Tank’s Anxiety

I missed a day for Tank's lessons so i'm going to do a lesson that had lots of little lessons within it. These lessons from Tank are to honor her teachings in her last few weeks with us.

Tank taught me she can be a very brave girl when facing 1 challenge. She says "I can handle this, that, OR the other thing, but when they are all too close together it's too much". I discovered if we work on or get past 1 scary situation, it takes a good deal of time before she can handle a second, even if its much smaller and something she can usually handle well.

I have come to learn through science that when fear hormones spike, cortisol and adrenaline, they stay at this level for some time, very slowly reducing back to baseline. But if something else happens to trigger fear it will ADD on top of what was already there. So while she could typically handle Thing A and Thing B separately and work through her anxieties, if they come too close together or even if something much smaller, can send her right over threshold at times i didn't expect.

This often caused explosive and dramatic spooks from Tank that I didn't see coming. She's fine with X why is she spooking at it today? Oh because an hour ago she spooked at Y and her hormones haven't come down to baseline yet.

This also taught me that a horse like Tank who has Trauma, her baseline is a much higher level of stress than a normal horse and much closer to threshold. She is living on the edge, literally, so we get accustomed to seeing her on the edge of threshold and don't always realize she's just doing her best to keep herself together.

This taught me to take her fear much more seriously, and have more empathy for the level of stress she is living with. So she needs help regulating her body when she spooks. This taught me the benefit of feeding the spook. If she spooks, i feed her. We can't reinforce spooking because it's an involuntary behavior. So when we feed the spook we reinforce the horse coming back to us, checking in with us, and we help them begin re-regulating their body.

We don't JUST feed the spook, after that, we stop and work on an easy, safe, known behavior, like head down, back up, touch target. We get her mind shifted back from fear/flight and back into seeking/problem solving. This helps bring her hormones back down to baseline a little more quickly, though it can still take mannnyyyy hours. So keep it in mind.

She has become a confident queen, but when something startles her, her first response is to check in with me and offer some safe behavior. Because this has become such our pattern. This showed me the importance of heavily conditioning those basics. Don't just train the easy stuff, condition it until it becomes self-soothing to do that well loved, highly reinforced behavior.