Hi, I’m Caitlin.
How I Came to This Work
I have spent much of my life interested in what helps us create meaningful change.
When life is difficult, how do we stay connected to ourselves and to what matters? How do we find a sense of meaning, purpose or direction? And how do we develop the capacity and courage to move toward it, even when the way forward is uncertain?
I became especially curious about what happens when our own experience becomes difficult to be with.
We avoid. Numb. Distract. Push through. Look outside ourselves for answers. Often, these responses make sense. They help us get through something we may not yet have the capacity or support to be with.
But I wanted to understand what else might become possible.
What happens when we can stay with our experience long enough to become curious about it? To notice what it might be showing us? To have more choice in how we respond?
And how do we become more able to meet what life brings––through its challenges, its changes, and its joys?
These questions began as personal ones. Eventually, they became part of my professional life too.
I became a clinical social worker and spent years working alongside people carrying profound experiences of trauma. I studied, trained, specialized and eventually opened my own private practice. I cared deeply about the work, and I saw meaningful change happen.
But over time, my questions began to deepen. I became less interested in having more answers and more curious about what helps someone discover their own.
What becomes possible when we learn to trust our own experience as a source of information?
Horses had been quietly leading me toward that question for years.
Early in my career, I worked in a residential program where I watched young women receive something through their relationships with horses that we as professionals, despite all our training and good intentions, could not seem to give them.
A horse could communicate something, and somehow it landed differently.
Something could be reflected back to them without the weight of treatment, authority, or expectation. And somehow, they could receive it.
There was simply a relationship and something true could happen inside of it.
I didn't fully understand what I was witnessing then.
But I knew, even then, that horses would somehow become part of my own work one day.
I just didn't know what that would look like yet.
Following Another Way
The things I was exploring in my own life were already finding their way into my professional work.
Alongside my clinical training, I studied mindfulness, explored the principles of Buddhism and spent time in nature. While working with veterans at the VA, I developed a mindfulness protocol for treating trauma.
I was becoming interested in what existed beyond talking about our experiences and understanding them intellectually. I didn't yet have the language or framework for much of what I was sensing, but I kept following it.
Over the years, I explored different approaches to working alongside horses. Each offered something while also helping me become clearer about what mattered to me: work that honored the experience of the horse as much as the human, and that paid attention to what the body was communicating rather than asking either to push through.
When I found EQUUSOMA®, with its grounding in Somatic Experiencing®, something I had been reaching toward for a long time came into sharper focus.
There was less emphasis on figuring everything out or searching through the story for the thing that needed to be fixed.
Instead, there was the body.
Sensation. Movement. Impulse. Curiosity. Relationship.
There was an intelligence there that didn't require me to manufacture an answer.
And there was something deeply relieving about that.
I began to understand my role differently too.
Perhaps my work was not to have all the answers, but to help create the conditions in which someone could discover what was already there and what might become possible.
What the Horses Taught Me
The horses took that understanding somewhere deeper.
Over the years, I have experienced things in their presence that I cannot always explain neatly. Moments of connection, knowing, recognition, and change that have made me increasingly willing to trust what can be felt and experienced, even when it cannot immediately be put into words.
They have taught me about relationships too.
Horses do not need our stories about who we are.
They meet what is here.
Again and again, horses have brought me back to presence, to the body, to relationship and to a way of knowing that feels quieter than thought.
But perhaps no horse has asked me to live these ideas more fully than my mustang, Stella.
My relationship with her required me to question many of the things I had been taught about what progress should look like and who gets to decide how progress is defined.
There were moments when it would have been easier to defer to someone else's expertise, to follow a prescribed path, or to see her as a problem that needed solving.
Instead, I brought her home. I began meeting the horse in front of me rather than the horse someone else believed she was.
We slowed down. I learned to pay attention. To advocate for her. To tolerate not knowing.
To let our relationship unfold without forcing it toward someone else's version of progress.
And somewhere inside that process, something unexpected happened.
In learning to trust her, I learned to trust myself.
Stella asked me to live what I had been coming to believe: to meet another being with reverence for the intelligence of their own experience, and to let that intelligence matter even when others doubted or disagreed.
Truly seeing and hearing her did not make me passive.
It asked something of me.
The courage to trust what I was seeing. To make choices others might not understand. And to take ownership of those choices regardless of the outcome. To move forward and trust that I will find my footing along the way, one step at a time, without the need to already have the answer.
Sometimes the most meaningful thing we can offer is not an answer or a script, but the conditions for something else to emerge.
The horses weren't simply becoming part of my work.
They were changing my understanding of what the work was.
What I Have Come to Trust
Since then, my path has continued to widen.
My studies have taken me further into somatic practice, Reiki, intuitive bodywork, energy, and the relationship between humans, horses, and the natural world.
What once may have seemed like separate threads have become increasingly connected for me.
I have come to trust the intelligence of the body. The importance of relationship. The ways we can know something before we can explain it.
I don't see myself as a healer.
I don't believe healing is something I possess and give to another person. I believe people and horses carry their own capacities for healing, connection, adaptation and aliveness.
My role is to tend the conditions with intention and care.
Part of that role is paying close attention.
I notice the small shifts that can be easy to miss. A breath that deepens. A jaw that softens. A moment of hesitation. A subtle change in posture or expression. I pay attention to the horses, to the environment, and to what is happening between us.
Sometimes I may bring something I notice into our shared awareness, not to tell you what it means, but to invite you to notice what is happening for you.
There is something important to me about being deeply attended to without being analyzed or defined. To have someone notice the subtle things without deciding what they mean for you. To feel seen without being interpreted.
I may notice. I may become curious. I may offer something back to you that you hadn't noticed yourself.
But I don't need to turn what I notice into an explanation of who you are.
I can wonder with you. Your experience remains your own.
I bring what I know about the nervous system, the body, relationship and energy. I pay attention to what is unfolding. I offer invitations, notice what might otherwise go unseen, and follow what emerges with curiosity. I listen to my intuition. I trust the horses.
I participate fully, without assuming I know what the experience needs to become.
And sometimes, part of that is knowing when to get out of the way.
After years spent inside rooms talking about what it means to be human, much of my work now happens outside.
Among horses. Under open sky. In relationship with bodies, seasons, instinct, energy, curiosity, and the things we cannot always explain.
It feels less like leaving my former work behind and more like following it somewhere more expansive.
Background
& Training
My professional background is in clinical social work and trauma treatment. Over the years, my education has expanded to include somatic and equine-facilitated approaches, EQUUSOMA®, Reiki and intuitive bodywork.
That background informs the way I see, understand and hold this work, but the offerings you will find here are intentionally different from my clinical practice.
Horse Wisdom Sessions and Somatic Immersions are non-clinical experiences. They are not psychotherapy and are not provided under my clinical license.
They are spaces for something else.
A different way of being in relationship with yourself.
With the horses.
With the natural world.
And, perhaps, with what you already know.
EQUUSOMA® Practitioner (ESP)
EQUUSOMA® has been one of the most formative influences on the way I understand both humans and horses.
Earning the EQUUSOMA® Practitioner (ESP) designation was the culmination of four years of intensive training, practice, consultation, personal work and evaluation.
Grounded in Somatic Experiencing®, EQUUSOMA brings together an understanding of the nervous system, trauma, attachment, relationship and equine behavior to explore what happens within and between humans and horses.
At its heart is a deep respect for the experience, agency and wellbeing of both humans and horses.
That understanding is woven deeply into the way I work today.