Why Moving With a Horse Might Rewire Trauma Differently Than Sitting Still

There's a fundamental limitation to talk therapy for trauma that therapists don't always acknowledge upfront: you're sitting in a chair, in a room, using words to describe experiences that happened in your body and overwhelmed your capacity for language. The gap between talking about trauma and actually processing it at the level where it lives, in the nervous system and the implicit memory structures, can feel impossible to bridge. You can understand intellectually what happened to you, you can develop sophisticated narratives about your trauma, and still wake up at 3am with your heart pounding because your body hasn't gotten the memo that the danger is over.

This limitation has driven the development of approaches that work more directly with the body and the sensorimotor systems where trauma memories are encoded. EMDR uses bilateral eye movements. Somatic therapies focus on breath, interoception, and releasing stored tension. These approaches recognize that trauma isn't just a story that needs reframing. It's a set of neural and physiological patterns that need updating, a process called memory reconsolidation where the original traumatic memory gets retrieved and then re-stored in a modified form that's less distressing and intrusive.

Equine-assisted therapy might be activating sensorimotor and neurobiological pathways that are distinct from these other body-based approaches (Li & Sánchez-García, 2023; Rankins et al., 2024; Zhu et al., 2021). It's not just adding horses to somatic therapy or doing EMDR in a barn. The combination of movement, multisensory engagement, real-time adaptation to an unpredictable animal, and relational co-regulation creates something qualitatively different. Whether that difference translates into unique therapeutic benefits is still being established, but the mechanisms involved are worth understanding because they suggest why some people who haven't responded to traditional trauma treatment might find something useful in working with horses.

When you're working with a horse, multiple sensory and motor systems are engaged simultaneously in ways that don't happen in typical therapy settings (Li & Sánchez-García, 2023; Zhu et al., 2021). Tactile sensation from touching the horse's coat, feeling its warmth and the texture of its hair. Proprioceptive feedback from your own body position and movement as you walk beside the horse or sit on its back. Vestibular input from the horse's motion if you're riding, the three-dimensional movement that requires constant balance adjustments. Motor planning and execution as you coordinate your movements with the horse's, leading it through obstacles or grooming hard-to-reach places.

This multisensory engagement isn't incidental. It's activating brain networks involved in sensorimotor integration, body awareness, and spatial navigation. For someone with trauma, these systems often become dysregulated. You might feel disconnected from your body, numb or dissociated. You might have poor interoceptive awareness, difficulty sensing and interpreting internal bodily signals. You might move through the world in ways that reflect hypervigilance or collapsed defensive states. The sensorimotor demands of working with a horse require you to be present in your body in a way that's different from the focused internal attention of traditional somatic therapy.

Riding specifically engages the vestibular system in sustained, rhythmic ways (Zhu et al., 2021). The horse's walking gait creates a pattern of movement that the rider's body must continuously adapt to. This isn't the same as walking yourself, where you're generating the movement. It's passive in the sense that the movement is coming from the horse, but active in that your body must respond and adjust constantly. This combination might access motor and balance systems in unique ways, potentially creating new neural patterns that weren't available through static body-focused work.

Many equine therapy sessions begin with grounding exercises that direct attention to physical sensations, to the feeling of your feet on the ground or your hand on the horse's shoulder (Rankins et al., 2024; Zhu et al., 2021). This is similar to the body-focused attention in somatic therapies, but it's happening in the context of preparing to interact with a large animal, which adds an element of appropriate alertness. You need to be aware of your body not just for the sake of awareness itself, but because that awareness serves a practical function in staying safe and communicating effectively with the horse. That functional element might help people who struggle with mindfulness when it feels abstract or disconnected from purpose.

The autonomic regulation that happens during these grounding exercises and throughout the session is part of how equine therapy might support trauma memory reconsolidation (Rankins et al., 2024; Zhu et al., 2021). Memory reconsolidation requires retrieving the traumatic memory in a state that's different from the original encoding. If the original trauma happened in a state of overwhelming sympathetic arousal, terror and helplessness, then reconsolidation needs to happen in a state that's safer, more regulated, where the person has more access to prefrontal resources for modulation and reappraisal. The autonomic co-regulation that can occur with horses, that synchronization we discussed earlier, might create exactly that kind of state. Aroused enough that the memory is accessible, but regulated enough that it can be processed rather than just re-traumatizing.

Neuroimaging research is starting to show what's changing in the brain during equine therapy for PTSD (Zhu et al., 2021). Longitudinal studies tracking people over the course of treatment have found changes in brain regions involved in emotion regulation, self-awareness, and sensorimotor integration. The prefrontal cortex, which helps modulate emotional responses and is often underactive in PTSD. The insula, which processes interoceptive information and contributes to self-awareness and emotional experience. Limbic structures involved in fear conditioning and emotional memory.

These neural changes suggest that equine therapy isn't just helping people feel better in the moment. It's potentially reorganizing the neural circuitry that maintains PTSD symptoms (Zhu et al., 2021). The integration of new, safe sensorimotor experiences with horses, experiences that are physically and emotionally engaging but not overwhelming, might be providing the conditions needed for traumatic memories to be retrieved and re-stored in less distressing forms. The body learns through these interactions that arousal doesn't always mean danger, that connection doesn't always lead to betrayal, that being present in physical experience can be tolerable and even pleasant.

When you compare equine therapy to EMDR, the differences in sensorimotor engagement are striking. EMDR involves bilateral eye movements while sitting relatively still, maintaining dual attention between the traumatic memory and the external stimulation (Zhu et al., 2021). It's powerful for many people, and the research supporting it is robust. But the sensorimotor involvement is limited primarily to the eye movements themselves. There's minimal engagement of the larger motor system, no vestibular input, no tactile or proprioceptive complexity. For people whose trauma is deeply embedded in body-based memories, the more extensive sensorimotor engagement of equine therapy might access those memories in ways that eye movements alone don't.

Somatic therapies engage interoception, breath awareness, and attention to stored tension in the body (Rankins et al., 2024; Zhu et al., 2021). This is valuable work, and for many people it's essential to trauma recovery. But it's primarily internal and individual. You're focused on your own body, your own sensations, your own patterns. Equine therapy adds a relational and external component that changes the dynamic. You're not just attending to your body in isolation. You're attending to your body in relationship to another being who's responding to you in real time, whose state influences yours and vice versa.

This relational co-regulation, the human-horse bond and the moment-to-moment attunement that develops, is probably one of the distinctive features of equine therapy (Li & Sánchez-García, 2023; Rankins et al., 2024; Rosing et al., 2022). It combines the sensorimotor engagement with social-emotional processes in ways that mirror how trauma originally happened. Trauma usually occurs in relational contexts, often involves betrayal or harm by other people, and disrupts the capacity for safe connection. Working with a horse offers a relational experience that's demanding enough to activate attachment and trust systems, but different enough from human relationships that it might feel less threatening. The horse's responses are immediate and honest but not judgmental. There's consequence for your behavior, the horse might move away if you're too abrupt or intrusive, but there's no malice or rejection in it.

The physical presence and unpredictability of the horse requires real-time adaptation in ways that stationary therapies don't (Li & Sánchez-García, 2023; Zhu et al., 2021). You can't just execute a plan and expect it to work. The horse might not cooperate, might be distracted, might have its own agenda. You have to read the situation, adjust your approach, tolerate uncertainty and lack of control. For trauma survivors who often struggle with rigidity, hypercontrol, or helplessness in the face of unpredictability, this is directly relevant therapeutic work. It's fostering new neural and emotional patterns, flexibility and adaptive responding, that might not be as readily accessed when the therapeutic situation is more controlled and predictable.

The experiential learning component matters too. You're not learning about these things conceptually. You're living them in the moment, discovering through direct experience what happens when you approach the horse with tension versus relaxation, when you're clear versus ambiguous in your communication, when you stay present versus dissociate. That kind of learning, embodied and relational, might create stronger and more durable changes than insight alone.

We need more research that directly measures whether equine therapy produces memory reconsolidation, studies that track changes in trauma memory characteristics and correlate them with the sensorimotor and relational processes occurring during sessions. We need better understanding of which specific activities with horses are most therapeutic and for whom. We need to know whether the benefits are additive with other treatments or whether there's something unique happening that can't be achieved through other means.

But what we know now suggests that the sensorimotor pathways activated in equine therapy, the combination of movement, multisensory input, autonomic co-regulation, and relational attunement, create conditions that are distinct from both traditional talk therapy and other body-based approaches. For some people whose trauma is locked in their bodies and resistant to verbal or stationary interventions, moving with a horse, adapting to its rhythms, learning to stay present in the complexity of that interaction, might offer a pathway to healing that wasn't available before. That's not a small thing. And it's worth taking seriously as we continue developing and refining trauma treatments that can meet people where their suffering actually lives.

References

Li, J., & Sánchez-García, R. (2023). Equine-assisted interventions for veterans with posttraumatic stress disorder: A systematic review. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 14, Article 1277338. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2023.1277338

Rankins, E., Quinn, A., McKeever, K., & Malinowski, K. (2024). Ground-based adaptive horsemanship lessons for veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder: A randomized controlled pilot study. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 15, Article 1390212. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2024.1390212

Rosing, T., Malka, M., Brafman, D., & Fisher, P. (2022). A qualitative study of equine-assisted therapy for Israeli military and police veterans with PTSD—Impact on self-regulation, bonding and hope. Health & Social Care in the Community, 30(6), e5312-e5323. https://doi.org/10.1111/hsc.13922

Zhu, X., Suarez-Jimenez, B., Zilcha-Mano, S., Lazarov, A., Arnon, S., Lowell, A., Bergman, M., Ryba, M., Hamilton, A., Hamilton, J., Turner, J., Markowitz, J., Fisher, P., & Neria, Y. (2021). Neural changes following equine-assisted therapy for posttraumatic stress disorder: A longitudinal multimodal imaging study. Human Brain Mapping, 42(7), 1930-1939. https://doi.org/10.1002/hbm.25360