Overcoming fear with a brain-based approach. Part 2: conclusion
By Kara L. Stewart
Reprinted from the November/December 2024 issue of USDF Connection magazine.
In part 1 of this series (“Rider: The Internal Art of Confidence,” September/October), you learned about your brain’s structure and how your autonomic nervous system and the neurochemicals it produces affect fear, learning, and confidence. You now should have a better understanding of why coming back after an accident, or overcoming a stack of multiple fears, requires more than a few simple hacks.
In this article, we’ll delve even deeper into the physiology of fear and how your brain processes it. Then we’ll give you a gentle process that can help you move beyond fear and into confidence—one that you can take with you wherever you go.
Healing Takes Time. So Does Dealing with Fear
In the last issue, you met Colorado-based professional horse trainer, clinician, and author Crissi McDonald, who in 2014 suffered serious physical injuries and a traumatic brain injury in a riding accident in Florida that put her in the hospital and left her with a deep-seated fear of riding. Faced with the potential loss of both her career and her love of horses, she spent hours doing research, hoping to find a way to overcome her fear.
“As I started to research trauma and how to regain confidence, I discovered that it is a process,” McDonald says. “The journey is not a straight line, and confidence waxes and wanes, even when we’re healthy.”
But in the first few weeks after the accident, McDonald didn’t have the self-acceptance and strength to stand up for what she needed: time to heal.
At first, McDonald tried to carry on as usual. Just two weeks after she was released from the hospital in Florida, she and her husband, fellow trainer and author Mark Rashid, drove with their horses to Texas to teach another clinic. The drive was a blur of pain, confusion, and tears as McDonald coped with a bruised brain and a crushed leg, but she says it never occurred to her to cancel. She’s a professional, after all, and people were counting on her. Of the clinic itself, she says she remembers nothing about the days or the students.
Soon, McDonald realized that she could no longer pretend she was fine.
“I could not just ‘get back on the horse’ and go on like nothing happened,” she says. “My brain had changed, and it was insisting I start listening to my own inner wisdom. It was asking the question: ‘Am I safe?’”
McDonald began reading books about overcoming fear and dealing with trauma, such as The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma and Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma (see “Further Reading” in part 1 of this series for the complete list). She says she learned that “fear is cumulative. Every fall, every accident, every head trauma I’d had in all my years of riding were held in my body and brain. That morning with Bree [the horse with whom she had the accident] was the tipping point.”
Based on her research, and aided by a team of professionals including Colorado-based board-certified neuroscientist and horseman Stephen Peters, PsyD, ABN, McDonald began implementing a three-step approach on her journey toward recovery beyond fear and into confidence.
The Process
Step 1: Acknowledgment. “The first step is crucial,” says McDonald. “You can’t lie to your brain and say, ‘I’m not afraid!’ It knows you are afraid, and it will call you out. Acknowledging our fear allows us to be congruent—with our horse, with others.”
But admitting you’re afraid to ride can be hard to do, especially if you’ve been involved with horses for a long time.
“The more experience we have as a rider, especially if we’re teaching or competing,” says McDonald, “the harder it can be to admit fear.”
Step 2: Titration. “Like the minute amounts of medicine in an herbal remedy,” explains McDonald, “titration means taking tiny steps, starting at the very beginning, to rebuild confidence.” And “it’s vital to go very, very slowly.”
Here’s an example of just how slow the process may need to be. At first, just walking near a paddock triggered McDonald’s sympathetic nervous system (which, as we explained in the last issue, is the “flight or fight” part of your autonomic nervous system—the part that activates your body’s reaction to a perceived threat by releasing a burst of neurochemicals). So “as soon as I noticed my fear, I took a few steps back and waited,” she says, each time asking herself, Could I feel safe here? “If not, I took another step back. Once I could stand there and feel safe, I ended the day on a positive note, just like we do when we’re working with horses.”
Over time, McDonald progressed to haltering and hand-walking one of their bombproof ranch horses a few steps, then a few more. Eventually she worked up to sitting on the horse bareback with someone holding the lead rope, then having the person lead her and her horse for a few steps.
“I was listening to my body the entire time,” she says. “If I felt fear rise, I’d back up to the place I didn’t feel fear and then, so very gradually, increase the amount I could do.”
As Peters explains, “When your brain knows it’s safe, it can start to be curious and explore. By doing this, you’re rewiring your neuropathways. You’re not ‘faking it ’til you make it’ back to confidence; your brain is actually different. When your brain knows it is safe, this safety becomes portable. You can access it in other situations.”
Step 3: Seeking and accepting help. Like many horse people, McDonald prided herself on being tough and self-sufficient. That changed, literally, when she got out of the hospital.
“I needed help getting in the truck, changing my clothes, washing my hair, everything,” she says. And in addition to needing help with the physical activities of daily living, she realized she needed to ask for help in dealing with her psychological trauma—which wasn’t outwardly obvious like her physical injuries but which was equally limiting.
“I sought experts who could me heal, physically and emotionally. I knew I couldn’t do this alone,” she says.
For dealing with fear and trauma issues, many therapeutic options are available, says Utah-based psychotherapist and horse enthusiast Kyle Dern, MA, LMFT, BCN—“and one size does not fit all. Keep trying until you find an approach that works for you.”
Commonly used therapies for trauma, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), anxiety, and chronic fear include eye-movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR), deep brain reorienting (DBR), trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy (TF-CBT), somatic therapy, and others.
“Many of these approaches access the memories through the body in a way that allows us to take the experience of heightened arousal,” Dern explains, “and decrease the arousal to the point where it’s neutralized and no longer triggers a nervous-system reaction.”
Finding Your Way Back to Confidence
If you’re experiencing fear or lack of confidence in the saddle, you’re not weak and you don’t have a character flaw. It’s the result of your brain trying to keep you safe and your body reacting to the neurochemical cocktail that’s coursing through your system.
The best advice is to care for yourself as you would your horse if he were injured. Acknowledge the injury, give it the time it needs to heal, seek expert advice and accept help with the issue, and ease back into work very slowly.
Your journey to overcome fear may be long, but it’s worth it. And when you look back at how far you’ve come, you’ll know you’re a whole, different, healthier person able to face and work with the ancient wisdom of fear and create confidence from the inside out.
Reset Your Brain and Body: 4 Fear-Lowering Exercises
These simple exercises can be helpful in lowering your sympathetic nervous system’s response and allowing your brain and body to reset. Try them all and find what works for you.
(Note: After a stress reaction, some people’s nervous systems actually become too “low”: Even though they’re still anxious, their heart rate drops and their lungs constrict, which can produce feelings of nausea and brain-fogginess, among others. So if the following techniques aren’t right for you, try deep, quick breathing or holding something cold in your hand for a minute or so. For more details, see part 1 of this series in the September/October issue.)
Diaphragmatic breathing: Inhale for three seconds and exhale for six, or inhale for four and exhale for eight. By extending the exhale longer than the inhale, you help to engage the parasympathetic nervous system and move in the direction of rest and calm.
Box breathing: Inhale for eight seconds; hold your breath for four; exhale for eight seconds; hold your breath for four. Or inhale for a count of six and hold for three; then repeat.
5-4-3-2-1: Engage your senses and identify five things you see, four things you can touch, three things you can hear, two things you can smell, and one thing you can taste (even if you’re just imagining it). This exercise helps you to stay present in the moment and not “check out” or dissociate when you’re in a stressful situation.
Visualization: Start by recalling a success you’ve had. Feel the positive energy of that success inside your body. The success can be modest and unrelated to horses, such as making a beautiful cake or getting recognized at work for a project you completed well. Then visualize the ride you want to have on your horse. Feel his movement, smell the air, see the environment, and infuse it all with the positive energy of your success.
Kara L. Stewart is an award-winning freelance writer living in California.
