The Horse Whisperer Inspires Good Attunement

I recently watched the movie “Buck”. It’s about the life of Buck Brannaman who was the inspiration for the novel and movie, “The Horse Whisperer”. This movie tells the story of Buck, who endured a traumatic childhood, yet also developed a gift of working with horses. This documentary interweaves Bucks gift of reading and training horses, with the life experiences he gained from being a survivor of horrendous childhood abuse. Today, Buck travels around the country offering horse clinics, where he works on horsemanship that is based on really understanding horses and finding ways to teach them to do the work they need to do, by primarily relying primarily on a strong relationship with them. He works with many horses who have been treated badly, and also works on breaking horses in, but he is respectful and develops an intuitive reciprocal relationship in which the horses respond to him out of trust. People bringing their horses to work with Buck, talk in this movie about ways their lives are touched through working with Buck. They talk about growing as people and working through their own personal pain and losses as they develop a healing relationship with their animals.

This documentary really touched me, and it reminded me so much of the work we do in EFT. Watch this clip that I believe encapsulates the heart of what Buck teaches.

Challenge yourself. Can you imagine just being with someone, and getting a feel for them. This is what we do help clients to do better for themselves and each other in session. Buck makes a statement, “It would be better to use 90% mental and 10% physical….”. Jim Furrow having watched this said, “it would be better to use 90% relational/emotional and 10% rationale/cognitive.” He goes on to say it’s a nice illustration for Greenberg’s notion of “guiding” and “following” in working with emotional processing. And then we can apply this to our relationship with ourselves, and look at when we lose this feel with ourselves in session. It’s so easy for us to get anxious or overwhelmed when we fall out of attunement with our clients or EFT as a theory, and these are moments to have that “feel” with ourselves. When we can self-attune, we can self-regulate, and as we self-regulate, we can once again repair with EFT and our clients, and we are back in the game.