Before I ever sat across from a patient, I spent my early years in the show ring, training and showing Arabian horses across the United States and Canada. People are sometimes surprised that a clinical psychologist began there. I am not. It was the best preparation I could have had.
Arabian horses are intelligent, sensitive, and famously attuned to the emotional state of the person handling them. You cannot bully a horse into trusting you, and you certainly cannot fake calm — the animal reads the truth of your body long before it registers your intentions. Learning to work with them taught me patience, emotional attunement, and a demanding work ethic, and those are the very qualities I lean on most as a therapist today.
You cannot rush trust
In the ring, progress is measured in small, patient increments. A horse that has learned to distrust people does not recover because you want it to; it recovers because you show up, day after day, and prove through consistency that you are safe. Push too hard and you lose weeks of ground in a single afternoon. The parallel to psychotherapy is almost exact. People who have been hurt arrive guarded, and no amount of clinical cleverness shortens the time it takes to earn their trust.
That early lesson is why I am comfortable letting therapy move at the pace it needs to. It is the same conviction I describe through the metaphor of the elephant and the turtle: the creatures that matter most move slowly and remember everything, and they change through trust rather than force.
Attunement is a physical skill
Handling horses taught me to read what is not being said. A shift in weight, a flick of the ears, a held breath — these are the whole conversation. When I later trained as a psychologist and worked in the most demanding psychiatric settings, that habit of watching carefully for the unspoken signal turned out to be invaluable. So much of what a person means lives in the feeling underneath their words, and attunement is largely the discipline of noticing it.
Attunement also has to be genuine. A horse detects performance instantly, and so, in their own way, do people. This is part of why I believe a clinician must do their own internal work: you cannot offer steady presence you do not actually possess. The consulting room, like the ring, rewards honesty of presence over technique.
Trust, consistency, and care
If I had to name what the show ring and the consulting room most have in common, it would be a simple formula: growth — whether in a horse or a human — requires trust, consistency, and care. None of the three can be skipped, and none can be faked for long. The horse taught me the formula first; my patients have confirmed it for more than two decades.
There is also a kind of humility in this work that horses instill early. You are never fully in control of another living being's timeline, and trying to be only sets you back. What you can control is your own steadiness. If you would like to see how these threads run through the rest of my clinical thinking, I have written about creating a safe-enough space for change, and you can read more about my training and practice as well.
Conclusion
I did not leave the show ring behind so much as carry it with me. The patience, the attunement, the insistence on earning trust rather than demanding it — all of it followed me into the consulting room and stayed. Growth requires trust, consistency, and care, and I learned that first from an animal that would accept nothing less.