For some trauma survivors, particularly those whose trust in verbal, relational connection was itself damaged by the trauma, conventional talk therapy can be genuinely difficult to engage with — not from lack of effort, but because the very medium (verbal, face-to-face human relationship) is tied to the source of the original harm. Nonverbal, embodied approaches, including animal-assisted therapies, can create a different kind of relational experience that bypasses that specific obstacle.
The therapeutic value isn't mystical — a horse responds immediately and honestly to a person's actual physical state (tension, calm, erratic energy) without the complicating layers of verbal negotiation, social performance, or the specific relational patterns tied to human-caused trauma, which can make it a genuinely different, and for some people more accessible, starting point for rebuilding a felt sense of safe connection.
Van der Kolk describes a teenage girl, Maria, cycling repeatedly through the foster care system with a documented history of severe relational trauma, who found a rare sense of calm and genuine connection specifically through therapeutic work with horses — an experience conventional talk-based approaches had struggled to produce for her. The horse's immediate, honest responsiveness to her actual physical and emotional state, with none of the verbal complexity or social performance involved in human relationships, offered her a form of connection that didn't carry the same associations as the human relationships tied to her original trauma.