04/11/2026
You don’t realize how traumatic something you lived through is until a horse mirrors it back to you 30 years later during an equine therapy session.
I lost my father when I was 16 to gun violence. It was sudden, instant, and brutal.
In the aftermath, my focus wasn’t my horse. It was surviving. My entire family was torn apart and I was in the middle of coming of age with a brain that wasn’t fully developed and a grief too large to hold.
So I didn’t hold it. I buried it.
What I didn’t realize was how much I was still carrying until it was mirrored back to me in an equine session decades later.
Here’s what happens with grief like that. When we lose someone we love, especially a parent, during those formative years, our nervous systems do what they have to do. The grief gets shoved down. It freezes. And sometimes it turns into shame, because children always believe they should have done something. Could have done something.
That frozen grief doesn’t disappear. It waits.
Horses find it.
They access what’s so subconscious, so buried, that no amount of talking has touched it. They mirror back the parts of you that you didn’t even know you were still carrying.
That’s what we do at my Somatic Healing with Horses Grief Retreat in Malibu.
We don’t talk it out. We work it out.
Comment MALIBU if you want to know more.
