When Cooper came to us a couple years ago, he was an extremely fearful pony who trembled around adults. Having worked with traumatized horses in the past, I felt fairly confident that I could help him. After he was given some down time, he started our rehabilitation and training program. Cooper was very compliant and willing to work with us, but still always fearful. Through his training we went very slow giving him lots of time to process in hopes he’d enjoy his time. Cooper never really progressed as other horses do and even though he was able to be handled easily, he could still be dangerous when he became fearful with getting his feet trimmed, or if the vet needed to work with him. Discouragement set in as I couldn’t advance with Cooper like other horses and also was saddened to think about what Cooper had been through before he came to us. Anyone that has met Cooper knows that he has one of the absolute sweetest personalities, wants to do everything right and wants to please everyone.

As Cooper learned ground manners, we began letting our three daughters (who have experience with horses) work with him. Immediately, Cooper was very comfortable and happy to be with kids, but still struggled with adults. Then, of course as we are finally making some progress, one of our daughter’s had a terrible accident while riding Cooper that put us both in the emergency room and left me dealing with my own post traumatic stress for months. Well, I responded as any “traumatized “parent would. I remained calm, cool and collected. OK, if I’m being honest remaining cool did not happen! Neither did remaining calm and collected. From that day forward I made the rule no one could work with Cooper except my husband and myself. I made up my mind that he couldn’t be helped. Anyone who knows our family and team knows how hard we tried with him, and they also know I have never given up on a horse.

Now to the good part of the story! As we were somberly discussing Cooper’s future as a family, our youngest twin daughter (not the daughter hurt in the accident) began to speak up to defend Cooper. The interesting part is our daughter is a quiet soul who didn’t like to use her voice at all let along to defend herself, but here she was defending Cooper. She begged us to let her have a try to “save” Cooper. The kind of begging that involved pleading with tears flowing and you couldn’t say no. A lot of prayer was needed to make the decision and surprisingly, instead of feeling hesitation I felt peace about letting her do this. Initially, when she began working with Cooper my heart would skip beats, but with every session Cooper never had a moment of fear. To be honest, watching her communicate with him was poetic and therapeutic at the same time. Something was changing within myself as I watched from the sidelines. Later, I came to the realization God was helping me finally heal from the accident by learning to trust Cooper again.

More than two years later, what our daughter has done with Cooper is amazing! He is now a very confident pony who works with many of the children that come to our facility building their confidence and trust. He even works with adults too! Most of our horses have come to us as rescues and sadly, many have the visible scars that tell their stories. Working with rescued horses has taught me so much about life and relationships. One of the greatest lessons I continue to learn centers around the many layers of forgiveness, and Cooper reminded me that there are layers of trust and it can be rebuilt in a relationship, but it does take time and hard work. My trust in him had been completely lost, but so had his with adult humans. Even though the adults on our team were not responsible for Cooper’s trauma, we had to earn his trust where our daughter was granted it instantly. The story gets better! Our daughter discovered her voice in this process and now has the confidence to demonstrate liberty work with Cooper to larger groups and assists me in sessions when Cooper is working with clients.

Post Traumatic Stress affects equines just as humans and it takes them time to heal just like us. The journey to healing from PTS doesn’t occur over night and many times we need people we can trust to walk with us on our journey to healing. Our daughter was that person for Cooper and inadvertently she was that person for me as well. There is the saying with age comes wisdom. When I feel peace about something I have finally learned to pay attention because God is leading me somewhere. Even though the battle of PTS was long and challenging for Cooper and myself, he led us to the path for healing and now hopefully have an inspiring story that will help others.

-Christina