Landy Peek (00:34)
So this week I messed up with Denny in what feels to me like a big way. And horses have an incredible way of revealing where we've messed up, where we've rushed, and now we're left with the repair. Welcome back to the Landy Peak podcast. This is your friend and host, Landy Peak.
And we're continuing our journey with the Mustang Challenge and the Mustang Summer. And as I sat to figure out what I wanted to share with the podcast this week, it kept circling back to my biggest struggle and frustration. And while I wanna share all of the incredible things that we're doing and all of the things that we are doing, that Denny is doing, and be
Right, it's hard to share the things that we've done wrong.
And so often in life, we unintentionally make mistakes that we then have to repair. So the lead trainer with Wild Rose shares that it is easier to prevent the mistakes from happening than to have to fix the things that we've messed up with our horses.
And so as she was sharing this week in how to help our horses learn how to load in a trailer.
She was sharing that you don't want the horse to know, understand that they can back up out of the trailer, right? So as you're trying to get them to come into the trailer in this g if you've not experienced trailering a horse, they're going into a dark cave, right? This is against kind of all of their fight or flight. You do not go into dark something where you cannot escape. It has an end point. And so it is a scary thing.
And so as we learned around how to support our horses when we get to the point of trailering, she said there's two real issues. The first is we want to have a clear path, a line of direction. And we don't want them to figure out that there's any other option than going straight forward. If they figure out that they can go backward, if they figure out that they can go backwards so fast and hard that they pull you out of the trailer.
you're in real trouble because they're not going back in. And this is a gigantic animal, right? So our yearling estimate, we haven't weighed her, but estimates around 500 pounds. A horse could be like 1200 pounds, right? So we're looking at a being that there's no way I'm gonna get in a tug of war. And so just never letting them in on the fact that they could back up and pull us.
Saves us so much grief because they only see the one option forward. We also have to pick apart what went wrong and all of the pieces that we missed. So as I was sharing my struggle, and this week what happened was I've been working on being able to fly spray Denny. And so fly spray is something that a lot of horses really don't like, right? So we have the components of
The smell, the feel of the wet, the sound of the bottle. And I'd worked with her. I thought I was taking all of these little tiny steps, making sure we're okay with the bottle, with my arm raising around her to be able to spray with spraying with all of the things. And I had used water, I'd used other kinds of spray, and she was able to stand there.
without a halter, without a lead rope, with nothing tying her, and be able to be sprayed. And I was like, we got this. This is awesome. So then I switched to fly spray. Now fly spray has it's like bug spray. So it has a distinct smell. If you sprayed bug spray, you know it's like not super pleasant. So we have the smell. And I sprayed her with bug spray and she was okay. Now she didn't receive it in the same way as the others because
It was a little bit like ick, right? And we talked about last week we had the 13 rabbits, so it was a little bit more of a rabbit. We didn't really react, but I noticed like we were a little tenser, but we were fine, and then I did it again, and we're okay. And I'm like, we're good. So then I tried it again, and she totally freaked out. And in that freakout, I lost.
Everything that we had done. Because in that freakout, I brought in some of my agenda and I brought in some of my thought process, and we've done this before. I wasn't working with the w the horse that I had today. We've done this before. This should not be a big deal. So you spooked now, and we happened to go inside. I think something spooked her aside from.
Because I wasn't actually fly spraying her when she spooked. I had the bottle and I moved my arm. Was it the bottle and me moving my arm that scared her? Was it something outside of it that scared her? I don't know. There's other things going on in the world around us in that environment. I don't know, but she spooked in a really, really big way. And we are no longer doing fly spray. And so I had to really let go of I can't just push through this. She's not.
Gonna push through this. And I was talking to the head trainer, Kayla Stone, and she's like, okay, you have to go back to pretending that you've never done fly spray before. And she asked me, with horses, as we're looking at fly spray, is it the smell? Is it the sound? Or is it the feel? And we have to break it down. And when we look at ourselves and our kids, right? Sometimes we're okay with something and we were like, well, we've done this before, and now it's not.
And breaking it down into the micro pieces. Now, Warwick Schiller talks about how the horse has to know the answer to the question before we ask the question. So when we're working with fly spray and we've taken all of the steps, and it doesn't mean that we've got it. Kayla is sharing how.
When you're trailering a horse, right, they can be okay going into the trailer. But if they have a bad experience in the trailer, they hit a bump, we had to stop too fast, they traveled alone and they got scared and they didn't like being alone, right? That ruined the whole trailering experience. And now, yes, they can get in the trailer and we've mastered that, but we've lost it. And how many times in our lives and existence do we feel like we have something with someone or our kids or ourselves and then
We lose it and we lose it because of the anticipation. So now I bring out the fly spray bottle, and Denny's gone. She's, I'm not doing it. It's the bottle now. She is anticipating the bottle. What is happening? How many times have we had experience? And now we're, and we see this with our kids going to school, right? We're anticipating what is gonna happen going to school. We're anticipating.
Anticipating what's happening when we go to work, the Sunday scared. It's not that there's anything actually to be scared of right then in that moment. It's the anticipation. So we can have anticipation working for us. We're anticipating going on vacation. We're anticipating for a horse, getting a treat, right? These are good things. And we can pair our treat training with: yes, a treat is awesome, and I'm anticipating and I want that treat. Okay, I'll do this to get that treat. We're anticipating the good.
And so the anticipation can work for us or against us. In this particular case, like nothing is going to actually hurt Denny with fly spray, although she thinks it is. And the anticipation is so strong that just the bottle she is reacting to, not me doing anything to her. And so we're back at square one. Going back to, okay, let me pull this apart.
Let's go back to are we okay with the bottle? And that's literally where I'm starting. Okay. And she didn't have an issue with the bottle when I first started fly spraying. We didn't have an issue with the bottle at all. All of a sudden we have an issue. And the funny thing is, she also, the other horse that's in there and the trainers that are working with porters, the other horse, they have fly spray that they fly spray porter. And you can watch her body language. I was out with
One of the trainers for Porter yesterday, Michelle, and she got out the fly spray to fly spray Porter, who is totally fine with fly spray, has a different bottle than I have, different colors. And Denny still reacted not as much because it wasn't me to the fly spray bottle. Like, mm-hmm, I'm not going near you. No way. Don't like it. You can see the stress on her face. So we've taken something that was totally fine.
And now the anticipation of it has been so strong that it's gonna be a negative something. And when she spooked, she spooked big and went back and she hit the end of the lead rope and she stumbled. And it I get it, it's a big trauma thing for her. It is a big trauma. It was a big reaction for the little thing that happened. But trauma is not the event. Trauma is how our bodies processed the event.
So for some horses, if she had spooked the fly spray, right, that doesn't mean that it's gonna be this big thing. But for her, it was really scary because I had the lead rope with her. She ran out to the end, it pulled around, she stumbled, like it became this big thing instead of like I moved away from it. We then have the chain of reactions that was like, and I can't get away. And so we now
Bring the bottle into the paddock and she's like, uh-uh, no go. I didn't even have to go with, here's a bottle. Are you okay with the bottle? Because when we started the fly spray, she was fine with the bottle. She had no anticipation or association or meaning to the bottle. The bottle now has meaning. The bottle is evil. And the funny thing is, as I've been teasing it out, we have the bottle. We're still not okay with the bottle. I don't know if she's gonna be okay with the bottle.
But I can break it out to, okay, so let's step back. If I use a different bottle, can I spray water next to her? Is she okay with the spray next to her? Yeah, we can tolerate from a different bottle that doesn't look anything like fly spray, that doesn't smell like fly spray, we can tolerate the spray next to her. So if we're breaking down what part of this is really the unhappy part, the part of the anticipation, it's the bottle. Spraying water next to her, she's fine.
Spraying even fly spray, spraying wet water on a cloth or a brush to put it on her body. So we're feeling the wet, right? So if we break down, is it the smell, is it the feel, or is it the sound? She's okay with the spraying next to her. She's okay with the feel of the wet on her from a brush. She doesn't like it now, misting over her, which it was fine before.
And the smell is a big trigger. So we have the bottle and the smell. And so this week, where last week before our fly spray incident, she would actively come up to me. We were fine with anything. This week she's wary. This week she was a little bit more like, what are you gonna do? What do you have in your hands? And I could literally see the tense.
In her body as I approached her, and then I show her empty hands, and she's like, okay, you're fine touching me. Just don't have anything in your hands. And then we're like, we're fine with the brush, right? So we have to rebuild the trust in the relationship, and we have to work through. We now have an evil fly spray bottle, and the smell in the bottle set her off. So sometimes just because we've tolerated it.
In the past doesn't mean that it's okay in the future because we now have an association and an anticipation with something bad. And that happens so often in our lives where we now have the anticipation of something that really prevents us from doing it, right? Those are our limiting beliefs, is really the anticipation that.
Somebody's gonna say something, the anticipation that we're going to not be enough, that we're going to do it wrong, that you know, whatever it is, it's the anticipation and the meaning we have overlaid with it that is keeping us stuck. And I knew going in with working with horses, like we needed to go slow. But it's we need to go.
literally one step at a time breaking down what could happen in the future. They need to know every single, and Warwick Schiller talks about, you need to know every single skill before you ask the task. So when we're talking about like picking up a hoof, right, can she stand still? Can she tolerate touch down her leg? Can she keep her legs still while I touch down her leg?
Can she shift her weight to be able to lift one foot? Can she be able to have us hold one foot and stay still? Right? So then can we tolerate having something tap, because we're gonna use a hoof pick, which makes a tapping on the hoof. So we have the pressure. We have the sound, we have the scrape to be able to clean that hoof.
And you think about like all I need to do is pick up this hoof and like use a little hoof pick and clean out all of the yucky stuff in the hoof, like the poop and whatever they've stepped in, mud and stuff. Like you have to break down every single task. This week we took Denny and Porter out of their paddock for the first time, which is so awesome. And so we were able to take them out and we grazed them a little bit on the property. And I took Denny into the r we took both of them into the round pim. And again,
We had felt like we had all of the steps and we pushed their threshold. So everything that we want to do, and I think as we're working with humans and ourselves, if we're working with in an under our threshold, the 13 rabbits, right? As long as we're keeping ourselves under the threshold, as long as we're keeping our horses under the threshold, a little bit of stress is okay. But once we go over the threshold,
We lose it, they lose it, our kids lose it. That's that threshold 13 rabbit point. So we're looking at how do we do things incrementally and really watching the threshold. And just because it's worked once or twice does not mean it's gonna continue to work. So when we took out the babies and I wanted to work in a round pen.
Alone with Denny. So we had some space. We work with Porter a ton, kind of intermixed with us. And I'd love to be doing some things where I don't have Porter over my shoulder. All of the videos that I take or my kids take as we're working with Denny. There's so many in there that have me saying, you know, Porter, I don't need help. Porter stop. Porter this, Porter that, Porter this. It's just in
Everything. So I wanted a little bit of space so I could work with her without border over my shoulder and and trying to help. And he's great. He's like a toddler who wants to help with everything. And if you're a parent and you've had a toddler helping with you, it's great and it's not always helpful. So I took Denny to the rounds pen. And what we did is we'd had them. I'd taken Denny out of the pen with
Porter in the paddock, one at a time. We'd taken them out together. All of that was okay. And then we crossed a threshold because they could easily see each other in all of the situations and they hadn't been that far away from each other. Now, Michelle had taken Porter out and she walked him away from the round pen out to let him graze. Should be an easy good thing, right?
I had walked Denny to the round pen. And they were okay till they realized how far apart they were. And they lost the safety in having their friend back at the paddock. If you were out, and I mean it's very visible open space, but if they're in the round pen and can look back and say, my friend is in the paddock, I'm okay, I'll go back to him. But if they look and say, my gosh, my friend is so far away and we're going opposite directions, we cross the threshold. And we have
too many new things building up. And we had behaviors that came out. They wanted to get back together. And so when we're looking, we have to do the work so slow.
Slower the body learns it's okay. Slower we repeat and we have the relationship. It's okay. My friend is still there. My friend is still there. We have the relationship with us, right? One of the things I love is when Denny does get spooked or when she's out, like she velcro's to my side. I have become a support for her. Until the fly spray, now it's like I don't quite trust you. So we have to re-build that. And it's funny as Tegan comes in, we tried, I had her working with Denny because Denny's like, you're evil.
The fly spray bottle, and there's flies, like it's uncomfortable. I can see her kicking and trying to move and swishing around the flies. So I tegan outside of the pen, we put fly spray on a brush. Tegan then walked in, let her smell it, she knew what it was, and then Tegan was able to brush. She trusted Tegan and that. So we have more repairs with me than with just the fly spray. And so we're looking at slow, is where the steps are repeated and repeated and repeated. And as I talked to Kayla.
About this, it's we need to be doing these repeatable steps every single day. There doesn't become the same the like, we've got this check move on. It is coming back to okay, every single day we groom, every single day we do the hooves, every single day we get her prepped for a farrier and vet work, you know, being able to
touch her body, have little pokes of our finger on her body like it would with a needle, you know, being able to handle her hooves. All of those things are daily skills. And just because we can brush her and she's great. And we'll enjoy brushing her and she enjoys being groomed. But in my head, sometimes it's like, well, isn't that gonna get annoying to just do this every day? In a horse's head it's
This is consistency and stability. And so when we come back to that threshold and really playing with the threshold, in as I've played with the fly spray again, what I am doing is asking something that is stressful, whether it's can I carry the bottle with me when she is not on a lead rope or halter. I'm literally just carrying the bottle in with me.
Me and we are seeing the bottle just gets to come in the paddock and the bottle just gets to come out and it's not gonna touch you and it's not gonna do anything with you. All right, so we're building that threshold and working underneath her threshold. I'm also watching her body. So for a horse, one of the things that you want to see that we are regulating, that we are downshifting, that we are resetting, and in humans we're really bad at doing this. We just kept building and building and building all those rabbits, is you want to see them licking and chewing.
We want to see the psi. And so I do things with her and then I back off. And I'm watching for that regulation to happen before I go to the next step. And because we now have the anticipation, we have much harder go with the fly spray than with than if we hadn't spooked with the fly spray. If I had kept with each step.
So if I had done each and every step with the fly spray, in here is the bottle. Are you okay with the bottle? Great. Here is me moving my arm with the fly spray. Are you okay with the fly spray, with me moving the fly spray? Great. Here is me spraying beside you, not touching you. Are you okay with that? Right. Here's the smell. Are you okay with that? Here is it touching your body. Are you okay with that? And she's really not great with it touching her body anymore. I think even at the beginning, I wasn't tuning in to how much she really didn't.
love it, but she was tolerating it. But we built too fast. I was like, we've done this twice. So I'm just gonna fly spray.
And I did once, and she was like, I don't know about this, but she didn't really react. The rabbits, right? And then something happened as I went to do it again, and she's like, I'm lost, I lost it. So we have layer upon layer that we're working with. And what I really want to highlight, because I think we really do this in our own lives, is that tolerance is not the same as truly.
Being okay with something. We tolerate behaviors, we tolerate things that happen in our lives, but we're not truly okay with it. And so horses can tolerate something, but that doesn't mean their bodies are feeling safe and okay with it. And they can tolerate it and they can tolerate it, but we're also building onto those 13 rabbits with each.
That we're tolerating. And we look in our own lives, how much are we tolerating before we explode? But that does not mean that the experience has fully landed in the body as this is safe, this is familiar, this is repeatable, and this is okay. So one of the things in horse training, and I think as we really tune into ourselves, we look at desensitization, meaning it is safe in my body, it is familiar, it is repeatable, it is okay.
Right. So we did this with a sweatshirt because that's what I had. So I took off my sweatshirt and we played with it rubbing her body and we played with it laying on her like it would be a saddle blanket. And I'm looking for the licking and the chewing. That particular thing went well. So I'm looking for the licking and the chewing. And is it repeatable? Can we do this every single time? And this is okay. Versus
Flooding. So flooding is where we have the stimuli come over and over and over and over. And we're not desensitizing, we're not saying this is safe in my body. It is just coming at us so much that they shut down. So say if I had her on a lead rope and I took this my sweatshirt and she didn't like it. And so, you know, if I shaked it at her.
And she's like, okay, I'm fine. I'm looking, I'm chewing, I'm looking okay. Right. I'm checking in for that. This is my nervous system is saying this is fine. I'm not stressed. But if she's moving away from me and she's moving and she's moving and she's moving and she really hates it, and I keep shaking it at her and I keep shaking it at her and I keep shaking at her. And I'm not watching the cues of I don't like this. Eventually she will stop. Eventually she will stand there and she will tolerate it.
But she's been flooded and her nervous system's overwhelmed and shut down. And we see this in our kids. I think we feel it in ourselves, where there's just so much, and I really see it in kiddos with school, right? They're flooded, their systems are flooded with the all of the sensory input, all of the learning input, all of the demands. And we flood and they shut down and they're okay in school, but their nervous system is not safe and they're not regulated. And then what happens when your kiddo gets home?
They lose it because we haven't reset with all the little stresses through school. So when Denny is saying, and I'm working with her, and she leans her body away, a subtle shift, or she tips an ear, or she turns her head, I'm reading that as I need a break for a minute. I'm not okay with that.
And so when her energy shifts away from me, I also shift my energy away from her. That doesn't mean I fully back off, but I might lean back. I might stop right where I'm doing it and stay where I am. And we're tuning in and saying, okay, how are we with this? Okay, are we okay with this? Because I want to work to the steps where there's trust, where she sees that I am respecting her body and we're communicating that I am saying.
Okay, I see that. I see that in you that you don't like that. I see that in you that you won't don't want to be touched right now. Before we get to the point of I'm walking away, which is a pretty big sign of I don't want to do this anymore, even though I have my agenda of like, this is my hour to work with you. Before we get to the point where she's gonna pop her butt up at me a little bit, and she did that with a fly spray. In my gosh, we've done this. I forgot all my rules.
my gosh, come on, Danny, we've done this. Let's just try this again. We spooked once. I'm gonna just try this again, right? And started to kind of work to push. And as I worked to push, she's like, nope, she's on a lead, so she can't get away from me.
And she pops her little butt up. She doesn't kick out. She wasn't gonna get me. She could have if she wanted to. It was a hoarse sign of warning. I had ignored all her subtle signals of I don't like this. And I knew I was ignoring them in my somewhere in my consciousness because I was saying, Yeah, but I just wanna do this. Instead of fine, this is not what we're gonna do today.
Instead of saying, okay, we're gonna get to one step. I really wanted to get through every step in that session so that we could fly spray her. And she was like, no. And I took okay, fine. We're backing off. Horses tell us with subtle cues. And when we skip those cues, when we do not really tune into their own systems, then we end up with bigger behaviors. And we do the same thing with ourselves and our kids.
When we are being flooded, when we are tuning off, when we are having the anticipation, when we're not resetting and the rabbits keep building, that's when we are skipping all of the subtle things. When we say and you feel it in your body, right? You feel that tension, and we see it with our kiddos with tantrums. We've missed all the subtle cues that they're giving us of like, I don't like this. Sometimes we miss and override the overt cues, and then we have a meltdown.
In ourselves or in our kids and in our horses. So, yes, Danny had accepted the fly spray, but her body had not fully built the answer in of this is okay. We hadn't had the full nervous system regulation with the fly spray, and then we had an and now we're struggling even more. So one of I think the big principles that I am working with.
Is the principle that the horse needs to know the answer before you ask the question?
And it means that we're building in the answer each step of the way. It means that we are giving them the option to say yes, where there really isn't an option to say no, because they know the answer already, right? So as we build on, do they know the answer before we ask the question? So before I say let's fly spray.
Do they know that the correct answer is to stand there and that the fly spray is gonna settle over you and it's gonna feel tickly and it's gonna have a spray sound and my hand is gonna be moving all over, right? Can we break it down? Can we stay connected? Can she smell it? Can she recover if she startles? Does she know what to do if she startles? So that was one of our first startles. She hadn't gone to the end of the rope yet and had it pull on her face. So
We should have been working on sending her out and having that she hits the ends, and the answer is that she turns her face towards me in a space that isn't stressful. I hadn't done that step. She didn't know the answer before the question was asked. And it's not even that I was intentionally asking a question. And then what can we do to come back to the relationship? So
It crosses over so strongly in our own lives because we do this to ourselves all the time. We get through something once and we assume we're fine. We handle the hard conversation, we keep it together during a stressful season. We made it through the birth, the move, the loss, the marriage tension, the work pressure, the kids struggling, the body change, the family conflict. We are survivors. And so everyone assumes we're okay. And sometimes we even assume we're that we're okay. But getting
through something is not the same as metabolizing the stress, hitting that reset button, integrating what happened in our story. Surviving is surviving the ask is not the same as being ready for the ask, knowing the answer, knowing that we're gonna be okay. And so then the next time something similar happens, we have the anticipation and our body reacts faster.
It braces, it shut down, it snaps, it gets anxious, it gets tired, and it says, no, I can't do this again. We have the anticipation. And sometimes we call it regression. We call it overreacting. But what it is, is that we skipped a step. We went from we can tolerate something one time to well then we're fine with it. Versus, no, we survived it.
And so we want to really tune into our own systems. We want to say, okay.
What can I do along the way to make sure that I'm hitting the reset button, that I know the answer to the question before it's asked? Because anxiety is truly the fear that you're not going to be able to handle what the demand is. That's anxiety. It's the fear that you're not going to be able to handle the event. But when we know
Each step of the way, when we know something has been integrated into our systems, when we know that we have the answer, the anxiety and the stress decreases. When we know that we can metabolize that stress and let it shift and hit the reset button, when we know we have the relationship to fall back on, when we know how the connection, when we can co-regulate, all of those things help us have that answer.
before the question is even asked. And so in your own life, and as I'm looking at my own life and looking at where I'm feeling stress, how can we build in those little micro resets? How can we build in the support system for us? How can we let ourselves metabolize and process the story? And this comes back to the trauma work that I've done where Peter Levine says we need to finish the cycle, right?
The trauma is not in the event. It's in how our body responded to the event, how we were able to metabolize the event. Did that event, that traumatic event, have rabbit upon rabbit upon rabbit, or were we able to hit reset, finish the story, finish the cycle? Let ourselves feel that we are safe again. And so much of our human existence is one stressor that we didn't finish.
And another stressor that we didn't finish. And then without the ability to finish the story, the trauma is still in our body. And so with a human, I go through and I talk through the story. And we can process the story and we can finish the story. With a horse, I can't sit there and ask Denny, like, what did you need in that moment?
Because she can't tell me. So it's reading her cues and coming back and saying, okay, we're building this safe space. And when this safe space is okay, and your body is telling me I'm okay, I'm watching for those cues. I also watch for the cues in the humans I'm working with. We're looking for when do they sigh? When do they laugh? When do they have some kind of physiological shift?
That tells me we just metabolized that trauma. So I hope that somewhere in my mess-ups, that you are hearing an aha moment for you where you can tune in and say, I pushed too much. We have the anticipation. The body, not the brain, the body didn't know the answer before the question was asked. That we went too fast.
That we had the tolerance and we saw the tolerance as acceptance and being okay, but really it was just a stress tolerance.
I wanna tell you how much I appreciate you being here, listening, tuning in, doing something incredible for you. And in this incredible midlife space, if you're in there with me, that you're also tuning into how your system is changing. And knowing, as I was reading around a study on perimenopause, menopause, and postmenopausal, that this space in time is not just a hormone shift. It is
actually restructuring our brain and that's why we're having the brain fog and the word recall because as the estrogen is declining in our brain our brains have to figure out a new energy source and is literally rewiring restructuring how our brains are functioning and in that space knowing that this isn't us falling apart
But this is us really shifting how our brains are working for the future.
I wanna wish you all the happiness that today can bring, and I will talk to you on the next episode.
Speaker 2 (38:35)
Hey, before you go, just a little bit of legal. This podcast is designed for educational purposes only. It is not to replace any expert advice from your doctors, therapists, coaches, or any other professional that you would work with. It's just a chat with a friend, me, where we get curious about ideas, thoughts, and things that are going on in our lives.
As we're talking about friends, if you know someone who would benefit from a conversation today, please share because I think the more that we open up these conversations, the more benefit we all get. So until next time, give yourself a big hug from me and stay curious because that's the fun in this world.
