My Story

I know what it’s like to have nerves in the saddle. I know what it’s like to feel “not good enough” around the boarding stable. I know what it’s like to be afraid to get on.

I also know what it’s like to be that little girl (or maybe not so little anymore) who simply loves ponies, loves the smell of leather, wants to spend every day in the barn, and would rather clean a stall than her room.

By the time I was 30, I was seeing a therapist for a variety of reasons, including PTSD from a working student job I had when I was 18. I’m still not sure if that therapist was inexperienced or just didn’t understand the horse world, but she definitely didn’t understand me. She downplayed the panic attacks I had before and after every lesson. She didn’t understand that my self-image was completely tied to being a rider, or that my sense of self-worth depended on whether or not I saw that distance to the jump. If she had understood that, maybe she could have helped me. Or maybe she was simply not the right therapist for me.

Eventually, I decided to go back to school and earn a master’s degree in therapy so I could become my own therapist, since I couldn’t find one who truly understood. I had quit riding again, partly because of finances and partly because of my PTSD around horses. During graduate school, I was fortunate to meet Gloria Beduhn, who needed help keeping her horses ridden. It was a long drive to her place, but working with her helped me start healing from my negative experiences with horses and horse people. She introduced me to dressage and began teaching me from the ground up.

While I was learning to be a therapist for others, I was also learning to be a therapist for myself. Over the next six years, I experienced a powerful journey of recovery through both self-led traditional therapy and Gloria’s patient dressage instruction. That combination changed my life.

Today, I am an accomplished therapist specializing in depression, anxiety, and trauma. Interestingly, the tools that help you recover from depression, anxiety, and trauma are the same tools that help you grow and succeed as a competitive rider. The difference is in the focus: first we build a foundation of acceptance, and then we strengthen that foundation through growth, confidence, and mastery.

It is deeply rewarding to use the same therapeutic skills that helped me—and hundreds of my clients—to support equestrians on their own journeys toward emotional health, self-fulfillment, and goal achievement. I have had the privilege of working with eventers, hunters, jumpers, dressage riders, barrel racers, reiners, and cutters, and I am honored to help each of them reconnect with their confidence, joy, and love of the horse.