Not a Mirror, Nor a Mystic
Inside the Unspoken Dynamics of Healing, Projection, and Power in Equine-Assisted Services
The farm and I survived last week’s heat wave.
Summer camp swam smoothly through the humidity, and the horses and I drooped in the shade together like cynical wilted lettuces thirsting for an afternoon storm. But when the rain came, the winds were ferocious, and the lightning crackled around the metal barn roof. The storms brought only temporary relief from the heat.
This is summertime in the American Deep South.
I forget that my great-grandmother’s house didn’t have air conditioning, not even a window unit, when I moved into it in the early 90s. I forget that I once drove vehicles that were cooled by open windows and my ferocious need to try to outrun myself, to be anywhere else than where I was.
Which brings me to today’s topic: transference — that particular human ability to ask another human, or animal, to hold all the projections and internal demons that we haven’t yet noticed inside ourselves or figured out how to tame.
Before we dive into that, please take a moment to explore last week’s installment of my Regathering Series, auditory journeys that bring my farm to you wherever you are in the world. So far, I’ve helped you stand beside a horse and welcomed you through the front gate of the farm. These visualizations are part of a growing library, and the accompanying workbooks are available to paid subscribers.
Now, let’s get started.
When the Healer Can’t Say No
Transference is a familiar topic in psychotherapy, how a client begins to unconsciously cast the therapist in the role of someone from their past: the mother who wasn’t safe, the father who never listened, the friend who disappeared. It’s a known phenomenon, and it is part of the architecture of healing. Therapists are trained to notice transference and hold space for it without reinforcing the illusion.
But when the therapist has four legs — when the therapist is a horse — where does the energy of transference go?
Over the past few decades, horses have become valuable tools in the healing industries. The work spans from the clinical to the spiritual. Some programs promise transformation, and others lean hard into connection. Sometimes the work is overseen by teams of therapists and horse experts. Sometimes it is guided by a whim. Sometimes the work is a riding instructor talking a person through frustration, but what binds all of these modalities is a deeply hurting populace that arrives in a whirlwind of dysregulation with a passion for connecting with a horse.
We say we want relationship, but often what we want is a response. We want something we can read, something we can control, something that confirms our journey instead of calling it into question.
And yet, no other species is asked to hold human trauma in this way. We don’t expect our cats to become symbols. We don’t stand before dogs and ask for spiritual validation (well, I sometimes do). We don’t walk into a forest and ask the trees to mirror our heartbreak. But we ask it of horses. And when they don’t comply, when the session slows down, or the horse shuts down, or we don’t feel the buzz of progress, we feel betrayed.
The horse becomes the projection screen, the altar, the battlefield, the mother, and the mirror. We cast them in the role of the wise one, the healer, the empath. And when they don’t cooperate — when they offer something more ambiguous or mundane — we accuse them of resistance, or we ghost them. We go looking for a better horse, or a more tuned-in herd. We take our unfinished story and carry it elsewhere, always searching for the creature who will carry it perfectly.
World champion equestrian Kim Walnes has been doing animal communication work for years, and in a recent podcast conversation, she said something that gave voice to a feeling that had been nagging me. She said, the horses are asking us not to put them on a pedestal. They don’t want to be deified. They want to be seen as they are. Horses aren’t archetypes or oracles.
Horses are not here to be the sole carriers of our healing.
echoes this from another line of wisdom. She reminds me often that many Indigenous people, specifically the American Indian communities she walks with, are asking not to be placed on pedestals either. She reminds me that idealizing a people, a culture, or a creature often coexists with ignoring their grief — that being put on a pedestal is another kind of erasure. It’s lonely work for a demographic still being held in generational trauma.We don't see the horses' grief. We see their stillness and call it peace. We see their silence and call it wisdom. But what if they’re just holding it all because no one else will?
What if we’re not ready to admit that the transference goes both ways, that in asking horses to hold and instigate our becoming, we’ve asked them to stay stuck in our stories — while we also stay stuck in our stories?
There’s a difference between witnessing and carrying. The horse can be a witness. They already are. But when we ask them to carry the full weight of our projected healing arc — to be the mirror, the medicine, the mystic, the mother — we miss the chance to be in a real relationship. We make them containers, not companions.
And in doing so, we risk repeating the very thing we came here to heal.
What is transference?
Transference is an unconscious process where human clients project old relationship patterns and roles onto their therapist. It’s closely aligned with enmenshment:
Enmeshment refers to relationships that have become so intertwined that boundaries are nonexistent or identical. While this concept most often occurs between a primary caregiver and their child, it can also happen in romantic relationships. Although enmeshment can initially lessen worries around abandonment and rejection, ongoing enmeshment can lead to resentment and low relationship satisfaction. So, recognizing the signs can lead to more understanding and ultimately, healthier relationships.1
Signs of Transference:
Idealization: Viewing the therapist or horse as all-knowing, infallible, or having special insight into one’s soul.
Dependency: Feeling emotionally reliant on the therapist/horse for validation, decisions, or self-worth.
Over-identification: Believing the therapist or horse “just gets me” in a way no one else ever has, early in the relationship.
Emotional intensity: Experiencing unusually strong feelings (positive or negative) toward the therapist or horse that feel out of proportion to the actual interaction.
Reenactment: Playing out unresolved childhood dynamics (e.g., craving approval, fearing abandonment, seeking punishment).
Sudden disillusionment: Idealizing the relationship and then abruptly devaluing or cutting it off when expectations aren’t met.
Jealousy or possessiveness: Wanting exclusive attention or feeling threatened by the therapist’s or horse’s relationship with others.
Projection of parental roles: Treating the therapist like a mother/father/child figure, or assuming the horse has a caretaker/savior role.
Strong reactions to boundaries: Feeling wounded, abandoned, or rejected when healthy limits are set.
Resistance masked as blame: Saying “this isn’t working anymore” or “the horse doesn’t like me” when deeper material is surfacing.
When the instructor becomes the container
I started out as a normal riding instructor, teaching people in the old-school way of pushing the horses and humans to their limits. Emotions had no place in the riding ring. As time went on, I realized that riding had a way of bringing up all the old stuff that people didn’t realize they were carrying.
I became more than an instructor when I realized that technical skills weren’t enough and that the real work was happening in our nervous systems. So I spent years doing my own work (an ongoing, never-finished process), and I sought out the tools my instructor certification never mentioned: somatic awareness, coaching frameworks, spiritual integration. I didn’t have all the answers, but I was better equipped to handle the things that naturally happen when humans and horses come together.
I knew the horses were carrying projection. It was part of what made the work so potent, and also so precarious. What I didn’t see — and didn’t have the training to prepare for — was how often that projection bleeds over, ricocheting off the horse and hitting me square in the chest.
As the instructor, the coach, the guide, I become the fallback container, the human-shaped vessel for everything the horse can’t or won’t hold. And when someone’s image of the horse as savior cracks, it is often me who catches the fallout, the blame, the silence, and the baffling rage.
Since Hurricane Helene tore through my region and my body burned itself down in response, I’ve lived through an avalanche of projection and departure. People couldn’t find the rhythm they were used to, the structure they depended on, and when I didn’t resume the role they’d assigned me — when I stepped back to rebuild, to feel, and to recover — I became the villain.
The story changed.
And the grief of being misunderstood, of being reduced to someone else’s unmet need, has been harder to bear than the storm damage. Because it shouldn’t be mine to bear. But when people confuse access with intimacy, or support with identity, they can’t tolerate the real me, especially if I’m no longer willing to contort myself to match their script.
If I’m experiencing this — what kind of fresh hell are we asking the horses to hold when we force them to do this work?
My own experience pushed me to look harder at the industry, at my sessions, and at the horses. I started asking questions most equine-assisted modalities seem unwilling to face. What are we really doing with the horses? And why aren’t we talking about the psychological load they’re being asked to carry, not just from clients, but from practitioners too?
I brought these questions to my friend and mentor Sarah Finley of Upcountry Counseling, a gifted therapist who happens to love horses but doesn’t romanticize them. We’ll be co-leading workshops soon, but in this conversation, I was venting. I told her I’d started to notice a deeper pattern behind the chaos and confusion that kept surfacing in my sessions, an eerie consistency in how clients unraveled or lashed out when the horse or I stopped mirroring what they needed.
Without missing a beat, Sarah named it: transference.
Then she said, “EMDR and CBT don’t have a face. They don’t have a body. No one walks into a session asking to pet CBT or to spend some extra time with EMDR. You can’t befriend them, and you can’t get mad at them when they walk away.”
But with horses, we blur all the lines, even in a simple riding lesson. We say it’s therapy, or a hobby, or our passion, but we treat the work like it’s a relationship. And when the illusion breaks, the horses can’t speak — and I get left holding the confusion.
EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) is a structured therapy that helps individuals process and release traumatic memories using bilateral stimulation.
CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) focuses on identifying and changing unhelpful thought patterns and behaviors to improve emotional regulation and mental clarity.
When the therapist can’t walk away
The horses are here with us because we put them behind fences and expect them to stay. They were placed in these pastures, brought into these barns, and enrolled in these programs. They’re here because people built systems that rely on their availability and their silence. We call it care, but at the root, it is containment.
They stand in floodwater. They stand in heat waves, in winter storms, and in the kind of human projection that would crush a lesser species. They stand in the middle of emotional chaos and spiritual performance. They show up for people who want transformation without discomfort. And yet, they stay because they don’t have a choice. And instead of seeing that, instead of honoring the position we’ve put them in, we call it wisdom. We call it consent.
This is the part of transference no one wants to talk about: the horse is expected to hold the projection, absorb our grief, validate our personal myths, and do it all without ever saying no. And when they do say no, when they shut down or push back or simply stop participating in the illusion, we walk away from them and from the work. We fail to see the reality of what it means to be in relationship with something that doesn’t exist for our benefit.
We tell ourselves the horse is choosing us. We build entire programs around the idea that they’re here to heal us. But they didn’t choose this. We did. And if we’re going to keep putting them in these roles, if we’re going to keep asking them to witness, to reflect, to stand beside our unprocessed selves, then we better be ready to carry the weight of our own becoming.
The truth is, they stay because we make it so. We call it partnership, but most days, it looks like labor. It looks like being the one who never gets to leave. And if you’re someone who claims to love horses, if you’re someone who seeks them out in the name of healing, then you should be asking yourself this: Are you bringing your full self to that interaction, or are you handing them the parts of you you’re too afraid to hold?
Because they will hold it. Until they can’t. Until they shut down. Until they get sick. Until they become difficult or inconvenient or no longer mystical enough to justify the story you’ve been telling yourself.
And when that happens, you’ll have a choice: do you blame them, do you leave, or do you stay through the discomfort, own your part of it, and deepen the relationship? Can you meet the horses without the fantasy? Can you let them be a horse — not a mirror, not a metaphor, and not a therapist.
Just a body beside your own, doing the hard, ordinary work of living.
I used to think my job as a coach was to help people find connection, insight, and peace. I wanted them to walk away changed because of the time they spent with the horses.
I wanted to witness transformation.
But I’ve watched too many people walk away when their projections cracked and the horse stopped offering the escape they expected. I’ve watched people blame the horse, blame me, blame themselves. And I’ve come to understand that transformation isn’t always the goal — or at least, it’s not the horse’s responsibility.
What I offer now is space — space to slow down, to feel what’s happening, space for a human to hear their own thoughts without any obligation for the horse to play savior or symbol. The horses are not tools. They are not steps in a program. They are complex, intuitive, and sometimes contradictory beings. Just like us.
And when we stop using them as backdrops for our self-improvement, they show us who they really are — and we are afforded the opportunity to see ourselves as we really are.
My work now begins with dismantling the pedestal and letting the horse simply be. We ask harder questions: Why did you come? What are you still carrying? What are you asking others — horses included — to hold for you?
I’m not disillusioned. I’ve just finally decided that the horses are deep healers, just not in the way we typically think.
I don’t promise clarity, or catharsis, or anything that can be measured in breakthroughs. What I offer is the chance to stand beside a horse without needing them to reflect something back. I offer the chance for you to exist inside your own body — maybe for the very first time. And here, without mirrors or metaphors, you might start to see what’s actually been asking for your attention all along.
Not the horse.
You.
The industry is starting to wake up. It couldn’t be happening fast enough — for the horses, or for the people who are finally ready to meet them without needing them to be anything else but a horse.
Love,
Kim
Omg. I absolutely love everything written here. Yes. Just know you scooped into my heart and mind and experiences and observations and reflections. Whew. I just want my horse to be a horse. We do “contain” them and then ask them to meet us on our terms. It’s so weird. I love my boy and his opinions and his horse ness. I had to laugh at “my horse doesn’t like me”. Why should he? Maybe he does sometimes and sometimes he doesn’t. Can’t we allow that to be true? Without getting all twisted up in it? Anyway just some thoughts. Thank you Kim!