05/09/2025
I want to share 2 experiences I had in my formative riding days, before I realised that everything I was doing with horses was wrong.
I was a young rider when I went to train for a month with a very highly rated dressage rider and trainer who then became a well respected judges at the highest levels of competition.
I was offered a lesson on her grand prix horse and filled with excitement I climbed aboard, thinking this would one a turning point for my riding knowledge. It was, but not how I expected.
I asked the horse to walk on and when he did not I was instructed to hit him with the schooling whip three times. I flicked him with the whip and was told - harder.
I did and the horse jumped forward into a walk. Then I was told to halt and repeat this as many times as necessary until the horse responded to my leg without needing to be hit with the whip.
From memory I did this 3 or 4 times before the horse would move forward from my leg into walk. I cannot really remember any other specifics form this lesson, but I did not enjoy it and I felt very bad for the horse.
I think this was a defining moment for me, in a negative way, because I was there to learn from the best and this was what the best was showing me I needed to do to be successful.
Without doubt, my whip use became more after this and at times I did take my emotions out on my horses with a whip to my great shame. It had been made an acceptable thing to do for me - until I met one of the defining horses that I owned who had been trained at a different well respected rider’s yard as a 3/4 year old and who was deeply traumatised by the whip and by something someone had done to him on the ground - something that had not been there before the training according to his owner.
I remember her sadness both at what had happened to him and also at having to sell what she had seen as her next grand prix horse as she recalled sending him - who had been awarded the top potential dressage horse in Scotland - for training and receiving back a shell of a horse who could no longer stand flatwork, having a whip near him or having a person on the ground near him.
He never grew out of being scared of people in the arena and would try to run away during a dressage test if a score collector went to the judges car during the test or if the judge stuck their hand out the car to ring a bell when he was at the short end of the arena.
In fact when we won one particular Intermediate class eventing I am sure that I got pity points from the judge in the test because she had done just this and Leo had run away from her and the car and all our warm-up work had gone straight out the window as he went straight into flight mode.
He also had a highly dysfunctional thoracic sling (I now know) and his way of jumping was head up, no bascule, which ties in with certain ways of training that some riders employ that focuses 1st on the position of the head rather than training the body and allowing the head carriage to sort itself over time as the horse gains strength and balance.
Whatever trauma had happened to him was so deeply ingrained in his psyche that he never, ever got over it and was always on high alert in the arena.
Deep down though, all this was bubbling up inside of me, the guilt an shame of my actions but not knowing how I could succeed if I did not do what I had been taught. I kept seeking gout training from top riders but never found a way that was not centred in dominance of the horse.
10/11 years after my visit to the states, I gave up horses and walked away form what had been my entire life since 14 years old. Fortunately though, 8 years later I came back to the scene and by happy accident fell into a new path centred in compassion for the horse, listening to the silent signals they are showing me, healing both the physical and mental trauma for horses and improving performance by training them to use their body properly - and that has been a never ending journey!
This is the biggest problem with professional riders using awful training techniques - impressionable young riders will emulate them and more and more horses will suffer - but the riders suffer too because their horses lose trust in them, they don’t get the results, they get injured trying to win against a 500kg+ animal and ultimately many, like me, give up, broken from the whole experience.
Even though riders who are taught negative ways to deal with the horses know deep down what they are doing is wrong, there are not many people who have the balls at a young age to stand up to someone with so much more experience than them. If you would have had the balls - bravo to you, but for the 1 who does there will be many who do not and who carry the guilt of having done what they were told and regretted it.
Nowadays, I don’t even own a whip. I do not have a use for them - actually, I lie, my cats love chasing my lunge whip tail - but that is all it has been used for in years!
I have worked hard on my mind and walking away from the angry, self critical, blame filled person that I was. The days that were filled with being pi**ed off and berating myself, my animals and everyone around me are gone and I rarely feel anger - not even when I see things like Heath Ryan and Charlotte Dujardin, because I have a level of compassion for them.
I understand what it is like to be in a situation where you only know what you know and are doing your best, but your best is not serving the horses you are working with. I was fortunate though, because it was not my career, it was my hobby and I could walk away and be just fine.
I also know what it is like to suffer trauma as a very unfortunate child who had alopecia resulting in low self esteem. This was made all the more worse by a certain teacher at my school when I was around 13. One day, she totally changed in our class and started to treat us completely differently.
It was a history class but she was telling us to do weird writing exercises when she came up to me and stated screaming at me and hitting the desk “WRITE WITH YOUR RIGHT HAND!” I am a lefty and cannot write with my right hand and she continued to berate me for my appalling ability to use my right hand for the entirety of that lesson, reducing me to floods of tears, scared and wanting the ground to swallow me up whole.
At the end of that lesson she piped up “and that is what it would have been like if you had been at school in the early 20th century.
I am sorry - what?!?! Total mental abuse as a ‘lesson’ in a school.
In the UK corporal punishment was only outlawed in schools in 1986 - so anyone of the age 39 and over may well have been physically abused I the form of punishment at school, never mind at home. In some states in the US corporal punishment is still used and in Australia most, but not all states banned it in the late 1990’s.
This leaves a huge amount of people carrying physical and emotional trauma into their adult life, just from being at school - they did not ask for that, nor the fallout from that.
What they went through in their life was not their choice, but what is their choice is what they do about it. In today’s day and age where there are some incredibly modalities, such as the one I created to help people with these exact things, that can release these stored emotions from the mind, body and spirit in the space of seconds.
People who continue the cycle abuse have a choice whether they keep feeling these emotions rise and act on them or realise there is an issue and reach out to a professional to get help with them.
Because here is the kicker - whatever someone is putting out externally, they are doing to themselves internally too. They have that internal voice in their head 24/7, it stops them falling asleep, it makes them want to numb with alcohol, prescription medicine and illicit drugs and it makes them want to strike out at others that they perceive to be to ‘blame’ for them feeling this way.
Truthfully though, if they look at the emotion they are feeling and back through their life, they will see that emotions has been there so many times in so many situations that the current thing ‘making them feel that way’ is only a trigger to the original incident in the past.
With top riders, this is their entire life, there is so much at stake for them and once caught and banned - what now? If they knew a different way that was kinder to the horses, made the horses bodies more functional, their minds calmer - which in return gets them better and more consistent results as well as horses that are not trigger stacked and have far less behavioural issues - it is a no brainer, they would be using it! So the fact that this is the way they train means that they don’t know any better way.
And I remember not knowing any other way. It was soul destroying.
I also know what would happen if someone came up and lambasted me, told me they hated me and what I was doing and I ‘should’ be doing it ‘this way’ - I would not listen, because no-one listens when someone is directing anger at them.
What makes people listen is compassion, love and tolerance and so while the actions of abusers disgusts me, I will also have empathy for them in the hope that this empathy is what may just reach them and allow them to see that there might just be a different way that might work better.
Any abuse directed at me in comments will be blocked immediately, I do everything I can not to block people on this page, but in this case I will not tolerate any abuse towards me just as I should not have tolerated any abuse towards that lovely dressage horse I was so privileged to ride all those years ago.
I was a young girl who was generally filled with self-doubt and struggled to stand up for myself. I could never have stood up to someone who was a pro rider and telling me how to ride their grand prix horse.
