[Open Eyes]

https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/can-...130038831.html

This article really means a lot to me on so many levels. I had rescued and found different ponies and brought them home and trained them and I slowly built up my own little farm where I used these ponies to work with very young children including my own child that struggled with dyslexia and in that faced a lot of challenges where she was often made fun of for learning differently. So, seeing that she loved riding and showed a lot of talent when it came to that, I kept her engaged with that and at the same time I worked with other children and I also took my ponies out and went to homes where different children struggled with all kinds of challenges and disabilities and got to ride my amazingly safe pony even though the children were often wheelchair bound or were severely autistic where they could not even talk or function or had braces on their legs or one child I would go and spend time with had a rare brain disease where as he was growing his brain was slowly dying.

Everything I worked so hard for was destroyed and damaged because my neighbor, even though they were told how important it was to contain their dogs failed to listen and when their containment system broke they failed to do the right thing and fix it and when they saw me leave to go out with my ponies, they let their dog loose where it came to my farm and targeted all my ponies and horses running them down leaving me to deal with so many different injuries, they choked, coliced, tore ligaments, tore suspensories, one fractured his pelvis, suffered a damaged hip joint and tore his ligaments all down his leg. They were all lame and everything changed on my farm and I was so overwhelmed by all the damage and sad, sad endings.

I went from getting up everyday and working with children and doing so many positive things to waking up every morning to so many injured ponies and horses and I had to medicate them and hand walk them and one pony I was giving her IV treatment three times a day and walking her where these same neighbors literally tried to hit me with their car THEY WERE SO MEAN.
And there I was with this little pony with a catheter in her neck and all I was doing was trying SO HARD to save her. I walked so much I developed planters facetious in both my feet and it got SO HARD to walk and function and I had to get injections and buy special sneakers fitted with custom made orthotics.

I did not get much sleep and every day was long and sad and exhausting both physically and emotionally. And then I got so I just could not function and get up and go out there and face it all and I ended up experiencing a post traumatic breakdown. I had lost the pony I had been trying so hard to save and she tried so hard too, she always tried and always tried for me.

Truth is I got so bad that I wanted to die because I could not stand all the emotional pain and I was so exhausted. My daughter's horse suffered torn suspensories front and back in his legs and I had to watch her devastated and struggling how to process it. I found my husband crying in the woods because of how badly damaged his beautiful white pony was that he took out as he too loved children and had wanted to work with special needs children but he had dyslexia and struggled so much in college that he gave up. When he went to college there was no help for how he struggles.

Everything I worked so hard for and loved so deeply was my way of creating something that I used in a positive THERAPEUTIC way. It ran very deep in me and all the way back to witnessing all the abuse my older brother suffered simply because he struggled with a learning disability. Truth is MY ENTIRE life has been trying to HELP individuals who struggle with learning disabilities and how this struggle affects their personal self esteem.

These individuals carry pain and SHAME for something that really is NOT THEIR FAULT. Truth is I witnessed this when I was little EVERY SINGLE DAY as I watched my older brother endure so much abuse from other children and ALL HIS TEACHERS too. My parents were advised by a psychiatrist to deal with him by NOT coddling him, but instead to consistently discipline him.

When one reads all the red flags that a child is being ABUSED and NEGLECTED, psychologically and physically, my older brother exhibited ALL OF THEM. He would suck his thumb all night long in an effort to self sooth so he could sleep. His lips would get so swollen and blistered and would bleed and all that did was lead to the other children chanting at him on the bus where he was called big lips, ugly lips and that he had kooties and he was ugly and no one would sit with him. He would sit next to the window staring out and trying to hide the tears that were running down his face. My mother had to use shower curtains on his bed and also on the floor because he would pee his bed EVERY NIGHT. His room always had that odor to it even though my mother would try to keep it clean.

Everyone was ANGRY at him because they could not MAKE him fit into what THEY FELT he should be. When I struggle though all these different flashbacks that come forward in fragments all these YEARS later, a lot of what I struggle with is how my own life was deeply affected by always being attached to an individual that struggled with these major challenges and how I was constantly identified by these other challenged individuals in a negative light. My entire childhood, I did not really have my own name, instead my identity was there is X's sister.

When I was in grammar school, I had ALWAYS had this very deep feeling that even though I was learning that it would never be right because of how SOMETHING IN THE BEGINNING was MISSING. I could never say exactly what it was either, I felt it always and I remember thinking that whatever it was I had to learn to JUST live with it. The other thing I struggled with is that if I actually did well on a test that it would become expected of me and because of what I had been witnessing every day "every morning" on that bus and also all day long as I would see glimpses of my older brother being punished, that I would not have it in me to be able to maintain getting higher test scores.

There was something I had to also pay attention to that I was NEVER able to talk about. I had to be able to tell when my older brother would get to a point where he could not take it and needed to VENT. Those were the days that I had to run and hide from him. I always knew to the depths of me that it was NEVER his fault. I also knew that if I tried to tell that all that would happen is that he would end up being punished and abused even more and to the depths of me I knew that he was already being hurt too much and anything more would break him.

My older brother did not have ANY friends, he did not have ANYONE. I felt SO BAD for him that I took it upon myself to be his ONLY friend. I had to do this in a way where my older sister did not know, because my older sister hated him, she hated him from the moment my mother brought him home as a baby. My sister wanted me to hate him too, and she would threaten that if I was nice to him and played with him that she would be mean to me. Ironically, that dynamic NEVER CHANGED.

One of the things that I have noticed about myself as I have been dealing with so many triggers and flashbacks, both visual and emotional, is that what I tended to do with all that I witnessed and experienced myself was I took away, "that is mean and hurtful and I will have to remember that so I don't treat others that way and hurt them". What I wanted to learn from all the traumatic things I had witnessed is why others can be so mean, how can they gain any pleasure from it, and how can I learn from all this so I can "help" instead of hurt.

My entire childhood I prayed for God to send someone to HELP my older brother. I tended to feel tired and weary in that I had been the only one that was his friend and who tried to "help" him. I SO WANTED an adult to come into his life that could take over and give him more because I was too young to know how to REALLY help him the way I knew he deserved to be helped.

When I created my farm and rescued and found these ponies and horses, it all was part of having a genuine PURPOSE. It was my way of taking all the trauma I had experienced and witnessed my entire life and building something I could use to help not only my own little family, but also other children in ways that I had wanted for not only my older brother, but also for myself. Every child that walked away from me after I spent time with them walked away feeling good about themselves. This is what I had wanted to see happen to my older brother MY ENTIRE CHILDHOOD. Every time I visited a family that was trying to help their challenged child FEEL good and have some QUALITY in their life, I was doing for those children what I had wanted to do for my older brother.

When everything I worked so hard for and all these animals that I grew to love so much that I could never have done what I was doing without them was destroyed just broke me to the depths of me.

I ended up in a psych ward because I was completely exhausted both emotionally, psychologically and physically. YET, I was treated like I was being BAD for experiencing so much grief that it completely incapacitated me.
My records say that I should not have been as affected the way I was and that I was wrong to place so much value in what I lost too. Outpatient only continued these criticisms and I have my records to prove it.

Truth is it was so bad that I ended up experiencing dangerous suicidal impulses. I genuinely felt that there was SO MUCH hurt and that the gravity of the depth of this hurt that really goes all the way back in ME, would NEVER be understood, and that no one could possibly understand it and help me GRIEVE. At that point the messages I was getting from EVERYONE including so called professionals was how I needed to NOT FEEL SO MUCH and that I was being bad for needed THAT MUCH to feel and GRIEVE. I was convinced that my pain would only be a HUGE burden on others and that it would be best for others if I ceased to exist.

The truth is that when my husband came to pick me up from the psych ward, he was angry and it was CLEAR to me that even though I was even more exhausted then when I went in that place that only traumatized me even more that I had to find SOME WAY of pushing it all down deeper than ever before in my entire life and find the strength to go back to all that mess that had broken me down in the first place. Doing that only made me worse because it was once again all about loss and sadness and constantly being reminded and what I eventually learned is also constantly being triggered too. It was not just me that had triggers, truth is all my ponies and horses were afraid and I had to make sure they were all put in at night because they were all afraid of the dark as that is when they were traumatized and got hurt. Then I had to find ways to block them all from being able to see my neighbors dog because when the could see that dog they would get all upset and I watched them experience EXACTLY what I was experiencing myself.

One day, I was alone and in the barn cleaning stalls because of how they all would get upset if I did not make sure they were all put in when it got dark. I had put my daughter's horse out in a small paddock, he had suffered torn suspensories and he had to be put out but in a small paddock so he would not run around as his suspensories needed a lot of time to heal. Next thing I knew I heard loud noises and when I went outside to see what the noise was about, this horse saw my neighbors dog and just being able to see it frightened him so badly that he tried to jump out of this paddock over the gate and did not make it. He had landed on the gate and literally bent it in half and was literally sitting on this bent part that created a kind of shelf. I was alone and when I saw him stuck like that I had no idea what to do. But he ended up slowly sliding off where he landed on the ground. I just stood there in shock and was so afraid he may have hurt himself really bad and may have even broken a leg which is a death sentence for a horse. But he managed to stand up and began to walk off, then he trotted up a small hill and on that small hill I watched him stand like a statue and stare at my neighbor's dog. He stood there FROZEN and his entire body was shaking.
I experience this myself. When one is staring at the very thing that traumatized them badly, YES, it causes that FROZEN and SHAKING to happen.

He was shaking and I was shaking and we were both FROZEN in fear. And I don't know how I did it, but I managed to catch him and put him in his stall and I PRAYED that he did not suffer even more damage and I also knew how expensive it was going to be to find out, that is something I KNOW OH SO WELL.

This horse was NEVER a spooky horse and he NEVER had any fear of dogs. Yet, that all changed and when people ask "why can't I JUST like I used to", I can relate, but what I can also say is this is what TRAUMA does, not only to a human being but also to animals too. I really wish I had the technology that so many have now where I could have used my phone to record what I witnessed that day. And all that I witnessed CHANGE from all my ponies and horses being traumatized by my neighbors dog that changed them ALL and changed me too.

One of the challenges I have is when I share my feelings, when I vent my feelings is that I genuinely feel that if I do that, especially if I do that wrong in any way that I will be PUNISHED in some way, that I will be criticized and told "don't repeat, don't talk about it anymore, stop grieving".

I don't "just" have PTSD from this trauma, I have complex PTSD from all the traumas I endured in my past too. I have complex PTSD that has challenged me with so many flashbacks that go all the way back. And I am SLOWLY realizing that I had tried to take all of the things I had witnessed that did traumatize me and I created something to be THERAPEUTIC and helpful to so many others on so many levels. So many children I helped, even my own child and my husband with his challenges. I even have shared a video of a Mustang I rescued who was abused and neglected, hit so hard in the face that he is missing part of his jaw and I had to save up so he could have surgery to extract the teeth his had dangling with nothing left to be attached to. Ironically every person captured in that video had challenges where each one of them had been hurt including MYSELF. When I read about how this woman reacted when she saw this abused animal, that is exactly how I felt about this Mustang that I rescued. He was SO AFRAID of people yet he also wanted to trust too. Each person in that video was helping him to trust and learn how to do a lot of things with people even though he had such a challenged history.

It's so nice to see an article where someone else is recognizing what I had been doing long before it began being recognized for having such a tremendous therapeutic value. I had TRIED so hard to explain it and my effort just ended up with writing in my records that kept saying I should not have placed so much value in what I had lost and that it was wrong of me to feel so much GRIEF.

[Open Eyes]

Well, just figured I would share the video that has this Mustang's journey that I rescued.
Each individual you see has/had challenges where they were hurt themselves. You can also see some of my farm too. This Mustang had to first learn how to trust and we all worked on that with him, there is a brief picture of me dressed in my puffy winter coat and hat working with him in my ring and he is coming up to me finally knowing I will be nice to him and he can trust.

If you pay attention he has a freeze brand on his neck as he was captured in the wild and this brand tells when, where and his age at capture. We put a lot of time into training him and in this video he is learning how to do a lot of different things so he is still just learning. He learned a lot and the past two years he has been free leased to a Dressage trainer for her son who also had/has learning challenges has been riding and learning on him. And these individuals also understand that he will always be sensitive and to make sure he continues to be treated in understanding respectful ways. He changes colors because he was shaved so we could work him without him getting too hot from having a winter coat that makes it harder to cool down when in work and training.

This is a video of one of my ponies being trained, he suffered suspensory damage in both front legs that resulted from my neighbor's dog.

The girl riding him was one of my students that struggles with panic attacks and struggles from growing up in a home challenged by having an alcoholic parent. This video taken was of this pony's very first experience at a horse show competition (dressage horse show).