About us

Eefje Gilbert is a horse-assisted trauma coach at a força, with a background in linguistics, fieldwork in Africa and IT architecture. She works with Myrna and Easter, two mares with very different characters. Every setting taught her the same thing: real change only begins once people stop performing.

Eefje, Easter & Myrna

a força is not a one-woman business. There are three of us. Eefje does the intake, the translating and the admin. Myrna and Easter do the rest.

Eefje Gilbert

From language to body. from boardroom to arena.

I spent years studying language. Colour research among the ≠Akhoe Hai//om (a Khoisan language) in Namibia, and social fieldwork among the Bagyeli in Cameroon. I believed that if you made language precise enough, you could understand reality.

Until I discovered that some truths do not live in language.

In Kribi, Cameroon, I watched communities being uprooted by a deep-sea port. I could document it, analyse it, name it. But the language I had learned did not touch what I felt there. That was not a language problem. It was a liminal experience: the edge of what words can carry.

Together with Prof. Dr Mirjam de Bruijn I founded Voice4Thought, which connects academic research with art and activism in conflict areas. After that I moved into (digital) transformation and IT architecture.

Meetings, fieldwork, boardrooms, ITIL, ArchiMate, change management… Every setting taught me the same thing: real change only begins once people stop performing and become honest about what is really going on.

The horses taught me that this honesty is not negotiable.

How I ended up here

My first session with a horse was as a client. I said “I'm fine”, and the horse walked up to me and curved its neck around my head and heart. My shoulders dropped. My eyes filled. I had said nothing. But my body had shown everything.

That moment changed the direction of my work. The body has an intelligence of its own. An embodied intelligence. To my mind, that is the definition of wisdom. I don't mean this as a metaphor; I state it as fact. Polyvagal theory, interoception, co-regulation: the science confirmed what the horses had shown me.

Today I work with people for whom talking isn't enough. High-masking individuals who compensated for years until they no longer could. Professionals with PTSD. Teams stuck in patterns nobody can name.

What I stand for

Trauma is stored in the body and can only be released there. That is not a belief, it is biology. Talking helps, but the body has the last word.

Trust begins with yourself. Not as a motivational slogan, but as a starting point. Someone who is not trustworthy towards themselves gets stuck — in relationships, in work and in recovery alike.

I work faith-sensitively. For those whose faith or sense of meaning is part of their recovery, it is welcome here. Not pastoral care, but room for what is at play beyond the visible.

Background

Research Master African Languages and Cultures, Leiden University. Fieldwork on Khoisan languages, Cameroon. Co-founder of Voice4Thought. Digital transformation and IT architecture. Horse-assisted trauma coach, UWV reintegration specialist. Founder of the Train-the-Trainer programme on neurodivergence & horse-assisted coaching. Founding Member, The Octopus Movement.

Languages: Dutch, English, French and, of course, beginner's Portuguese.

From spring 2027 also in Tomar, Portugal.