EAW 16 Christine Dickson - On The Path Coaching

This can be psychological, this can be neuropsych, this can be physical, this can be all of the conditions that human beings have. These lovely equines, these beautiful horses that we work with, help us with. Thank you for being part of the adventure and we hope you enjoy today's show Welcome to Equine Assisted World. I've got Christine Dixon with me today. If you don't know her, you soon will, and you should. She is based out of Los Angeles.

She is an equine assisted coach, but she's much, much more than that.

And I'm going to let her Talk a little bit about the modalities that she uses and how she uses them specifically with trauma and addiction and for those of us who are working broader and broader in the field like us at Horsepoy and New Trails where we got into it with autism and then naturally found this broadening out into all sorts of areas of You know mental health we realize at certain points that we need mentors And I was at the Warwick Schiller's Journey On Summit in Birmingham in England

this year. And I'd met Christine before in California, but she was there speaking again, and this is the first time I'd really had a chance to properly listen to her. And She shared in more depth about her work. And so I thought I would try it out.

I thought this sounds really good I'm gonna try this thing that she does and see if it works on some of my own, you know difficult histories and stories and little traumas that are going around within me and she did her thing and it worked interesting and it worked in a way that Usually, I'm used to seeing when I'm engaging in the shamanic world. And normally I don't bring that side into equine assisted world, because it's a can of worms.

However, there are things that cross over in the shamanic world. human consciousness in society, but also have good hard science behind them. So without rambling too much more, I'm going to let Christine introduce herself and advocate for her own awesomeness, and share with us some things that really will inform us making our practices. Okay, so Equine Assist. Well, thank you for coming on. Please tell us who you are and what you do.

I, I got trained as a clinical hypnotherapist in 2004. I've been trained as an advanced practitioner of IEMT, which is integral eye movement technique. And I have been doing equine assisted coaching for about five, six years now. So all of those things as well as mentoring and coaching people, they all work really well together and build on each other. And the people that.

I think that I most attract and work with, or, you know, it's funny, they say, like, you know, you typically work with people who are similar in what their experiences are, right?

So I I tend to work with people who have either grown up in families where they had one or both caregivers, whether that was a parent or grandparent, had mental health issues, such as pathological personality disorders or addiction, because the 2 things show up in, in much the same way you have a, an emotionally and compassionate, Level person who is dysregulated.

So their compassion for others is greatly reduced and that makes for a very unhealthy environment for a child because the child then really early on learns that to adapt and survive in this environment, I'm going to have to be able to read the room. I'm gonna have to be able to read the nervous system and thoughts of the person who's bigger than me and in charge. I'm And that becomes a hypervigilance.

It becomes this kind of almost superpower where you can even tell by maybe the way the footsteps are coming down the hallway of whether this is going to be a good night or a bad night. And, and that is so linked that kind of sensory projection and hypervigilance is really correlated with high levels of empathy. So we develop these high levels of connection and empathy and reading people. The, the downside to that is that what we don't cultivate.

Is our own sense of self, we don't cultivate how we feel in any given situation. Like, like, does that make me feel good or bad? Or do I like this or dislike it? Because we're always reading the room and figuring out what other people are sensing and feeling there and then adapting to them in order again, to be safe. And so this creates a pattern where we only feel safe.

In how other people are perceiving us and many times we grow up to take that pattern out into the world and find ourselves in constantly similar situations because that's where our skill set is. And even though we don't want to be in those situations. To the 88 percent that is our subconscious mind, what is familiar is pleasurable.

So you could grow up in a very dysregulated, unhealthy, chaotic, abusive environment and your conscious mind could dream about when you grow up and you can't wait to get away from all of this and you dream about this healthy life that you want to live. But what's funny, or it's not funny at all, what is interesting, let's say, is that the subconscious goes, hey, that's a great idea. That looks cool. But guess what? We've never experienced that.

And because it's the unknown, it's, it's to be feared. We're going to make you attracted to people in situations that will repeat the patterns of your childhood because you know what? You know how to do that.

So then we end up in relationships like romantic relationships with people that could most of the time appear that they're Absolutely, not that and then once we get further down the road we realize oh my gosh This is the same pattern and then we go through the trauma of being In a relationship as an adult with someone who's either battling addiction or has the same pathological personality disorders, or what can be really, really heavy is that we are so broken down spiritually.

Emotionally that in our, you know, these, these create cognitive dissonance, meaning, like, we no longer know what's real and what's not what's true. And what's not because we're constantly being blamed projected lied to all of these things. So, and instead of trying to clear and face it.

We take ourselves out and people will take themselves down by then using drugs and alcohol to check out when actually facing and leaving the situation feels unbearable and that the the worst part about that is that we've now become more more and more vulnerable in the Relationship because that addiction will be used against us to keep us in that cage and keep us in that box

You know when you're picking up a drug you may feel powerless to it, but you know, you're doing it We're talking about an unconscious Program that exists in your mind That even though consciously you think you're making good choices and not choosing it, you don't see the red flags because your tolerance level of those red flags has been trained to be so high that you just don't see it until it gets to this point where suddenly it's now crossed into the level from the subconscious into the

conscious and you see what's now happening and then it all becomes clear. But it's not that choice of addiction.

Well, I've been in it for, you know, 5, 000 years, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know? So people like me, for example, I'll play devil's advocate, you know, grew up in horse culture, no horses, never, never didn't know horses, even though my parents actually were not horsey, but I had a horsey aunt. So I was, you know, And it's been my life, you know, the whole, my whole life. Even when I've done other careers, it's always been parallel.

So there's never been a time when I wasn't sort of a professional cause I came out at it, not from the big money side. So you then have to become a pro, you know, basically first in the sports side, the training side, and then latterly in the therapeutic side or whatever. Okay, fine. So horse people.

naturally have a bit of an allergy when someone comes in and says, well, I've been doing this quite recently because we know that that can also sometimes actually lead to some, you know, bad judgments. This is true. So I want first for you to talk to us about your life with these types of treatments, modalities prior to horses, then how did you get started? Get into them with horses.

And then what can old timers like me, equine dinosaurs learn from some stuff that you can bring in from completely outside of that world, and then apply to horses that I could have mentorship for when, when someone like this shows up in my practice. So can you talk us back to where you began? How do you know about all this stuff?

So what's funny is this, this whole, this whole life journey began with the idea of doing equine assisted coaching. Well, that's not necessarily true. It began with hypnotherapy. I really, really wanted to be a a therapist. That's what I wanted to be. And when I moved When I moved from Vancouver, B. C. down to Los Angeles, and I was in a really dysfunctional relationship and, you know, very living like paycheck to paycheck. I was still raising my kids. I, I had never gone to college, right?

So going back to school meant that I was going to be in school for a very, very, very long time before I would be licensed to be able to see clients. And I just didn't see how I was going to be able to do that because I needed to get out of this relationship and I needed something that I could.

Make money at and support my children and I wanted to really do something that was going to help people so I saw an ad for It was the only college in the country of hypnotherapy and it was in Los Angeles and it was a year and a half program and I had a residency and it was very I was very on the up and up. So I signed up for that because that would mean that within two years I could actually be doing this.

And that changed my whole view of what I wanted to do because I loved that modality so much because it was addressing that 88 percent which is the subconscious program. And I had felt like I found my thing. I found the thing that I love doing. I love seeing the results of this.

But I was still in the middle of my own dysfunctional relationship and, you know, one of the markers that makes a person more likely to be in a pathological relationship or I should say a cluster of markers is one is a high, high level of tolerance, a high, high level of empathy, really strong level of loyalty to a fault.

Like, you give loyalty to someone who does not give it back and and those, those a combination of those things and that your relationships mean the world to you, you know, and having those markers. Those traits meant that I was always putting, I would always put everything before myself. So even though I got trained in this, even though I was so excited, even though I was starting, I graduated, I was starting to get clients.

At the time, my ex-husband was starting as construction business and convinced me that if I gave all that up. And I became the operations manager and ran that company for him, for us, they would make way more money than my hypnotherapy. And therefore we could build this up over and it was like, do this for a year or two. And then you can go do your little hypnotherapy thing. And you wouldn't have to worry about money and blah, blah, blah. Well, I'm sure you can imagine how that went.

I was doing that for five years. As our relationship disintegrated, it was how and I would, but I was doing it for this carrot. You know, there was the carrot and I just kept looking at that carrot going against everything. That was my, my intuition was telling me my, my soul was telling me and guess what? 2008 happened and. Everything was lost. Five years. I did that job and it was everything that had been built up was taken away in the recession. We lost everything, everything.

And I went through a period where I told myself that this was punishment. You know, that the universe was punishing me for being greedy because look, I wanted this really abundant life that I could give stuff to my children and help my children and all this. And I was just being greedy. You should just be happy with the fact that you have somewhere to live and you have food. And, and, and it was really hard. Like I was really depressed.

And I had to slowly figure out who I was because I had given everything to this relationship and this company and all of this and it all was not in alignment with who I was. It was not in integrity. And now I didn't know who I was. And I, I read at that point in time, I read The Artist's Way. And in The Artist's Way, it talks about journaling, writing morning pages, and having one day a week that was your play day.

And when I was thinking about play, of course play kind of goes back to your childhood, so I started using my childhood as kind of fertile ground to try and remember who I was. And try to rebuild myself and I would go to museums because they were free and I was so broke. I mean, this was in the middle of the recession. I was so sober. I was baking bread at home. It, yeah, it was, I was very, very financially tapped. So yeah, this was a slow process. Building myself back up again.

So that led me to in, in 2007, I read the Tao of Equus by Linda Kahanov. And it was like, I suddenly understood why I was attracted to horses at my darkest moments.

How can we go from suffering and surviving into being a healthy and, and liberated thriving human and not just someone who now has, well, I, I healed that pain, but, you know, I'm still kind of in the shadows. So I saw that I could marry, I could marry my love for horses and my deep desire to learn because how, like, I didn't know anything about this. I mean, how fun to learn this and to get that wisdom and then to practice something that is just, you know.

Like magical and there's an aspect of it that it's not clinical, right? Like you're partnering with a horse. So you have no idea what's going to happen. There's it's always, there's a newness to it and a trust in it and a spiritual sense that I was very attracted to. So that went on my vision board in 2007. That went on my vision board and I always joke about it because what's funny is, is that.

When I finally got to a place where that was possible because that was the guy that was a gasoline in my tank Like it was always gonna be I wanted I even ran the the equine assisted program at the addiction Facility I worked at in Malibu Partnering with there was a therapist and the horse handler came in and then I was the one that ran the equine part program by, I brought the people to it, I participated in it, and it was my job to write the clinical notes for what took place. And

Like, it's a part of it for sure, but the vision of me just doing that, like everything else falling away and like that was, it, it, it wasn't it, but it was a really key piece. And the horses brought me here a thousand percent. And I've had amazing experiences with them, with clients.

And I asked them for about 1520 minutes to just observe the horses. And then I wanted them to write a little bio about each horse, like, how they interpret that horse, what they see. And what they feel that that horse's personality is all of this stuff. It's amazing because people will project so much.

On to the horses, but by doing that by taking it outside of their themselves where they're feeling all the feelings and putting them outside of their body on to these forces, they gain clarity and perspective around what's actually going on in their life or how they're viewing things in their life.

I have another horse that is very confident, swagger. He's the class clown. And this person was saying that he really felt a deep connection to my mule. But he wanted. To be the confident horse. And he, and he, he had this almost disgust towards the mule because he was low on the totem pole. He was a very empathetic and non confrontational being. And he, and, and this was a manifestation of, of how he saw himself as a man because he, he was that.

Loving, empathetic, healing man in the world that values the swagger and the confidence and felt, and felt like that was what he needed to cultivate and really had some self loathing around that he wasn't that.

Because then that's you a human pointing it out So therefore, you know, you're now the adversary and the human, you know, how do you dance that dance?

How they are seen here at the ranch. So this guy, he's seen as a clown, right? He's always looking for play and he's confident and he's, he doesn't have all the anxiety that some of the horses who have had other experiences with humans can have he's healthier mentally. You know, like, and, and I have yet to meet somebody that isn't fascinated and excited about. Looking at the differences between their their perception and another perception of What you're seeing

So there's been a lot of emphasis on helping the person who has low self esteem and low and a low power level or how you want to describe it in relationships, the, the personal that's more. Needs to be brought up there. You know, that's been like so much, the focus of self help books and, and things is the person who needs to be brought up but not a lot of talk about the grandiosity and the grandiose that needs to be brought down.

And many times when you're bringing someone up, that's not something that that person's used to, so they don't have a feel for it, but it's, it's And when they're trying to quote, unquote, fight for themselves or set boundaries or do these things, they, without a lot of guidance, they can be not very good at that and then they can overcompensate and then they can start to become the bully. Using their pain as justification, but that's not what they want to do.

It's just that they don't have the framework to be able to have balance and, and have true, a true place of grounding to come from and not feel like everything is a power fight.

Had, you know, a few years of active work in this kind of on the job training, they did do something similar to, like, any gala, you know, where the idea was, you know, you bring the group in, you divide the people up into groups. You've got 4 loose horses in the arena. We have set up a thing in the middle, a circle, you've got to get that horse in the circle without, you know, how do you do it?

That was kind of, you know, so it was kind of teaching people how to work as teams and and stuff like that, but it wasn't always. Utilizing in that scenario, the wisdom of the horses and allowing the horses to be as involved in the process. And what I've found is in the way that I, I partner with them, they don't need a lot of direction.

With me and she was very intuitive, very smart and I just, you know, there is, you have to kind of, I think if you have too much, if I have too much of a, I want to do these things, right? A framework, then I'm not going to be as in the moment to, to sense and follow my intuition about what the next step should be because I'm going to have my checklist that I gotta get done. And we started off with the whole. In the arena writing about what you think about each horse, and she was really spot on.

She was very good at that. And then we ended with, I had her go into a 24 by 24, like, little paddock stall with my mule and a brush. And I just said, just try this. I want you to brush him, but I want you to I want you to be in connection with him. I want you to be telling him about what you're doing and talk to him. Talk to him as though he can understand you and you can share with him anything, anything you're thinking or feeling, anything that you want him to get out of this.

And I just left her there and I went far enough away where I, she knew I couldn't hear anything, but that I could still kind of see what was happening. And she did that for like 15, 20 minutes. And then that ended and we came back into my office and she was, she seemed like she was smiling. She was happy. And so we, we talked about a few things. And then I asked her at the end, what is your biggest takeaway from today and what she said, like, just blew me away because I wasn't expecting it.

She hadn't shared any of this. And she said, you know, I've been in therapy for 30 years. And for 30 years, I've had therapists telling me that I take everything personally, and then I have to stop, you know, the, the ideas to stop trying to see myself through other people's eyes. I'm always worried about what other people think of me. I'm always everything I do is to create this image, you know, and then I'm devastated.

If I think somebody thinks poorly of me and I, and they're like, just be in your body, be in your body. And she said that having that time with him and observing him that day and talking to him about this is that what she realizes that even though he was low man on the totem pole, he didn't care because he was fully being himself and that was who he was and there was nothing right or wrong about it. It just was. It was right because that was him being fully himself and he did not care.

He had no awareness at all. He was happy and she finally understood what those therapists were trying to say to her because she saw it exemplified in him. And it's like all of that teaching just finally all lined up inside her psyche and she got it.

He used to be top dog and he took a backseat 18 months ago. And that was who he was then. But there was a certain amount of stress involved in that for him. He had to kind of be in control because to be top dog is actually not just about getting the food first. It's about, you're supposed to be vigilant. You're the one who has to make sure all the other horses are okay, basically. And Now, he's stepped down from that role as another horse has come, younger horse has come into that role.

And as you say, he doesn't care. He, there's no sense of despair. That, Oh my God, I used to be, you know, the top dog and now I'm, you know, not and under saddle, he's just the same old, Hey, Hey, Hey. And then when he gets in the, in the field or in the pen, he's like, yeah, I'm, I'm here. That's fine. It's fine. And would that we could now looked at it myself and kind of went, gosh, you know, that's beyond wisdom. That's, that's happiness because that's just to be okay where you are.

You know, we could wish for such peace. It's peaceful, I think. Okay. You came to Horses Latish and again, I keep promising listeners, please hang with me because we are going to go into Christine's story of how she got here, which you kind of need to hear But when you come into Horses Latish, you've got to have mentors, right? So even though so I'm always when people say oh Roo, you know, why should I learn from you?

I say well because actually I've got good mentors So if you're if you're learning from me, you're actually learning from you know, this person and this person and this person said my You know, say it's in the dressage thing, then that would be the Valenza family in Portugal, who I know you've gone out to visit and seen the amazing stuff they do and blah, blah, blah. Who are your mentors? Who brought you to your horse knowledge that you can offer your horses to people, your herd to people?

And then here's this book, You Are a Badass by Jensen Sharer that I'm listening to on Audible, and she's such a dork. She's so, has, and, and self proclaimed, like, she has these jokes that are like, dad jokes through it.

She's talk everything she's talking about are things like I already know that I remember being so like arrogant in the beginning of listening to this book I was like, this is like Self help 101 for people, you know, I I already know this stuff So silly the thing about it being delivered in such a fun silly, which you might identify with light hearted Huh? Not you. Yeah. Not, not at all.

So, listening to that book, in the middle of listening to that book, it's all about taking action. What action are you taking? I want to work with horses, but I don't have the money. I don't have any horses. I don't have any access to horses. What, what can I do? Like, what can I do? So I decided to get in the car. And take the two hour, two and a half hour drive up to flag is up farms, which is Monty Roberts place, which was up the coast.

I know that his farm is open to people visiting and it's a beautiful drive. And I was like, I'm just going to do that. So I did, I went up there, I mean, walked around again, petting some noses. And I came back and that night I did a, I co produced a documentary with friends. Called American street kid, which is about homeless youth in the U. S. And we were, we had a nonprofit that came out of that called spare some change.

And our nonprofit was being featured at a at like a band showcase downtown. So we were going to be the nonprofit. In the entryway with our stuff and our little table and it was me and my friend who was one of the producers michelle kaufer? So Michelle and I were sitting at the table that night. She's like, hey, what did you what'd you do today?

I said, well, you know, I took this drive up to see these horses because you know I really want to get involved in this equine assisted coaching and stuff and I don't know how, you know I don't know how that's gonna happen. And she's like, wait a minute. I know somebody that I think I know somebody that does that Well, that's somebody That she thought she knew was Katie Nelligan now, I don't know if you've ever heard of Katie Nelligan, but she's been on works podcast.

She, the reason Michelle knew her is because Katie Nelligan used to work in marketing at Lionsgate films. Katie Nilligan had left Lionsgate to start doing equine assisted therapy, learning, coaching. And so Michelle hooks me up with Katie. Katie is work, her, her whole setup is 25 minutes from my house. We decide to meet. I took some workshops with Katie. Katie introduced me to Esther Bernstein, who runs Sapphire Sanctuary at the time.

And so I started volunteering because I was like, I need to immerse myself in horses. I don't know anything about body language of horses. I don't know anything about the care of horses. So I volunteered at Sapphire fast forward. I don't know, eight months and the property that Sapphire was running out of is in foreclosure. All the horses need to go. And I adopt one of the horses. Sapphire took their, they just ran their operation out of this property.

They didn't own it, so they just moved their operation, but I took on one of the horses that the property had owned. Fun fact, that property was so depressing. It had people living out of the cars on it. It was, it was just a mess for sad, sad horses. That's the property I live in now. That property, if you had told me in 2016 that I would live there one day, I would ask how much you hate me. Because, there was the joke was there's not enough sage in the world.

To clear the energy out of that place, but the land is you people talk about they come here and they feel it. They feel there's a spiritual aspect to this little tiny corner that I'm in. And so when it got foreclosed on a construction company took it, they gutted everything. They cleaned everything out and eventually. Amazingly enough, here I am, but I learned about horse care through Esta.

She was my mentor and then over time I got other mentors and learned from more people and more people found work, Schiller. And just that's why I said, like, I can't ever imagine. I don't think if I'm in horses for 30 more years that I'll ever consider myself an expert. In horses because it's so humbling like no matter how much I feel like I learn there is a sea of knowledge that

Quote from the great 18th century classical dressage master francois He wrote what Which is basically if you do dressage today, that's my What you're trying to do and he was the keeper of the royal stables for the French king in the early 18th century And he was approached by a nobleman to train his son And he said the nobleman said to La Guernière, you know, just you know, turn him into a good horseman He doesn't have to be like, you know, a total equier as you'd say like a total expert he

just you know, they can sort of show the horse where to put his feet, you know and La Guernière said ah Yeah, the very same thing I myself have been trying to do this past 60 years. I love it. So no, we're all, you know, constant beginners. All right, here you are now on this amazing What do you call it?

You know, you talked about, oh, I was in this shitty relationship and you know, I now I sort of, I'm a client with horses walking up and down breezeways of barns to feel better, which is a great thing for people like us to hear because I think we can forget sometimes as practitioners of the equine stuff that simply being around the horses is healing. You know, we all know this of course, but we're, you know, we, we get for the best of reasons, you know.

Tied up with trying to provide the service that we provide and sometimes we forget actually it's just being there is, you know, sometimes enough Letting the horses do their thing just by being who they are But okay that shitty relationship that you're talking about.

I think you're talking about how people survive relationships I know that you're being rather modest about some of the shit you've had to go through in order to reach the point where you can help other people going through their shit, basically. Can you just talk through whatever you feel to talk through that helped?

Because, again, a lot of us that are coming into this equine assisted world, we're coming from vastly different backgrounds, and, of course, you can't be a perfect person Human being alive on planet Earth for more than a certain amount of time without going through some trauma It's just part and parcel of the experience of being on the planet. However Certain types can be more acute than others.

So talk us through Where you begin and then bring us up to now and then why hypnotherapy and then I we haven't touched at all on the eye stuff and That listeners is how I really connected with Christine She did her eye thing which he's going to tell us about with me and it healed Some stuff in me that needed healing. Bring us please from where you start to where you end Up to now through all that, please. And then perhaps how it now informs what you do with the horses.

So, this has been an ongoing discovery for myself, but my mother just was not healthy enough to raise a child. So my grandmother through court order took me from her when I was 2 and a half due to neglect. And other issues. So I, you know, I kind of grew up really knowing what it's like to feel like you don't really have a place of belonging. My grandmother did her best and she was wonderful.

I am grateful to her every day, but you know, I wanted to be in a family with other kids and siblings and young parents who did fun things and. I did get some of that by going to my aunts in summers and, and holidays, but I think that there was also, there was a, a, a fear of the adults in my life of what I turn out to be like my mother, because as I grew up my mother's mental health issues and her manipulation and violence. And chaos just grew and she kept having children.

There's five of us with five different fathers. So it was, you know, always managing the train wreck that my mother was creating. So fast forward to when I was in, I lived with my aunt. In my freshman year and halfway into my sophomore year and you know, to, to protect people in my family, I won't go into exactly what happened, but there was a series of events that happened and lies told that cast me into. A view of looking like I was, you know, you're just like your mother.

I got thrown out of their house ended up at my grandmother's. My mother at the same time found herself homeless and was living at my grandmother's pregnant with my sister, Katie, and with my young sister, Kimmy.

Being about I guess she was probably like five or six and so the idea was I was gonna live with my mother So I get moved in with my mother and I'll just fast forward to After my sister was born a few months later My mother was itching to get back to the bar one of the drinking buddy when I didn't want to go alone So she would leave my little sisters with the neighbor and take me to biker bars When I was 15, 16, around that age and I mean, when I talk about this stuff, I have to tell you, it's

like I'm talking about a movie I saw because it's so bizarre to me how much happened in such a small period of time and how absolutely insane it was. You know, by bringing me to these biker bars.

I mean, I had guns put in my face, I was in high speed chases I was in vans with strange men, like, my mother would leave me with strange men, the fact that nothing terrible happened to me is, I swear I have guardian angels watching over me because the, the situations I was put in, and that the fact that that stuff didn't happen is, is just insane. But. When you have a young teenager who is living in this chaos, who is defiant, I was very defiant, I was very angry about a lot of things.

And I never had a father, and I meet this older man who thinks I am just the best thing since sliced bread. And takes me under his wing, and I fell madly in love with him. I was 16, he was 34. And, you know, I haven't shared this before, but the first time I ever did a drug other than smoking weed, which I hated because it just made me paranoid I didn't get the attraction was with my mother my mother and the group of people that she associated with were into snorting meth.

And so that was given to me when I was about, I think I was 16 is around the time I met my kid's dad and so we, I would go off to weekends with him and we would do math and I just was enamored with it was followed him off the ends of the earth. Like, he was.

My God in a way, you know, he was everything and he was in the fact that he was scary on some really primitive level Because I felt so hurt by the rejection of my family and the people that I loved and the position I was in that I think on some level the scariness of him made me feel safe, you know, because he was strong and Nobody was going to hurt me if I was with him and one day when we had been away we would go on these like drives and I never knew what he was doing.

You know, I, we get a hotel somewhere, I'd be left at the hotel. He would go visit people or do whatever he did, or I'd sit in the car outside of people's houses. We're driving back. He's crashing next to me. So he's like nodding off. I was doing the driving, but I didn't have a driver's license. And we got pulled over and yeah, turns out there was five pounds of meth in the trunk. And that caused a complete jumping of tracks for my life.

I was a juvenile, so I went to juvenile hall and I didn't even know I was there. I didn't know there was anything in it. I didn't know why I thought the reason I was held was because when my mother was mad at me, she had reported me as a runaway because she didn't want me to go away with him for a weekend. And so she never took that off. So I thought I was being arrested because. I was still on the books as a runaway. When I figured this out, I didn't know what to think.

I was more dependent on him now because this was his world, you know, he was, he had been arrested a million times before and I needed him now to help me and it kind of forged me. In this relationship and when the government was going to move to certify me as an adult we went on the run and I lived for four and a half years under aliases and moving and.

I had two kids under aliases and during that time, he became addicted to drugs and became more and more terrifying and abusive and I felt I had nowhere to go because if I went home, I would be arrested and I, my family didn't either have the money or the knowledge of how to navigate the judicial system in this country. And. The, and during this time, he was actually going back and showing up for his cases because he, the search was, it was like an illegal search and seizure.

So he was, he ended up winning the case after 4 and a half years on the fact that they didn't have a warrant to search the car. They didn't have, they did a lot of things because they knew who he was. So, you know, my family found out, no, I'm, I'm jumping. So he wins the case. I had spent from 18 to 22 and a half with, you know, no friends, no, but like, no life just on hold waiting and then living with this really unpredictable human.

And so I was so excited to move home and so we did I kind of took him driving and streaming because I was, you know, Moving back, I was going to have a life and what we didn't know was that five pounds of meth in the trunk is also a federal offense.

So, even though he had won a state case, the feds had charged him in a sealed indictment, which meant that when we moved back, we were being surveilled for a year, followed in airplanes and helicopters and all kinds of crazy stuff, phones tapped, all of that. And one day there was a knock on the door and it was the police.

And all of a sudden the agents came out from the woods, they came out from behind the barn, they came out from everywhere, and I was on the 11 o'clock news, that's how my family knew, so it was a huge bust, huge bust,

Same exact crime, but now from a federal level, but they had also surveilled him and the during those 4 and a half years that we were living on the run, he was actually manufacturing meth.

And I, everyone, all the women in there thought I was in there for DUI, cause they had no idea why this thing was happening. You know, 23 year old girl that looks like she's 15 is doing in jail. And then they saw the news. And when I woke up, I remember the first day waking up in there. And the craziest thing was that other than my children who were staying with friends, other than that, I felt like I had been saved. Like the thought was, it's finally over.

Because I didn't think I would ever be able to leave him. I don't know how I would ever get away. He was terrified. And he, you know, there was lots of threats. So I was free. I was in jail and I was free. And so it took 15 months. I had to plead guilty to 20 something felonies, but he agreed to plead guilty to get me out.

And I found out years later that there were places that I had left and moved and within weeks they had tracked me down to those places. Now whether or not there was nefarious intent or it was just about getting me back to bringing the kids. You know, I also just didn't really want to be bringing my kids to prisons all the time for visits. And there was a lot of.

There was a lot of racism and, and horrible views that I didn't want them exposed to as young children, you know, if, if they get exposed to that as a, as young adults, they already have the framework, but I didn't want that for them.

He had four children before we were together and his daughter was coming out to California. With her fiancee and he convinced her to come and reconnect with me. So that was a trippy day within minutes to be on the phone with him after not talking to him for years and years. But he I don't think he ever really got over his propensity for meth. And I think he was probably still doing it. He, in 2014 15 he died of a heart attack.

They had a really hard time connecting with him to have some kind of idea of who their father was and it was very hard on them when he died. Not because there was a great love there, but because of what the loss of what could have been. And I just felt sadness because of the choices he made. He could have had so much more love in his life and such a better impact.

But, you know, there's an aspect of him that knew that he wasn't well, and, you know, that it was probably good that he wasn't around the kids when he was young, when they were young.

My job was to not fall apart in front of them and then I could fall apart when they left. And I'll never forget the first conversation I had with my daughter because she was, she was four and or three, was she? No, two and a half. So she was, it was a couple months before her fourth birthday and the first phone call I had with her took a few days to get to, but she was hysterical and she was saying, come get me mommy, come get me. And I broke.

I just, my knees buckled and I, there was nothing I could do. The only thing that I could do was manage their care as best I could from where I was.

I don't know if it's because they didn't have, didn't have representation, if they didn't have people that they could go with. I don't, I don't know. I did have a lawyer, pretty. Quickly. So, but they ended up with them and then I had to get them out of there because it wasn't a good place. And they ended up going to a friend of my exes who had, we had visited before and they had a house and a pool and kids. And from my perspective, it was a stable home she stayed home and took care of the kids.

He worked. It turned out to not be as good of an environment as I had hoped, but other people that were trying to step up, we're only willing to take 1 child and I was not separating them. So the options weren't great. But they were the best that I could get and they could have been much worse. But that's, that's, you know, I've lived.

One of the things that I think is so important when you have something like this happen in a family is to take responsibility for your role and to not be defensive. I've never been, I've always tried to raise my children with the understanding that their experience is their experience and that. You know, we could talk about how I was 16 when I met him, but I still hold accountability for what happened. And if they're ever upset with me or frustrated or sad, that's their right.

And I'm, I don't defend myself. I'm not here to change their mind. I'm here to allow their experience to be their experience. And because of that, We don't have an elephant in the room. They don't feel that they can't tell me how they feel because somehow it'll hurt me so much I won't be able to take it. So they hold it all in.

And one cannot presume as a human to, it's so interesting is that we're all empathetic to each other. We're social creatures. We are basically empathetic to each other, thank God. But there's a limit to what we can offer each other for healing because of our own fires and egos and, and so on the horse doesn't come with that. And but by sharing a story like that, you come very, very close to the role that the horse does, which is you're saying, here I am having lived this experience.

This allows you to be human too. I know that's not necessarily what you're consciously saying, but. I think when I think it's how it gets received and I think that this brings a very similar kind of healing to the type of healing a horse would bring or nature would bring. So for that, I'm extremely grateful. And I can see why somebody coming to your barn, this being the point of it sort of doesn't matter that your equine experience might be somewhat recent.

With the type of experience that you've had in life, you are very well set up to help people. Now, you then go from this experience and some others into therapeutic modalities. I presume to some degree to help yourself out too. And you find yourself with hypnotherapy and then you find your way to IEMT. Please talk to us about why and tell us what they do.

I see this happen a lot and this is where as any type of mental health work or any type of supportive work for people is so important to really, really develop a sense of when we're projecting onto people because we, if we allow ourselves to do that, we're going to get it wrong at some point and the way I see this happen is there's, there's Two ways in my experience.

One is, my mother was something I survived and how beautiful is it that there are people in this world that can't even comprehend that. And there's people in this world that get very uncomfortable. If you say anything negative about your mother, if you tell people that you have had to limit your exposure to your mother, they can't understand. And I have had that happen in with people who were doing quote unquote, like force therapy type work where they projected onto me this idea that my family.

Was my, were my ancestors and they were part of me and I had to be grateful for them and I had, and it was, it was not very informed. Put it that way and I think that this is. I've heard of this struggle with other people who have had parents that are so toxic that sometimes no contact is the only way to protect yourself and people don't understand and it gets people very uncomfortable. So, being able to see how we don't project that in our work is, is important.

The other one is when you've been in a pathological love relationship or even pathological relationship as an adult child with a parent. There can be really unhealthy things that happen.

One of the things is that the way pathological relations work is very similar to horse training, or at least the, the, the older model of horse training that is shifting, which is the idea of pressure and release pathological relationships become a pressure and release modality, which means that the uncomfortableness or the anger or the manipulation that's trying to happen. From the person with the pathological issue becomes a pressure that the only way we feel safe.

Is that we have to relieve that pressure that could mean paying their bills. It could mean agreeing to not see our friends. It could mean a bunch of things. And those don't necessarily go away when you separate from that person because it's a power and they're trying to to wield and. For a long time, mental health professionals did not understand the dynamic and they would further shame the person who was being manipulated because they're going, wait a minute. I don't understand.

You're not even together anymore. You're not even together anymore and you, and you've just paid their car payment for them? Like, what are you talking about? The person already feels shame for the fact that they did it. The threat of not doing it and the pressure of being able to resist all of the manipulation and all the ways that that person has shown you that they will burn it to the ground if you do not comply. Well, then it's a choice. That's not really doesn't feel like a choice.

Do I want to die on this hill? Do I want to invite this in? It takes time and Sometimes those are the relationships like these are not clear cut These types of relationships are ones that people do that women do get killed the the you know People will say in abusive relationships Oh, why didn't you just leave? Or when you read about women who poisoned or, or, you know, ultimately killed their abuser and they'll go, why didn't they just leave? They could have just left.

And what they don't understand is, and this, this isn't just to women, this is men too, men are in these relationships as well is that the point to which you are most vulnerable is when you decide to leave. Because you have started to demonstrate that you're no longer under the spell and you've connected to the fact that you have power and that's the thing that has been fought, has been the whole MO is for you to never believe that you have agency.

And so when you start to believe that that needs to be taken down, and when you take that action is when the big retaliations can happen. So it's not true that people can just walk out and people don't have the support that there, it just doesn't exist in a lot of ways. So this is the one thing I wanted to say about the people that show up. Because a lot of times people who are in these relationships will show up for help.

And you have to be careful of what help that you're suggesting, because if you don't know the actual situation and you suggest someone leave it without proper support, which is going to definitely go beyond your, your skill set, they could be getting into a more dangerous situation. And this is a type of brainwashing that takes years to undo. It's not intellectual. They already know they're being manipulated. They know that things don't add up and that they're stuck.

They just don't know how to get out of it. Because it's a grind. You got ground down. So that, that is something that I feel very passionate about. And that I would say anybody, any other person doing this work that has any questions, if I would be happy to answer them. Answer.

There will be, so listeners, there will be a contact that you can go to Christine and get further mentorship on this. Talk to us about the hypnotherapy now and talk to us about the IEMT, please. And then how does that inform recovery?

To create knowns in the subconscious that will support your conscious decisions. So, if you know, if I want to like working out, you know, if I want to, I want to start working out, well, it's going to be helpful to have some suggestions made to the subconscious that connect you to the subconscious.

Feelings, the why, the feelings of after a workout, the feelings of why I want to do this, what I'm, I'm reaching for health wise or body wise and feeling strong or what I'll be able to do and how I'll be able to support my body versus the pain being the forefront thought of the actual working out of how we don't want to do it or it's boring or it's this or it's that. So it's kind of like, you know, eating, eating foods.

That you don't want to eat is very similar, sweets and stuff like that is very similar to drinking alcohol because we want that positive feeling that we get right in the beginning and our mind completely gaslights us about what the effect is afterwards. It doesn't even show it to us. Don't think about what's afterwards. Just let's just focus on that initial feeling. And then after we do, it's like, we wake up and go, now we're dealing with the after effects.

And it's like, why was I, I was like under a trance before. Well,

Role is the manager and this is what it looks like. I'm a little kid. I'm three years old. I'm wide open, right? I'm wide open. Hey, I don't have any defenses. I don't have any protections up yet And I find a frog in the backyard and i'm so excited and I take my frog in the house and i'm like mommy Mommy, look at my frog. Look what I found and she's like I told you to get out of here I'm in the middle of something. Why are you such a pain in the ass all the time get outside and play?

Well, all of that openness, that is like a collapse. It's a collapse. It is a deep, deep wound. And in that moment, a manager gets formed, because we don't want to feel that pain ever again. And the manager goes, stupid, look what you did, stupid. Don't do that again. Just play with yourself. You don't need anybody else. And that manager from that point on is always looking for ways that that stupid part of you is going to be open and get hurt again.

And that part of you that got hurt becomes what they call the exile and it gets put in a box and it gets thrown in the dungeon and it is exile. We cannot trust that part of you. And as we all know, children learn how to regulate their nervous system through co regulation. And when you don't have a parent.

That you can go to when either you're super happy or super sad or super scared that will hold you and listen to you and let you use their nervous system to bring yourself back down and you go, well, I'm just going to have to do it for myself. You can't do co regulation for yourself, but what you can do is you can dissociate and that starts to feel like a superpower and you become more and more intellectual and you intellectualize things and you go, you know, that doesn't hurt me.

Yeah, I don't get bothered by that stuff. It's not that you don't. It's that you have dulled that to the point where when it comes in, it's so automatic that that gets put in a box and put away that you never even experience you bypass the whole experience. So we have, we all have all these managers, right? So this is how I describe IEMT. So now when that happened, right, let's imagine that what you heard that manager is saying is that nobody wants to hear from you.

That creates kind of a tuning fork within your psyche. It's like a, it's like a lens. Every situation after that point is going to be scanning for how no one wants to hear from you. If someone that, you know, just says, Hey, what's up? And like, and just walks past you and keeps going. It's not that they're busy. It's not that they're it's that they're avoiding it because nobody wants to hear from you. Right. We go into every situation with this anxiety that nobody wants to hear from me.

Every situation we see goes to that lens and validates. So now this memory that created the manager, well, the mind kept that memory as being sharp. So what I mean by that is the memory lives in the hippocampus, but it has a direct link right into the amygdala, which is the nervous system, the body. So mind and body are connected in that memory. You cannot intellectualize your way out of the effects of that memory.

When we're activated, our wise mind, our ability to have perspective and, and to see it from a bigger, see the bigger picture is, is almost non existent because we're activated. Take away the activation. We can use our own wisdom and our own views to put perspective on something that I don't know like it was so triggering. And now, oh, wow. Yeah. God, my mom was doing that to all of us. All the time. She was so stressed out, you know, and I know what was going on then. And, and yeah, I can see.

But, you know, like you just start to see it differently. And then all of those domino effect. The domino effect of everything that you built on top of that. That all starts to fall away.

And. This works amazingly because you know what the thing is, is that the whole system, this whole system was created in our evolution to help us as children when we're in an environment to survive the adaptive child needs to adapt and survive the environment, but those tools that it created do not necessarily service as adults when we have agency, you can keep the wisdom of a past experience. Transcribed without needing the charge. So let's say you like to apply this to horses.

Let's say you had a accident on a horse, you know, you, you were riding your horses and then you have this terrible accident and you got really hurt or sometimes you didn't even have to get really hurt. Sometimes people have small accidents.

I'll also maybe like to do it in water, perhaps. You know, people have their different happy places, but obviously if wee horse people, that's ponies I could see. A double power because I could see, I could see a subconscious reaction going, Oh, well, I'm being listened to because I've been placed in the, even if it's by myself in the environment, that is the best for me. Sensorally, emotionally, and so on.

So I could see a real power in doing this with the horse, but I could also see what's great is that you could also do this completely without because, You're not always with the horse and as you say, you can do this over distance. What, what it seems that you're describing here is a shamanic process. So when I've had the experience with. Shamans in indigenous cultures, there is a, it's, it's usually conflict resolution and that conflict is often internal, but it can be also external.

So the shaman could be addressing conflict within the group, for example, or conflict between two people equally. It's conflict. You know, if there's a health issue, that's still a conflict, it's still a dilemma. And the idea is to resolve that dilemma. And I think that one of the things which is tricky for us, all of us in our culture, and by our culture I don't just mean Europe and America, I mean everything that is post agricultural in the world and is not hunter gatherer, basically.

Anything that has gone through this process of kind of, Becoming processed in a funny way. Removal from nature, which is also a deep wound. Is we've, we, we, we cannot be other than mentally ill in that situation. Because, so therefore we must all be, because we're all suffering, we're all animals in a cage. And sometimes the cage is nicer than the other cages, but it's still a cage.

And we lack community, and we lack the, the good shaman, but we also have gone from The predator being, or the danger being, obviously the lion, the tiger, the whatever, but also, say, the elephant or the black mamba. But not, in the hunter gatherer culture, your fellow human.

And the, even though humans are as funky in hunter gatherer life as they are in non hunter gatherer life, there is a process to defunkify and, keep those conflicts cleansed so that the community doesn't fragment and people don't get eaten by hyenas basically. Now we've replaced the hyena with ourselves and this sends us mad because it's not how it's supposed to be and yet we have to navigate this. And it's almost impossible.

It seems to me that what you're describing particularly with IEMT is a way to in our society have that shamanic conflict resolving cleansing reboot that allows you to navigate and that sounds incredibly useful. What I can also say is, you know, having tried it. Because remember in Birmingham, I was like, all right, then do it. And you threw it and you did take me through it and I was like, oh, that did actually take the sting out of that memory. That's cra That's amazing.

And it was so And then you

Like you have to have, you have to have all of the different ways that this can go and know how to navigate through to find Ways around these things because I've had to go all different directions. So because it was easy, like for me, as, as with you and really direct, like, I thought, oh, it's just going to be learning about the questions and how the, you know, to move people's eyes and, and that'll be it. But it's not to say that if you do this work, that.

As you, as you've done it, you're as a client that you can't take aspects of it and do it for yourself. And, and if you don't get the result, you know, like, you're not going to hurt yourself if you don't get the result. That you're looking for, then you would know that you maybe need some extra help on that. But yes, I think that once you experience it a few times or maybe more than a few, but like, then you can get a feel for it and use it.

And then perhaps we could join forces within the practice. Have that so let's say I mean obviously I'm in Germany you're in California but let's say you were down the road from me. I could see saying Okay, Christine. Could we join forces here? I'm doing this thing. This is this horse boy thing. This is this movement method things is this ticking thing Would you please can I please send clients to you or could you?

Come sometimes in certain sessions with certain people and bring that resource to the table. Is this, is it easy to find people who are trained like you are in this?

You know, these are all ways that, you know, who knows if that, you know, it doesn't, you don't have to have the horses because this is an inside job. You know, this is all about how you're, you know, Your mind and body are connected, but who knows ways that it could be expanded through actually being in the field with the horses or being there's so many, so many different things that you could try, you know, and I we are planning we have been planning.

We're going to do it this year, but now we're doing it next year. Is a retreat where I'm kind of the on the human realm and she's working on the horse realm and by pairing up we get to support people in the work that they're doing.

They want to do the work with the horses, but we all know our own personal work is just a Completely interwoven with that so not only the mentoring stuff and the other stuff, but if we come up against something that is rooted in that nervous system from a past memory, we could clear it out in real time and then what you're what what the people are there to learn about the horses. Doesn't have the roadblocks from the internal barriers anymore.

Like everything can, can actually sink in and be more accessible.

Maybe this would be something for professionals, you know, that coming from whatever side of the equine assisted field to be exposed to this. Something which we didn't get into, and we haven't got time to get into it now, because I think maybe we need to have you on again is I know that you've done a lot of work with addiction, people with addiction, celebrities with addiction. I know that you ended up building a large practice.

That's had to, you know, you've had to protect people's anonymities. You've worked sort of at that level a bit in Hollywood, and that's given you a, an insight into How tricky it can be. This word navigation comes up again to help people who are in the public sphere and therefore can't, you know, go out there and be frank about what they're facing and what they're dealing with.

Just because we're heading into towards towards the sort of natural end of this particular iteration, but I think we had to bring you back on. Can you just talk to us a little bit about. What that, how that has helped you, where you have to sort of, in your practice, where you have to help someone, but you also have to kind of keep it secret that you're helping them, that you have to, you have to dance around.

You're talking about eggshells, you know, that these are very real ones suddenly, where you actually have to protect the people that you're working with, and at the same time, you know, get them through what they're doing. How has that particular, those years of doing that, helped you to help ordinary people? More deeply because it just adds a layer of complexity.

And, you know, I don't even pretend that I know what that's like, but I can say that when I did go through the rest and was on the news and all of that stuff and sitting in the courtroom and in an unveil hearing the prosecutions can say anything about you without. And so the things that they said were horrifying to me. I wasn't prepared. I didn't know any of that.

And it felt like, and this was in the news, and I mean, it felt like you were hated by the world and you were being seen in a way that was not even true. And it's a very trippy feeling to have this like unknown, like faceless, you know, Enormity that now suddenly sees you has honed in on you and is projecting this negative energy towards you.

So, you know, there's a difference when you're dealing with someone who is a public figure in any way, because in addiction, you talk about, you know, there's a saying that says you're only as sick as your secrets. So there's an aspect of ownership of being true that goes with healing, but I can't tell someone else whether that's what their experience is going to be if they come out to the world and share this aspect with them because it doesn't look like a lot of that is always true.

Now, a lot of people who have done this have found that the amount of support they got way outweighed the negative comments, but this is more about. Navigating this internally and finding the forgiveness and finding the freedom and Knowing that that is your decision. I'm not sure if I answered that fully because I kind of just lost my train of thought

So we, that feeling of being susceptible to everyone else and everyone else's thoughts comes with us into adulthood, no matter how powerful we actually are. So then our reactions to people are oftentimes overblown. We feel attacked by different opinions.

Questioning can feel threatened by someone doing things differently or seeing things differently judged you know, it's that thing where we, we are, we can become very in tune with our own feelings or the feelings that we feel the animal is having and have a lot less compassion for the other person. How many times you hear people say, I. I love animals and I hate people. Yet we're people. You're a people. We're all a people.

And so either you have a grandiose version, view of yourself that feels like you're the only good person in the world and everyone else is terrible. Or you have internalized a real negative and unhealthy view of yourself as human. And either way, it's, it's, you know, you don't have community. You don't have. The beautiful aspects that you can only get from having a relationship with another human being.

And I wonder if that statement that gets made is a way of, is actually an unconscious statement of grief, when saying, you know, I love animals but I hate people, meaning, I seem to find with animals what I can't find with people, but what I know I ought to be able to find with people, because they are my species. And I feel this grief of being unable to connect with people.

With my species and this is a soul wound and I'm expressing it with these words Even though it's coming out in a weird way. Does that make sense?

Those of us listening definitely are all very curious about the IEMT. We're very curious about how you bring what you've learned about addiction and also hypnosis and so into perhaps ways we can inform our own practices and to do what we do better. I certainly am always looking for mentorship. How do we find you? How do we reach out to you? How do we engage you to help us learn this stuff?

Because look, I'm not saying that people can't be grind, you know, it, you know, when you see, especially if you identify with the horse's pain and suffering, and then you see people show up with the same ignorance, the same ignorance, the same ignorance, it's easy to lose your compassion for the person and connect with the feeling of that building on itself, instead of. Connecting with the idea that how great more and more people who believed this way are coming to learn things differently.

How great is that? As opposed to I can't believe another, you know, like there's and that's just one example. Like, it really it's a lot of the way we're viewing things that creates our own suffering.

our fellow professionals in the field in a sort of a not we're here to teach you stuff more like a let's explore. How we might want to deepen our practices Okay, brilliant. I

These include easy to do online courses and tutorials that bring you and your horse joy. For an overview of all shows and programs, go to rupert isaacson.com. See you on the next show. And please remember to press, subscribe and share.