Hold The Line Services

01/25/2026

🇺🇸 First Responders & Veterans — You’re Invited 🇺🇸
This May, during Mental Health Awareness Month, we’re opening our expanded barn and welcoming the community for a day focused on movement, remembrance, and connection — no pressure, no expectations.
Join us for any part of the day:
🎒 Ruck the farm (1-mile nature trail):
First responders and veterans are invited to ruck in honor of a first responder or veteran lost to su***de, if they choose. Participants may carry a name with them, walk in silence, or ruck alongside others — entirely on their own terms.
🥏 Disc golf tournament fundraiser (afternoon)
🧘 Donation-only restorative yoga (morning, optional)
🐴 Barn tours & time with the horses
🌿 Space to walk, sit, decompress, or simply be outdoors
You do not need to participate in yoga, disc golf, or the ruck to attend. Whether movement helps you reset, or stillness feels better that day — both are welcome here.
This open house celebrates the growth of our barn and supports our nonprofit equine-assisted mental health programs serving first responders, veterans, and the community.
📅 May 30th, 2026
📍 Hold The Line Services
Registration coming in the early spring
Come move, remember, connect, or rest — on your terms.

01/21/2026

01/18/2026

“Just snap out of it” doesn’t work—especially in this job.

For first responders and corrections officers, the brain is trained to stay alert to danger. Repeated exposure to trauma, violence, death, threats, and chronic unpredictability physically reshapes how the brain functions.

PTSD isn’t a lack of willpower. It’s a nervous system that has learned—correctly, at one time—that staying on high alert keeps you alive.

• The amygdala fires faster, even when the threat is no longer present
• The prefrontal cortex has a harder time slowing reactions down
• The stress system (HPA axis) stays activated far longer than it should
• Memories don’t file away as “past”—they show up as now

This is why certain calls, smells, sounds, tones, or environments can trigger intense reactions without conscious choice. Your brain is doing exactly what it was trained to do—just in the wrong context and at too high a cost.

Healing isn’t about “being tougher.”
It’s about retraining the brain and nervous system to recognize when you’re safe again.

You’re not broken.
You adapted to survive.

12/30/2025

As the year comes to a close, we’re reminded that first responders and veterans continue to carry the weight of extraordinary service—often without enough support for their own mental health.

At Hold the Line, your generosity helps provide trauma-informed, accessible mental health care to those who serve our communities every day. Because of supporters like you, we’re able to reduce barriers to care and offer services that foster resilience, healing, and hope.

A year-end gift allows us to continue this vital work into the coming year.

Thank you for standing with those who give so much of themselves. Your support truly makes a difference.

With gratitude,
Hold The Line

12/21/2025

In trauma therapy, we often refer to the sympathetic side of your nervous system as a "deer, bear or opossum," (fight, flight, freeze).

There are pictures of deer and bear in the office, and I often joke with clients that you will never see a picture of a opossum because of how much I detest them.

Here is a picture of an opossum that will probably the only exception to that rule. Take it easy on yourself this season, especially if you are carrying heavy things that you tell no one about.

12/21/2025

12/19/2025

Snakes shed so horses can run.

The Truth of 2025.

This year hasn’t been about speed or spectacle.
It’s been about pressure. About things rubbing where they used to fit.

About realising, slowly and sometimes unwillingly, that certain roles, relationships, and ways of being just don’t work anymore.

Snake years turn you inward.
They make you less tolerant of noise.
Less willing to over-explain.
Less interested in carrying things that were never really yours to begin with.

Shedding isn’t pretty.
It can be uncomfortable. Lonely. Irritating in a way you can’t quite name.
But it’s exact. Nothing comes off by accident.

And that matters, because what comes next requires movement.

The Year of the Horse is about momentum. Direction. Freedom.
But horses don’t run well when they’re tight or restricted.
They need space. They need clarity. They need to trust where they’re headed.

So Snake slows you down first.
Not to stall you, but to stop you bolting in the wrong direction.
It teaches discernment before speed.

You don’t move into a Horse year dragging old skins behind you.
You move in lighter.
Clearer.
More honest about where you’re actually willing to go.

So if 2025 has felt confronting, quieter than you expected, or strangely clarifying, you’re not stuck.

You’re shedding.

The work is mostly unseen.
But it’s the reason the horse will be able to run when the time comes.