When the Body Speaks

I was standing in an arena. Sand under my feet, a fence around me, and a horse along the far side, doing nothing in particular.

The coach asked how I was doing. "Yeah, fine," I said. The Dutch version, ja goed hoor, is even more dismissive than the English one. It's a sentence designed to close a conversation before it begins. I had said it a thousand times. At dinner tables. In meetings. To friends who might have actually wanted to know.

The horse lifted his head.

His name was Tygo. He wasn't trained to do therapy tricks. He didn't know my history, my research, my carefully constructed arguments about language and power. He was a horse. But the moment I said those words, he turned, ears forward, and looked straight at me.

Then he walked over. Not fast, not hesitant. Deliberate. He positioned himself behind me and curved his neck around until his head was level with mine, covering my head and my heart, like a shield. Or a permission slip.

And then something broke open that I had no vocabulary for.

Water ran from my eyes. Not crying in the way I understood crying. No sobs, no narrative, no "I'm sad because...". Just water. My shoulders dropped. A breath came out of me that felt like it had been held for years. Maybe it had.

I had spent my entire adult life in my head. That was where I lived. I could navigate five languages, decode political discourse, write academic papers in my sleep. My mind was the sharpest tool I had, and I had used it to build everything. My career, my identity, my sense of safety.

My body, by contrast, was just transport. It carried my brain from one meeting to the next. I fed it, moved it, occasionally noticed it was tired. But I did not listen to it. I didn't know that was something you could do.

Tygo knew.

What happened in that arena wasn't mystical. It was physiological. When I said "fine" but wasn't fine, my body was producing a signal. A mismatch between my words and my internal state. Humans are generally poor at detecting this. We are trained to take words at face value. Horses are not. They are prey animals. Their survival depends on reading the nervous systems of the creatures around them, not the narratives.

Tygo didn't hear "fine." He felt the tension in my fascia, the shallow pattern of my breathing, the cortisol running through my system. And he responded to that. Not to my performance.

This is what I later learned to call incongruence: the gap between what you project and what your body actually holds. For high-masking people, and I was one of them long before I had that language, this gap can be enormous. You learn early that the real signal isn't welcome. So you override it. You perform "fine" so convincingly that even you believe it.

Until a horse calls your bluff.

Standing there with Tygo's neck around me, I didn't understand any of this yet. I had no framework. No polyvagal theory, no knowledge of interoception or alexithymia, no concept of somatic release. I just stood in an arena and felt my body do something my mind hadn't authorised.

It was the most disorienting experience of my life. And the most honest one.

Because here is what I know now, after years of working with horses and with people who have spent their lives in their heads: the body keeps the score long before anyone writes the book. It stores what we override, archives what we suppress, and, if we are lucky, eventually finds a way to discharge it. Not through words. Through trembling, tears, breath, heat, cold, stillness.

Tygo didn't heal me that day. That would be too neat a story, and I don't trust neat stories. But he did something no human had managed in forty-odd years of conversation: he made my body visible to me. Not as transport. As intelligence.

That was the day I stopped sharpening the knife.

Not because language stopped mattering. It still does. I'm writing this, after all. But because I finally understood that the knowing I had been chasing wasn't going to arrive in a sentence. It had been in my body all along, waiting for me to stop talking long enough to feel it.

This is part 2 of the five-part series When Language Breaks. Previous: When Language Breaks · Next: When the Horse Responds