RIDING CONFIDENCE
"Riding a horse is not a gentle hobby, to be picked up and laid down like a game of solitaire. It is a grand passion. It seizes a person whole and once it has done so, he/she will have to accept that his life will be radically changed"
Ralph Waldo Emmerson
Riding should be enjoyed, not endured
What Working With Me Looks Like
As both a BWRT practitioner and former elite equestrian competitor, I understand the unique psychology of riders from both clinical and lived experience.
Equestrian fear responses are often misunderstood by people outside the horse world.
Riding involves genuine unpredictability, high consequence and complex emotional dynamics. Confidence issues are rarely resolved through generic reassurance alone.
Sessions are tailored to the individual rider, their experiences and the specific patterns maintaining the problem.
The work is collaborative, structured and practical, with the aim of creating meaningful change rather than endless analysis.
Sessions can address:
-
riding anxiety
-
confidence loss after falls
-
competition nerves
-
fear of jumping
-
hacking anxiety
-
rider trauma responses
-
performance pressure
-
anticipatory fear patterns
Appointments are available online, allowing riders across the UK and internationally to access support from home.
The aim is not to change who you are as a rider. It is to quickly and permanently remove the automatic responses that are currently stopping you from riding as you know you can.
Losing Riding Confidence
Loss of riding confidence is your nervous system doing exactly what it believes it needs to do to keep you safe.
Maybe your anxiety began after a fall, an accident or a near miss. Maybe your horse behaved in a certain way with no reason, maybe you had a series of difficult rides, maybe someone harshly criticised you, maybe there was pressure to compete, or maybe there was simply an accumulation of stress.
Whatever the reason, anxiety never helped anyone do anything becasue anxiety is only designed to stop you doing whatever it is that your brain has decided is a threat, not make you better at it. The tension that anxiety creates in your mind and body makes you a less effective rider. Not least because your horse will feel that tension and start overreacting themself.
Why It Happens
The brain is designed to predict danger and prevent repetition of experiences it associates with threat. Thus anxiety is a learned pattern.
You didn't choose it and its not just the way you are.
After a frightening event or repeated stress exposure, the brain can begin linking riding situations with danger automatically and outside conscious control.
Importantly, this process is not logical. A rider may rationally know:
-
the horse is safe
-
the situation is manageable
-
they have ridden successfully before
Yet the nervous system still reacts as though immediate danger exists. This is why “just relax”, “push through it”, or “stop over thinking” often fail to help in any lasting way.
How BWRT Addresses The Pattern
BrainWorking Recursive Therapy (BWRT) is a modern modality that is unlike any other. Instead of addressing the anxiety, BWRT addresses the trigger, which ensures the unwanted emotion doesn't occur in the first place.
Rather than attempting to “manage” fear after it appears, the process interrupts and restructure the brain’s conditioned response sequence itself.
This means the work focuses on:
-
the anticipatory response
-
the automatic emotional reaction
-
the learned protective pattern
-
the brain’s prediction of threat
The goal is not to suppress emotion or force exposure through distress, but to remove the need for the destructive response to arise in the first place.