We’ve been wanting to write a blog for a while about pain. We see all kinds of pain at HorseBack, physical and mental, and we thought we would start with the pain in the mind.
This is the one you can’t see. It does not come with obvious scars. You might meet a veteran and they’ll say something casual about having been in Afghan and they will look whole – untouched by war, and the things seen. They’ll make jokes. They may appear strong. They don’t need a walking stick.
Inside, it can be a whole different story.
Mental pain can be as excruciating as physical pain. It can feel unrelenting, and mysterious, and impossible to counteract. People – and especially men, and especially men who have been in the services – tend not to talk about it. You’d feel an idiot if you said something like ‘My heart hurts’. And nobody would know what to say back to you. You don’t want to get the weird looks, so you keep it to yourself. You might not admit it to your family, because you don’t want to worry them. You won’t tell your friends because you don’t wish to be a bore. You will not say anything to your workmates, because you don’t want to appear weak.
Mental anguish is not weakness, but it can feel like it.
So everything gets hidden away and the weight of the extreme anxiety and the night-terrors and the hyper vigilance grows heavier, until it become too much to bear.
A lot of our veterans isolate, at this point. They can’t function easily in the world and they feel ashamed of that, and they hide away. The pain, feeding off loneliness, gets worse.
Sometimes, the effort of getting out of bed in the morning can feel like trying to climb Everest in bedroom slippers. Making normal conversation is as hard as addressing the United Nations. The sense of self disappears; any sense of purpose is lost. A darkness descends, and walking through an ordinary day is like fumbling through a smoke-filled room.
At HorseBack, we always say that we dwell on possibility rather than impossibility. We do hunt hard for silver linings. But that does not mean that we do not acknowledge the clouds. You cannot, unfortunately, just switch to a bit of positive thinking and breeze your way through the storm. You have to, in our experience, honour and acknowledge and even respect the negative, before you can move through it.
We have to look seriously at what our veterans are going through. We can’t wave it away with a magic wand. There is a reason they come to us. It is often because everything else they have tried has failed. So we see their pain, and we face their pain, and then we try to give them something else to focus on. We can’t change what has happened to them, but we can show them a different future.
The way we do this has manifold layers to it. We’ve spent years trying to work out whether there is one silver bullet, but there isn’t. We’ve watched people who were broken walk away from us with hope restored, and we’ve tried to understand how that happened. And we think it is a complex process.
First of all, when they get here, the veterans find kindred spirits. They are, for the first time in a long time, not alone. They don’t have to hide, or pretend, or fake being fine, because they are with other people who are not fine. That companionship gets rid of the shame, the fear of being judged.
Nobody judges, at HorseBack. The humans don’t, and the horses don’t either. The veterans find a huge freedom with the horses, because of this lack of judgment. These honest animals don’t care what brand of Post-Traumatic Stress you have got, or what medication you are taking. They take you just as you are, in that moment.
The in the moment thing helps a lot too. We work on stillness and anchoring yourself in the present: the veterans do this with the horses each morning, and it helps to build a new habit in the mind. You might not be able to wish away the gremlins in your head, but you can learn to turn them off, just for a while, and that is a streaming relief. It is also a habit you can build on, so it becomes easier and more automatic. It is why meditation has been shown to be so effective for improving mental health. At HorseBack, we get the veterans to do a kind of meditation with their equines, so that they remember what inner calm feels like.
Then there is a sense of purpose, which has often been lost. A veteran with life-changing injuries may feel that there is no purpose any more; there is no mission. We give them a mission, and they do it as a team – with the horses, with each other. As we often say, this is not a holiday camp. We ask serious questions, and get our veterans to learn new skills, and to do things, like getting on a horse and riding up a Scottish hill, which might alarm them a bit. As they face their fears and find their purpose, we see a new confidence and strength flow into them.
There are many other things we do here, but this is getting ridiculously long, so we’ll finish now, with one of the most important parts of the recovery plan, and that is laughter.
Veterans have a very particular sense of humour. It is often quite dark, a dry gallows humour which got them through their service. It is sometimes difficult for civilians to understand. At HorseBack, they can make the worst jokes, and everyone falls about in hilarity. It’s not just the merriment that makes the difference, it’s the feeling that nobody is going to stare in incomprehension. Someone wise once said that one of the greatest feelings in the world is being got. Everyone gets it, here. Our veterans are among friends, who speak their language. And that gives them a sense of coming home.
So yes, there is pain. We don’t shy away from that. But there is a way through the darkness, and that is what we help our veterans find. That is what gives us our own sense of purpose, our own meaning, and our satisfaction in a job worth doing.
