The Vertical Axis

On what horses taught me that therapy hadn't, and what that has to do with faith.

The first time I understood what I had been missing, I wasn't in a therapy room. I was standing in a field with a horse, and I had just told him I was fine. He didn't hear "fine". He registered the tension in my fascia, the shallow pattern of my breathing, the cortisol in my system, and he responded to what was actually there. I have told that story elsewhere (When the Body Speaks). This article is about what it means.

What the horse did that day was more than read my incongruence. He introduced me to a dimension that the frameworks I knew did not have a place for. I have since built a method on it, and I want to set out here, as precisely as I can, what that dimension is, why two axes are not enough, and where the clinical and the theological descriptions of it meet without collapsing into each other.

Two axes are not enough

Most therapeutic and coaching frameworks operate on two axes.

The first is nervous system regulation: what is happening inside the client. Arousal, affect, interoception, the window of tolerance, the contents of the self. This is the prerequisite. A dysregulated system cannot make reliable contact with anything.

The second is relational contact: what happens between people. Attachment, co-regulation, boundaries, reciprocity, transference, the field between practitioner and client. This is the medium.

These two axes account for most of what Western psychology has developed over the past century. They are real and they matter. But in my experience, first as a client and then as a practitioner, they are not sufficient.

There is a third. I call it vertical orientation, or the vertical axis. It is the client in relation to something that does not need them to perform, produce, or be good. Something that is present without requiring anything in return. Something larger than the therapeutic relationship, larger than the self, that the nervous system registers before the mind has formed an opinion about it. Regulation answers the question "can this system settle?". Contact answers "can it be met?". The vertical axis answers a question the other two do not ask: once it no longer has to survive, towards what does it orient? For the secular reader the answer can stay as bare as the question needs: towards that which is there before it is named. Estin ti. There is something. What it is comes after.

The first part of this is measurable. When a person stands in a field where horses graze and birds move undisturbed, their nervous system receives a signal that evolution has been calibrating for hundreds of thousands of years: if I were not safe, the animals would flee. Through neuroception, the autonomic nervous system's unconscious detection of safety or threat (Porges, 2004), the body receives continuous cues from the regulated states of the prey animals around it. It settles before the client has said a word. This is co-regulation at a scale the consulting room cannot replicate.

What the horse said to me that day, without a word, was something no human in my life had managed to say convincingly: you do not have to hold this alone.

The measurable dimension

The literature on equine-assisted work documents the mechanism, if not yet the full picture (Kendall et al., 2015). Horses act as somatic mirrors and nervous system co-regulators. As prey animals highly attuned to environmental threat, they respond to human physiological states, heart rate variability, breathing, muscle tension, rather than to verbal content or social performance. When a client says "I'm fine" while their autonomic system signals distress, the horse responds to the somatic truth rather than the narrative.

This creates something talk-based work cannot: a non-collusive witness. The horse does not accept the performance. It does not punish the truth. It responds to what is present.

For clients with high-masking patterns, including autistic masking (Hull et al., 2017), alexithymia, dissociative adaptations, or trauma-based hypervigilance to social cues, this breaks a fundamental impasse. The usual relational work assumes the client can access and report their internal state. But when the entire adaptive strategy has been to override internal signals in favour of external demands, that access may be genuinely blocked.

The vertical axis bypasses the block. It does not ask "what do you feel?". It creates conditions in which the nervous system can register safety and begin to settle without verbal access or narrative justification.

The theological dimension

I want to be precise here, because imprecision is where this kind of work loses credibility.

The vertical axis is not inherently religious. A secular client experiences it as nature, as scale, as the felt sense of being part of something that was here before them and will be here after. That is physiologically real and therapeutically significant on its own terms. Frankl's will to meaning (1946/2006) is a clinical description of the same axis: what sustains a person when there is nothing left to survive.

But for those of us whose framework includes a Creator, the vertical axis is not only an evolutionary mechanism. It is a door.

The bodily experience one client names as regulation through environmental cues, another experiences as being held within creation, held by the One who made both the field and the body that knows how to read it. Same nervous system process. Same measurable settling. Different interpretive horizon.

These are not two different mechanisms pretending to be the same thing. It is one embodied reality that can be truthfully described at several levels: neurobiological, ecological, existential, theological. An integrative approach does not collapse these levels into each other or privilege one as more real. It recognises that a human being standing in a field with a horse is at the same time a nervous system receiving co-regulatory signals, a relational being experiencing non-demanding presence, a creature within creation, and, for some, a soul being reminded that it is known and held.

All of these descriptions are true. None cancels the others.

Why this matters clinically

The vertical axis explains something two-axis models struggle with: why some clients make significant progress in nature-based, animal-assisted or contemplative settings when conventional therapy has plateaued.

It is not that regulation work or relational work failed. It is that for some presentations, complex trauma, autism with high masking, dissociative adaptations, existential crisis, the missing element is not more insight or better attachment repair. The missing element is a regulated, non-demanding context larger than the therapeutic dyad.

When both practitioner and client are human, both carry the evolutionary and cultural weight of social evaluation, performance and reciprocal demand. Even in the safest therapeutic relationship, there is a relational field that has to be managed. The vertical axis introduces something that makes no social demand, carries no evaluation, and offers presence without expectation of return.

For the client who has spent their whole life reading and managing others, this is not just relief. It is access to a dimension of experience they may never have known was possible.

The dark night and the dimensional problem

There is a pattern many clinicians will recognise. The intelligent, sensitive patient who has done the work, the therapy, the medication, the self-development, the reading, and who arrives not better but hollower. Not because the frameworks failed on their own terms. Because they were two-dimensionally complete and therefore, eventually, unbearable.

The ego is a horizontal construction. Identity, narrative, relational positioning, achievement. It is built for the flat plane. It has no load-bearing capacity for the vertical axis; it was not designed for it. Contact with the vertical does not strengthen the ego. It renders it insufficient. That is why it can feel like destruction.

This is what the mystical tradition in Christianity has been trying to say. The dark night of the soul (John of the Cross, 1578/1991) is not the absence of God. It is the collapse of the two-dimensional structure that was substituting for the vertical axis. The structure was load-bearing. It was not built for the weight. The dissolution is not the problem. It is the threshold.

One presentation deserves naming on its own terms. Not the person in acute crisis, but the person who has done significant work: years of therapy, nervous system regulation, spiritual practice. They hold the language. They understand the map. And they arrive bewildered, because they are back at the wall and do not know why.

This is the bypass that presented as completion. Not avoidance; they did not flee the difficulty. They went through something real. But the passage they completed was not the full passage. A regulated nervous system, a repaired attachment, a more coherent narrative: these are genuine gains. They are not the crossing. The crossing costs the ego its load-bearing status, and it cannot be done gradually, manageably, or without knowing what is being lost. The person who had the regulated version, the metabolised version, the gently held version, may not know, even now, that what they had was the preparation and not the thing itself.

The clinical question is therefore not how to go deeper. It is whether the person knows which passage they had. The naming is not judgment. It is the map that makes the next movement possible.

The implication, and I offer it as a suspicion from practice rather than a finding, is this: a portion of what presents as treatment-resistant depression, existential crisis, or late-stage burnout in intelligent, sensitive people may not be a pathology of the first two axes at all. It may be a dimensional problem. If so, more insight will not solve it, and better attachment repair will not solve it, because what is missing is a dimension the available frameworks do not have the ontology to address. That is a hypothesis. It is testable, and I would rather it were tested than believed.

The horses are a back door to it. Pre-verbal, pre-theological, undeniable. You cannot argue with what your nervous system does when a horse comes towards you.

Practical implications

Recognise the limits of the consulting room. Some nervous system states cannot be reached through talk, or even through somatic work in enclosed spaces. The vertical axis may require actual access to non-human co-regulators: animals, landscape, open sky.

Take the longing for nature and animals seriously as clinical information. When a client says "I feel most myself alone in the woods" or "my dog understands me better than people do", that is not avoidance. It may be the only context in which they have found the vertical axis. That warrants exploration, not normalising away.

For faith-integrated work: the vertical axis is a bridge between embodied therapeutic process and spiritual practice. The neurobiological and the theological are not competing explanations. They describe the same event at different levels of resolution. Both deserve to be held.

Understand masking as a vertical axis deficit. High-masking clients have often lost access to any environment that does not require performance. Restoration may need to begin there, rebuilding access to the vertical before deeper relational or regulation work becomes possible.

A note on what I hold and what I know

I believe in the vertical axis as a door to the Creator. I do not claim to know this in the way I know that co-regulation is measurable or that masking has a neural architecture. The distinction matters. Faith that presents itself as knowledge is a different thing, and often a harmful one.

What I can do is name the door and point towards it. Who has ears to hear will find what is on the other side. I am not the saviour. I am not even the guide. I am a namer, a pointer, someone who has stood at the threshold long enough to say with some confidence: this is real, this is here, and you do not have to cross it alone.

The rest is not mine to give.

Closing

The horse didn't fix me. He showed me what I had been missing: a world that didn't need me to be anything other than what I was. A presence that registered truth and responded with steady, non-demanding attention.

That is the vertical axis. And for some of us it is not optional. It is the ground on which everything else becomes possible.

References

• Frankl, V. E. (2006). Man's search for meaning. Beacon Press. (Original work published 1946)
• Hull, L., Petrides, K. V., Allison, C., Smith, P., Baron-Cohen, S., Lai, M.-C., & Mandy, W. (2017). "Putting on my best normal": Social camouflaging in adults with autism spectrum conditions. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 47(8), 2519–2534. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-017-3166-5
• John of the Cross. (1991). The dark night. In K. Kavanaugh & O. Rodriguez (Trans.), The collected works of St. John of the Cross. ICS Publications. (Original work written c. 1578)
• Kendall, E., Maujean, A., Pepping, C. A., Downes, M., Lakhani, A., Byrne, J., & Macfarlane, K. (2015). A systematic review of the efficacy of equine-assisted interventions on psychological outcomes. European Journal of Psychotherapy & Counselling, 17(1), 57–79. https://doi.org/10.1080/13642537.2014.996169
• Porges, S. W. (2004). Neuroception: A subconscious system for detecting threats and safety. Zero to Three, 24(5), 19–24.
• Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. W. W. Norton.