12/11/2025
🐴 When Your Nervous System Needs a Herd
Sometimes your mind tells you everyone is upset with you.
That you said the wrong thing.
That you’ve somehow messed everything up.
And your whole body reacts as if it is true.
Here is the trauma-informed reality:
You are responding like a prey animal in a world that feels like a predator.
When you’ve lived through rejection or emotional unpredictability, your nervous system learns to anticipate danger before it arrives.
It becomes hypervigilance.
It becomes the constant question: “Am I safe?”
This is why horses feel like home for so many people.
They don’t care about your awkward text.
They don’t remember the silence at dinner.
They don’t measure your worth by social cues.
A horse has one priority: safety.
They are built to scan for threat.
They understand the urge to check the perimeter.
They understand what it is to live on alert.
But they also carry the lesson humans forget most:
🌾 The Return to Grazing
A horse can spook, adrenaline surging, ready to flee…
and seconds later, they breathe, shake, and lower their head to eat.
They don’t cling to the story.
They feel the fear, recognise the absence of danger, and come back to the present.
When you stand with a horse, you are not looking into a mirror.
You are borrowing their calm.
Their slow heart rate.
Their grounded body.
Their ability to come back to grazing.
Hypervigilance is not a flaw.
It is a survival skill that outstayed its environment.
So when your brain whispers, “Everyone hates me,” try this:
1. Acknowledge the spook. I feel unsafe.
2. Check the environment. Is there an actual threat?
3. Find your herd. Who helps my body soften?
4. Return to grazing. Breathe. Eat. Be here.
You are not broken.
You are a sensitive creature looking for safety.
And you deserve a herd—human or horse—where you can rest without performing.
