai and I broached the subject, just a little bit of theory based and evidence based and the conversation that you and I have had before that applies to this and to the neuroscience is, is about I had to do with insurance also. So that, well, yes. Okay. So this is my, this is like the, why are you not doing equine therapy, Carissa? My answer to that question. Right. And I've had to defend that answer so many times over my career. So yes, I am a horse person. I'm deeply, deeply a horse person and I am a therapist, but I don't do equine therapy. And, and my answer is always, I can do more. I can do more without. I can do more as just a horsemanship instructor than I can as a therapist, and my scope is bigger, and my, the range of what a possibility gets bigger when I take off my therapeutic lens, and this is why I believe theory is equally or more important to understand as we move forward as a field. And I'm so adamant about teaching my supervisees their theory. They have to know their theory in order to work with me. And, and here's what happens. So, evidence based practice allows us to research. Research is necessary. In order to convince payers that what we're doing is valuable and worth the money that they give us. And so when we start talking about equine therapy as a practice, all of a sudden, I am faced with an ethical dilemma of how do I get my clients access to the experience and the care that I know horses can provide. And also feed myself and in order to get paid, most clients, the majority of people seeking services, unless they are incredibly privileged economically, and I'm going to put privilege out there. So the majority of the people are not economically privileged enough to access therapy without insurance. That's just the fact. And, and actually it's interesting. So I've worked in community mental health, which serves the Medicare, Medicaid population. And I also work in a private group practice where we only take private insurance. And it's actually the private insurance community and my community that's more underserved. We have more providers for the Medicare, Medicaid than we do for private insurance. But to ask someone to pay my fee out of pocket for equine therapy is just simply a barrier for most people. And it breaks my heart that most people cannot access horses because money is a barrier. When insurance gets involved, they want to know that what I'm doing is evidence based. And what that means is that they want me. They want me to create manuals and protocols. They want me to create systems and mechanize the work that I do so that it can be consistent and measurable and things like that. And there's, there is a value to that because, yes, we need to be able to say that what we're doing is effective. We need to have some measures and goals and ways to measure change. I'm about to stir the pot. I am stirring a professional pot that and I'm about to take a stand on some things. And so not all clinicians are going to agree with me on this. And I respect the clinicians that are doing the best they can to work in the system. I'm also doing the best I can to work in the system. The history of the insurance system and medical models of mental health therapy is just dark, and it has, we are, I, I came into a field about 15 years ago when I first started doing this work where Children were being treated with behavioral interventions that caused relational harm. And if we think about horses as a metaphor, like, and I'm going to keep bringing it back to the kids, because the kids are innocent, the horses are innocent. This, this is the same trauma that many of us in the horse industry hold, where we were told to do it. The way we were told to do it, we were told to kick harder, pull harder, get that crap, make them do it, make them mine, show them who's boss. And we were groomed to become abusers by the generation before us. And that was also happening in the mental health industry in relationship to clients who were the most vulnerable and people who are the most vulnerable. And that's children. And that's the chronically mental ill. And there's a history to that that goes back to before you and I were born. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's goosebumps there. And so, yes, thank you for taking that stand. And so, yeah, so for me, like the simple answer is to say like, I. I have come to a place where, like, it is more important for me to protect the integrity of the relationship that I have with people and animals than it is to get paid, and I can't in good conscious engage the insurance system when it comes to animal assisted work, because the risk of causing harm goes up. Whether it's. And, and I'd rather stand in integrity. So I have my private practice. I have my therapy practice, my office practice, where I am able to do good things in the system. And then I have my separate horsemanship practice where I can just be a space holder and there's a more open, authentic being. That explanation makes so much sense. I mean, I know we've talked about this a little bit before but the full, full breadth of that helps me really understand why you do what you do. Now, I, you know me, I'm always thinking like, well, there must be some, Easy answer. Can't we just and like last summer when I was almost involved with a couple of nonprofits and doing a lot of visioning and some writing and talking to lots and lots of people and trying to pull ideas together. One of the things that I came up with, with a lot of help was Why can't we do some studies? I have a nonprofit come together, do some studies that could become the evidence based evidence that we need, like around, for example, horses and people and anxiety. Could we take people with anxiety studies? Through a nonprofit, get a grad student who wants to do their thesis on it to run it and pull together this documented, scientific, measurable information on the benefits of people with anxiety. Yeah. I am horses and move that where, where we can actually make a change. I mean, I know a lot of people want to work with horses and want to work with people and want to work with nonprofits. Why can't we tailor a lot of that into the system where I'm going to call out, I'm going to call out the field again. So I work for a pretty, I work for a pretty progressive nonprofit right now, and there are some conversations on the edges of the field right now about why this is a challenge, the history of the field, how, like, we really do need a cultural change within systems of care that are Allow us to return back to our own humanity. And I don't know how familiar you you are with the conversations coming out of the medical field right now. What happened. In the medical field and mental health is a branch of that. We work in the medical model. Policy became more important than care. Right? And and so here's okay, really quick. So, to answer your question, people have done that research that research exists and. And when I say we need a culture change, I'm saying we need a culture change because the spirit of capitalism has taken that research and put it behind a certification paywall. And so you have to attach yourself to a certification process in order to say, I now hold the information that allows me to open the store. Can you break that down in some language that is a little bit easier for people to understand? Yes. This goes back to professional ethics in order to introduce a new kind of practice as a healthcare provider. into the work I do. I have to demonstrate that I've received adequate training and supervision in that practice before I can just go for it. So I study a lot of things and I'm trained in a lot of things, but I can't actually do all of the things I know when I meet with people because I have to stay within the scope of what I've been trained and supervised in. So your, your hands are just tired. Your hands are just tied. Yes, yes, yes. So, and so, and so, in order to access that training and supervision that requires often thousands of dollars on my behalf out of my personal money, just to open the door to say. Here I can now offer this so in this way, people that have worked the way I have you know what I've dabbled in and with some of the people that I trained with back in 2016 to be able to hold the space and the intention. And be the witness of what happens with people and horses without a degree, without a license, without any of those things that restrict you that the real work is being done. That's I agree. I agree. Yeah. And yeah. Yeah. It's just, and I, and I love the science that validates the magic. I love, I love that science can say, yes, there actually is something happening here. There is a phenomenon that's real. And let's, let's go talk about that with Dr. Dewey and Rupert Isaacson and the neuroscience that those two have, even though they're not exactly on the same page, they're both kind of saying the same thing supported by a different scientific theory, correct? Right. If we think about psychology, let me go back to the beginning. So, psychology is young, psychology is only like, it's less than 200 years old. I mean, it's, it's young, it's a young, young science. And psychology really does come out of philosophy, right? And it comes out of psychology. Theoretically, I am very Jungian in my orientation and that's where I pursue my continuing education, but out of necessity, I got exposed to behavioral schools. Because that is where it's easy to measure behavior. It's really difficult to measure the symbolic archetypal influence of the unconscious rising up out of the primal materia of life. You can't, it's harder to quantify that. Yeah. And because it's harder to research, it doesn't get looked at. And so what happened is like philosophy, birth psychology, and psychology turned also into like the intersection of psychology and biology became the field of neuroscience where we studied the physical anatomy of what's happening in the brain and the nervous. When I was coming up, I was exposed to Dan Siegel and people who are familiar with Warwick Schiller and his work around interpersonal neurobiology, polyvagal theory, and attachment theory, he is talking about Dan Siegel's work and he's talking about Steve Porges work. So Steve Porges, Dan Siegel are both in this field of interpersonal neurobiology. So interpersonal neurobiology. Is the study of the neuroscience of relationship and the beautiful thing that this does is, and this is the groundbreaking science that this field contributes, in my opinion, is that it separates academically. The brain and the mind because they are not the same and we often confuse them and when I was coming up before this definition was provided, there was a big debate about where is consciousness. Is it in the brain or is it somewhere else? And this contribution says no, it's not. It's it uses the brain. It uses the nervous system, but it's something beyond that. And so The mind in this field is defined as the process and flow of information between People will go into consciousness studies and say, yes, like consciousness is maybe the container for the mind, but the mind is defined as a relational process, not a thing. So when I'm standing out in the field with my horse and I start to feel better and all the worries of the world start to melt away, is it my mind? Is it the horse's mind? Is it, I don't know what it is, but there's a flow of information happening that's creating change and it's that flow of information that is mind. That being true, I have experienced that. I'm sure a lot of listeners have experienced what you're talking about and most horse people that are regulated and paying attention have experienced that. That in and of itself isn't I Measurable. And it isn't. Yes. What you can do with horse therapy. However, whatever it is you're doing in horse therapy that is measurable. Also, that is present. No, right. Right. So we have to play both games. Like in order to stay within the medical model, we have to play the both games. We have to find again. This is again where behavior is measurable and subjective reporting of behavior has become a valid way to measure change. What that means is I can do things like say on a scale of 0 to 10. Like, where 0 is completely calm and 10 is the worst it could be, what number would you rate your anxiety right now? And that individual's answer is valid. And then, okay, okay, we're going to go do some things. And at the end of our session where I'm going to ask you the question again, now, on a scale of 0 to 10, what number are you now? Oh, wow, I noticed. You know, like I've had an experiential process that has now created a different way of relating to myself and the environment and now I'm different and I can put words to that sometimes or I can put numbers to it. I can I can call that evidence based. We can't measure that. We can't have insurance cover that. We can't make the magic that happens with horses and people in this field available Tell me more about how you feel like you can't use what I just offered. Because in a clinical setting, that would be, like, a I could create a goal for the sake of the insurance company that says client's current baseline is an 8 out of 10. Like their, their subjective experience of their own reality is an 8 out of 10 on whatever scale that we create or define. And we want to get it down to a functioning level, which they decide is maybe like a four out of 10. I can cope with that. So that, that we can create evidence based. Material with that, we can make, we can make goals with that. We can make goals with that. We can, we can create measurable goals. But that's different than saying, I'm using an evidence based practice. in my therapy. So, for example, like EMDR gets talked about in the horse world a lot. EMDR has a very strict protocol with eight phases to it and you do things in a very specific order and a very specific, you know, like step by step process. And if you deviate from that protocol, then you are not practicing to fidelity. And now I cannot get paid. Horses don't operate that way. No, not at all. Not at all. I can, I can sometimes, like, I can sometimes get my adult clients to operate that way. And children don't operate that way. Children don't operate, but yet I, like, we still have built insurance for providing care to children. Yeah, it, it becomes really, really convoluted. So, what do you think about Rupert Isaacson's idea? with the hips, you know, where he went to the neuroscientists after horse boy. And that's in a previous episode for people who want to listen to the interview with him. And he's an author and there's a movie called horse boy, and it all comes down to the neuroscience. After the fact, after all the shamanism is. moving the hips releases oxytocin, which increases the ability of autistic children or anybody to learn and feel good. And it kind of barrier. And Dewey says something a little bit different about that. I'm trying to remember exactly what he said. Yes. Okay. So this is where again, knowing your theory is important. They're giving these two different people are going to give Different answers to the same question, because they're looking through a different lens to provide that answer. And, and this is again, like where I get curious about like how different theories might influence my perspective and my perspective of health and change in a particular situation. So Rupert Isaacson is working a lot with, yes, the, the actual physical neuroscience of the body. And it is pointing to the neurochemicals as the agent of change. And what I know about Dewey Freeman, and just like, and I'm, I haven't studied or trained with him, but what I know about gestalt therapy, and what I know about, The theory of gestalt, which does work with the idea that we get these blocking beliefs through experience in utero and, and I come more from an object relations school in the work that I do, which is again this idea that we get conditioned to you. Believe that the world is an unsafe place, or we get conditioned in a pre verbal window of development through experience in relationship to learn that maybe we're unworthy of love, or that we're going to be abandoned. Or that the world isn't safe, or that other people aren't safe. And we, we, these experiences then translate into operating beliefs that then define how we move through the world. And so, and so. If we take, again, like sitting on the back of the horse and having our pelvis moved, we can go to the occupational therapy world and say, Oh, I'm activating and regulating the proprioceptive system. And then we get Rupert Isaacson saying, Oh, yeah, that's happening. But no, no, no, it's really the oxytocin. And then, you know, Dewey Friedman, the Gestalt therapist is going to come along and say, Oh, no, no, no. Yeah, that's happening. And really the agent of change is. Having a relational experience that changes these operating belief systems. And then here I am saying, I don't know. I'm just going to dive into the mystery of it all and get curious about what happens. But what I know is that when I engage in the archetype of the horse, and I allow myself to embody the archetype of human, and we come together, good things happen. Yeah, magic happens. So, yeah. And I think Like, maybe, I know there's been a lot of, like, talk on social media recently, and there seems to be this, like, debate between old school, new school, or more old school classical conditioning versus R plus reward relationship therapy, like, the only positive reinforcement, like. Again, like, to even just entertain the idea of, like, positive reinforcement and flooding theory and conditioning and operant conditioning and all that, you have to know that that is the language that comes out of the behavioral school of psychology. So, again, you're As applied to horse training is what you're talking about as applied to animal behavior? Yes. And, and that same, those same ideas are applied to and this is where things get dark because it's those same ideas that are applied to the kinds of, residential programs that the indigenous people were applied into that then stripped them of their culture. So it can be used for harm, but draw some more parallels. Yeah, I took a big loss. I know I took a really big jump. I took a really big job. Yeah, let's break that. So this behavioral school, the idea of operant conditioning, the idea of positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, things like that, comes out of a behavioral school of psychology. And it goes back to people like B. F. Skinner. And B. F. Skinner's research was used by the U. S. government. To create schools for the indigenous children that were taken from their parents and placed in boarding schools and foster homes and then stripped of their culture. So, the thing that is being pointed at right now is progressive in the equine world because it is a step away from manipulation and harm and bullying. Was also used in history to cause harm to people. What is a step away? Let's look at the history of the horse industry. So I came up in the 80s and 90s. And so I was, I was raised riding the million dollar Arabs of the 70s, where the horse industry had this huge heyday and this big boom. And the show world became very, very, very lucrative. And horses were a hot commodity and the competition became so fierce that it was standard practice to abuse and drug horses in order to get the paycheck. And I'm just going to say that I came up in the reining industry in the 90s and had to step away because I saw too many horses break down. And at the same barn that I was training out of, I watched horses in the saddle seat industry flip over and die. On a regular. Because of the stand, you know, and no one questioned what was going on at the time because the money was too good. Wow. That's a heck of a history. It's the same thing that people are challenging now with the racing industry. You know, like we just had a pretty major racetrack in California closed down. And yes, there's now like generations of people that are out of work because of that. But that racetrack was measuring its progress and change by trying to reduce the number of fatal breakdowns on the track. If you don't know what a fatal breakdown is, that's when a horse gives that physically in the middle of a race and dies in the race. Oh my God. Like So, I mean, this, this is the extent of the abuse. We have gotten that far away from what is humane because the money was so good. And now we have lots of people, including myself and you speaking out against this. Yes. And sometimes We get so passionate and upset and angry at what's happening that we can lose sight not so much you but I'm probably a little bit guilty of this and I know some other people are of pointing fingers. To the extent that we become part of the problem. Can you, can you speak to that? Yes. And, and that I will, I'm going to speak generally because I think that's a natural stage in the healing process when you're recovering from the abuse cycle and the cycle of violence. And, and there's a word for that clinically in the domestic violence world. We talk about how sometimes the victims of domestic violence also get tangled in a legal process where they are also a perpetrator because the. The amount of energy necessary to stand up to the abuse becomes reactive and somewhat harmful to the person they're standing up to. So it's like the eye for an eye, you hit me, I'm going to hit you back. And. And that can be really, really disorienting to face within yourself when the story that you've been living is that you have been abused and you have been hurt and you have been victimized for so long, and you finally find enough power to step out of a freeze response or fawning response and fight back. I mean, we love movies that do that. Yeah, we love justice. We want justice. It's justifiable. We don't want people to be abused. We want them to be empowered. Yes. And forces to be abused. You want people to treat them differently. Yeah. Yeah. And the road to doing that with, with education and positive feedback is so long and hard. And I'm constantly reading these things on Facebook by people who are calling other people out. And, you know, I want to say, sometimes I do say like, can't we just get an organization that you can call and go in there and get these people educated. Because that's what it takes, but we don't have that standard. We don't have that agreement. We, we're a long ways away from being there, but we do have this permeated problem of horses being abused because people don't understand or because people are dysregulated. And another thing that is being talked about a lot is like people are not attuned to the emotional well being or to the emotional world of the animal. And so they're lacking empathy which is scary because a lack of empathy is what defines things like psychopathy. And it's difficult to be encountered that potential within yourself. Yeah, it's, it's difficult to, I, I know that sometimes I encounter people who have a really defined spiritual practice. Maybe they're vegetarian, they're vegan, they're animal rights activists, and then the horse exposes the predator in them, and they didn't know it was there. They didn't know that that nature was dormant within them. And then their own capacity to manipulate and control is exposed. And then they have to face that within themselves. It's much, much easier to avoid that reality. And say, well, I'm going to go become religious in my horsemanship. And I'm only going to use these methods which are evidence based that are proven to cause no harm. And if I just do it right, then I'll be good enough. Okay. And I won't, and I won't have to confront the totality of what it means to be human. Right. Okay. So I want to comment on this a bit because when you and I have watched and traded back and forth, watching some training videos, there are things that happen. And I know there's something that happens inside me because there's a place where we're trying to become a leader. A benevolent leader, but there's all of this dominance and there's all this tradition of dominance that we were just and and there's fear. These are large animals and when we start to become, you said something and I, I didn't latch onto the phrase or the word that you said, but it's like something becomes exposed. In us that is unpleasant, but it comes from a place of trying you have so much wisdom and there's so much there. Sometimes I just get full and we've been talking for a little bit. So I want to hear that part again about what's the box and then what's there and what's allowed out that is acceptable. can you say that again? Society conditions us and we learn that some things are okay to show. And some things are not okay to show unless So the mask is what we learn is okay to show and, and there's things that we learn and it might be different in different contexts. It might be different in different relationships. Sure, you know, so what's okay to show in my home may not be the same as what's okay to show at work. Or in public. And, and we can break down that principle in so many different ways and give lots of examples of how that shows up in society. Like, it's a big conversation right now in the adolescent development world is the, the question about gender identity, like, what is okay to show in the bodies we are given and, and is it okay to show something Other than what aligns with what people imagine is connected to different biological sexes and biological expressions. Okay. That's I mean, that's an example. So. Everything we learn that's not okay to show goes into our shadow. And some of that goes in there unconsciously, and some of it goes there consciously. So an example of that might be if I'm hypothetically out dating, and I really like this person, and the person on the date says, I'm a vegetarian, I might put in the shadow for a little while that I eat meat. Conforming. Yeah, yeah. And then other things get conditioned and go in the shadow because through unconscious processes, some of the things in the shadow are untapped potential. So it's not all negative things. It's just. It's just unseen things. It's just hidden things. And, and there's a whole, like, lineage of people that have talked about how we can find gold in the shadows. It's worth going into the dark places, because there are things in there that are worthy of being redeemed. Absolutely. I want to bring shame into that. And I want to bring horses into that conversation because, because there's a way there's a way that some people without a license, because if you have a license, you're not supposed to do this kind of stuff can identify or have a superpower of identifying. Those areas of shame that are in the shadow that can actually bring forth these really good things but, but our culture doesn't deal with that. Yes, yes, yes, yes. And the horse has a way of holding space. And somehow, in my experience, knows or helps bring these things forward too. Because they have no judgment.

MacBook Air Microphone & FaceTime HD Camera: 56:07

I am doing a pause here for part two because Carissa and my conversation continued and also didn't finish. So we're going to record the second part that will start right after this. So please tune in for the rest of this conversation. I hope that you are enjoying it as much as I am. I've waited so long to interview her and it feels like the most important conversation of the whole podcast. Thanks for tuning in.

56:37

They have, okay, and, and this is where, like, okay, the book, Evidence Based Horsemanship with Martin Black and the other guy is it Stephen Peters? I don't remember. But the evidence based horsemanship book that goes into the neuroanatomy of the horse's brain, where we've learned that horses don't have a prefrontal cortex, I can point to that from my understanding of developmental neuroscience and interpersonal neurobiology and say, like, Oh, wow. A horse doesn't have a prefrontal cortex. That is the seat of abstract thought and language and reasoning. And so, if I connect that back up to the idea that Dewey Friedman put forward in his podcast that recently came out, where he says, like, yes, we have these operating beliefs that tell us That maybe we're not worthy or we're bad or we're broken. Horses literally don't have the hardware to have those beliefs, but what they do have is a limbic system and a whole lot of empathy, exactly. And that's like. The work of Pak Yongsep and the functions of the limbic system and the circuits that are available to us there is the place where we experience relational change. It's not always through the belief, it's through the embodiment and the experience and the emotionality of it. Through the heart centered place. That's where the shifts happen. I believe. Yeah. No, I've seen it. I believe. I've experienced it. I know. I mean, I know this is the, this is part of the magic we're talking about that isn't just explained by the neuroscience. But I mean, it is, but it's not. Right, we have, we have enough science now to, to measure the electrical magnetic field of the heart. We have enough science now to, like, do the fMRI imaging and things like that to define these circuits. We have enough science now to put language to the electrical phenomena happening in the body. That electrical phenomena is a reflection. In the physical world of back to Dan Siegel's definition of mind, the process and flow of information between two beings. Okay, so my mind's just going to this thing that I, that I heard that we've talked about that is a very maybe Oversimplification of what we've just been talking about, and that is that the horse can. This is the reason the horse can become a surrogate to heal a trauma that happened in a human to human relationship. Yeah, I, I think that. If I'm gonna add to that, I think one of my theories about that is that associations matter. In my work with people with complex trauma like in the trauma recovery world, there's lots of isms. And one of the isms is that it's very difficult to heal in the place that hurt you. And so for those of us who've experienced social environments that are chronically invalidating and chronically creating relational wounds. Or you're existing in relationship with someone who, like, just is so stuck in their own stuff that they're not healing, growing or changing sometimes, like, We need to remove some of the human variable and we can still experience relational things without the association. Of the human, like, of being human. Because I do believe, and I have met and encountered people who have just been so hurt by life, by, and so hurt by humanity, that, that I cannot look them in the eyes and tell them It's gonna be okay, and that they won't be hurt again. The reality, the heavy reality is that, yeah, humans are really nasty creatures sometimes. And when people are hurting, they hurt other people. Hurt people hurt people. And what a gift to be able to have a moment in time where you're connected and held and attuned to by another being that's not hurting you the same way that you've been hurt. And is actually incapable of a lot of that. Yeah, and I might not be that being and that's okay. Yeah, the horse as a surrogate and the horse holding that space and like the palpable way that I have experienced feeling the electromagnetic field of their hearts. Magnet magnified by like how many of them there might be like with a higher herd in Canada, or so this is where I wonder too, is like the untapped potential of wild horses. Oh my gosh, to be able to form that electromagnetic field and make such a huge difference, especially with people that fit into what you're just describing is so incredibly powerful. And and yet these beautiful creatures with that kind of potential are slaughtered and starved and not cared for. And if we don't manage the populations, then we're going to lose all of them, the reality of that. I wonder if that, like, so there's, I'm going to, I'm going to back up and kind of recap, because that's being an advocate for the horse for the horse. There are ways that we can be advocates for the horses that are perhaps lucky enough to be in captivity in a good way. I think I'm going to pivot away from the mental health world and, but I'm going to stay with the storytelling and the mythic world and the place my mind goes when you bring that up is to the history, the long, long history of relationship that we have with horses and the history of domestication and what it means to be in relationship with the domesticated animal and the story of the American Mustang. Okay. Like that's big, it is really, it is really big, but you know what, it's a parallel to it's also, isn't that also a parallel to the colonization and decolonization and solvency 100 percent we were going to talk about, yeah, 100 percent like it's so like, I mean, if we look at the history of what it means to be human, like, especially I was having a conversation with some colleagues of mine, and we were talking about the influence of colonization on the mental health world and the influence of colonization on just what it means to be human in society right now in the political times that we're in, like, so, I mean, this, this, this is up and. And the horses have traveled with us and lived this with us for thousands of years. They have not, they know the story because they've lived it with us. Like if we think about generational trauma and generational healing and working with the ancestors and working with the reality that Most of us here in America come out of immigrant families, and most immigrant families, like, my family, I have branches of my family that have immigrated to America going back to the 1600s during the mass migration from Europe, and then I have more recent immigrants in my family, but we're all escaping war and poverty and famine and hardship and trauma and genocide. Right. That's in our DNA. And the horses have traveled with us through that, and they've experienced it alongside us. And so what we see happening in the horse industry is also happening to humanity.

Samson Q2U Microphone & FaceTime HD Camera: 1:06:04

We decided to pause our conversation here, so that's the end of part one, and there is a part two. Stay tuned.