Capacity Is Not the Problem: Why Conditions Matter More Than “Resilience”
What Horses Teach Us About Regulation, Trauma, and the Limits of Endurance
In both mental health and equine spaces, there is a familiar refrain:
Build more resilience.
Increase capacity.
Learn to stay calm.
At first glance, these ideas sound supportive—empowering, even. But when we look more closely, especially in the context of our current political, social, and environmental realities, this language begins to fracture.
Because for many people—and many horses—the problem is not a lack of resilience. The problem is often the conditions they are being asked to endure. Most of us, myself included have been conditioned to push past, override and express less and less. Stoicism is valued and rewarded, a pattern that often develops in childhood.
When resilience becomes a quiet accusation
In therapy and wellness culture, resilience is often framed as an internal skill: something an individual should cultivate through mindset, regulation strategies, or nervous system work. But this framing subtly shifts responsibility away from the world people are living in and places it squarely on the individual.
For people from non-dominant cultures, racialized communities, LGBTQIA+ folks, disabled people, and others living under chronic systemic stress, the message can sound like this:
If you were stronger, this wouldn’t hurt so much.
This is not only inaccurate—it is harmful.
Distress, grief, anger, numbness, and exhaustion are not signs of insufficient coping. They are reasonable nervous system responses to real, ongoing threat. No amount of individual regulation can neutralize structural violence, political instability, or collective trauma.
Horses reveal the flaw in this logic immediately
This same pattern shows up clearly in the way we often relate to horses.
We ask horses to:
Stay calm in overstimulating environments
Suppress fear responses
Perform regulation before safety has been established
Tolerate confusion, pain, or pressure quietly
When a horse reacts—moves away, startles, resists, freezes, or shuts down—we are quick to label them as reactive, untrained, difficult, or lacking capacity.
But horses are not failing.
They are accurately responding to their conditions.
Unlike humans, horses cannot compartmentalize or override their nervous systems to meet expectations. Their bodies tell the truth. When the conditions are unsafe, unclear, or overwhelming, the nervous system responds accordingly.
This is not misbehavior.
It is wisdom.
Calm is not the same as regulation
One of the most dangerous confusions in both therapy and horsemanship is the belief that calm equals regulation.
A quiet body is not necessarily a regulated body.
A compliant being is not necessarily a safe or consenting one.
In horses, what is often rewarded as calm may actually be:
Freeze responses
Shutdown
Learned helplessness
Dorsal collapse mistaken for trust
In human spaces—especially dominant-culture therapeutic environments—the same misunderstanding shows up when emotional expression is labeled dysregulation rather than communication.
Regulation is not the absence of movement or emotion.
Regulation is the presence of enough safety, choice, and relationship for a nervous system to respond flexibly.
Capacity emerges from conditions, not force
Capacity is not something we demand.
It is something that emerges when conditions are right.
For horses, those conditions include:
Choice and consent
Predictability and pacing
Space to move, flee, orient, and express
Attuned presence rather than control
For humans, the parallels are exact:
Cultural and relational safety
Structural honesty
Permission for expression without punishment
Collective support rather than individual optimization
When these conditions are present, capacity grows naturally. Not because the nervous system was pushed—but because it was met.
The quiet harm of endurance culture
When we overemphasize resilience, we often end up teaching beings—human and non-human alike—to tolerate harm better instead of questioning why harm is occurring in the first place.
This is endurance, not healing.
It asks:
How much can you withstand?
Instead of:
What would need to change for you to feel safe enough to soften?
Horses refuse this lie. They will not perform wellness to protect human comfort. They will not uphold systems that ask for compliance without care.
That is why working with horses is not just therapeutic—it is political.
This is not an argument against healing or recovery.
Humans and horses are remarkably capable of healing, adapting, and finding their way back to connection. The nervous system is not fragile—it is responsive and alive.
What I am questioning is not our responsibility or capacity to heal, but the expectation placed on individuals to recover on unrealistic timelines, in unsafe conditions, or without addressing the roots of harm. Healing cannot be rushed, demanded, or abstracted from context. It unfolds when the conditions support it.
A different ethic of relationship
In my work with horses and humans, I am not interested in creating more resilient bodies that can absorb more harm. I am interested in creating conditions that make regulation possible.
This means shifting the question from:
Why isn’t this being handling this better?
To:
What conditions have we failed to provide?
This reframe changes everything.
It returns dignity to the nervous system.
It honors response as information.
It invites responsibility back into relationship and environment—where it belongs.
Listening to what is already being said
Horses are not asking us to fix them.
People are not asking to be tougher.
They are asking to be met.
When we stop demanding resilience and start tending to conditions, capacity follows—not as a performance, but as a living, relational truth.