Rupert Isaacson: Welcome to Equine Assisted World.
I'm your host, Rupert Isaacson.
New York Times bestselling author of the Horse Boy.
Founder of New Trails Learning Systems and long ride home.com.
You can find details of all our programs and shows on Rupert isaacson.com.
Here on Equine Assisted World.
We look at the cutting edge and the best practices currently being developed and,
established in the equine assisted field.
This can be psychological, this can be neuropsych, this can be
physical, this can be all of the conditions that human beings have.
These lovely equines, these beautiful horses that we work with, help us with.
Thank you for being part of the adventure and we hope you enjoy today's show
Welcome to Equine Assisted World.
I've got Christine Dixon with me today.
If you don't know her, you soon will, and you should.
She is based out of Los Angeles.
She is an equine assisted coach, but she's much, much more than that.
And I'm going to let her Talk a little bit about the modalities that she uses
and how she uses them specifically with trauma and addiction and for those of
us who are working broader and broader in the field like us at Horsepoy and New
Trails where we got into it with autism and then naturally found this broadening
out into all sorts of areas of You know mental health we realize at certain
points that we need mentors And I was at the Warwick Schiller's Journey On Summit
in Birmingham in England this year.
And I'd met Christine before in California, but she was there
speaking again, and this is the first time I'd really had a
chance to properly listen to her.
And She shared in more depth about her work.
And so I thought I would try it out.
I thought this sounds really good I'm gonna try this thing that she does and
see if it works on some of my own, you know difficult histories and stories
and little traumas that are going around within me and she did her thing and it
worked interesting and it worked in a way that Usually, I'm used to seeing
when I'm engaging in the shamanic world.
And normally I don't bring that side into equine assisted world,
because it's a can of worms.
However, there are things that cross over in the shamanic world.
human consciousness in society, but also have good hard science behind them.
So without rambling too much more, I'm going to let Christine introduce herself
and advocate for her own awesomeness, and share with us some things that really
will inform us making our practices.
Okay, so Equine Assist.
Well, thank you for coming on.
Please tell us who you are and what you do.
Christine Dickson: Well, first, I'm really excited to be here because Yes,
we did connect in a deeper way at the Birmingham summit, because we kind of
were in this orbit of each other the other two times, but this time we really
talked and we've just had a lot of deep conversations that have been really fun.
So I'm excited to be here and have another one with you.
So
I, you know, these days I transformational mentor because.
That I'm trained in, in a few modalities that they all kind
of work together beautifully.
I, I got trained as a clinical hypnotherapist in 2004.
I've been trained as an advanced practitioner of IEMT, which is
integral eye movement technique.
And I have been doing equine assisted coaching for about five, six years now.
So all of those things as well as mentoring and coaching
people, they all work really well together and build on each other.
And the people that.
I think that I most attract and work with, or, you know, it's funny, they
say, like, you know, you typically work with people who are similar in
what their experiences are, right?
So I I tend to work with people who have either grown up in families where
they had one or both caregivers, whether that was a parent or grandparent,
had mental health issues, such as pathological personality disorders or
addiction, because the 2 things show up in, in much the same way you have
a, an emotionally and compassionate, Level person who is dysregulated.
So their compassion for others is greatly reduced
and that makes for a very unhealthy environment for a child because the child
then really early on learns that to adapt and survive in this environment, I'm
going to have to be able to read the room.
I'm gonna have to be able to read the nervous system and thoughts of the person
who's bigger than me and in charge.
I'm And that becomes a hypervigilance.
It becomes this kind of almost superpower where you can even tell by maybe the
way the footsteps are coming down the hallway of whether this is going
to be a good night or a bad night.
And, and that is so linked that kind of sensory projection and
hypervigilance is really correlated with high levels of empathy.
So we develop these high levels of connection and empathy and reading people.
The, the downside to that is that what we don't cultivate.
Is our own sense of self, we don't cultivate how we
feel in any given situation.
Like, like, does that make me feel good or bad?
Or do I like this or dislike it?
Because we're always reading the room and figuring out what other people are sensing
and feeling there and then adapting to them in order again, to be safe.
And so this creates a pattern where we only feel safe.
In how other people are perceiving us
and many times we grow up to take that pattern out into the world and find
ourselves in constantly similar situations because that's where our skill set is.
And even though we don't want to be in those situations.
To the 88 percent that is our subconscious mind, what is familiar is pleasurable.
Rupert Isaacson: Can you just repeat that?
Say that again.
Christine Dickson: So, to the subconscious.
Yes.
We call them, you know, in hypnotherapy, they're we, they're called knowns.
These are what we know, right?
To the subconscious knowns, which to the conscious mind could be abuse or
negative, but to the subconscious.
Knowns are pleasurable because we know how this works.
We've been here before.
It's like the devil you know.
So you could grow up in a very dysregulated, unhealthy, chaotic,
abusive environment and your conscious mind could dream about when you grow
up and you can't wait to get away from all of this and you dream about this
healthy life that you want to live.
But what's funny, or it's not funny at all, what is interesting,
let's say, is that the subconscious goes, hey, that's a great idea.
That looks cool.
But guess what?
We've never experienced that.
And because it's the unknown, it's, it's to be feared.
We're going to make you attracted to people in situations that
will repeat the patterns of your childhood because you know what?
You know how to do that.
So then we end up in relationships like romantic relationships with people that
could most of the time appear that they're Absolutely, not that and then once we
get further down the road we realize oh my gosh This is the same pattern
and then we go through the trauma of being In a relationship as an adult with
someone who's either battling addiction or has the same pathological personality
disorders, or what can be really, really heavy is that we are so broken down
spiritually.
Emotionally that in our, you know, these, these create cognitive dissonance,
meaning, like, we no longer know what's real and what's not what's true.
And what's not because we're constantly being blamed projected
lied to all of these things.
So, and instead of trying to clear and face it.
We take ourselves out and people will take themselves down by then using drugs and
alcohol to check out when actually facing and leaving the situation feels unbearable
and that the the worst part about that is that we've now become more
more and more vulnerable in the Relationship because that addiction
will be used against us to keep us in that cage and keep us in that box
Rupert Isaacson: Addiction is an interesting thing because we
tend to think of it as addiction to a substance or a behavior.
But I think that what you're talking about here is that what
we seem to be really addicted to is certain types of relationship.
As you say, because what's familiar, what's familiar.
We feel we know how to handle it.
So even if it's essentially unsafe, it's a danger that we know how to navigate.
Christine Dickson: I don't want to cut you up.
I just want to make one clarification.
I wouldn't call it an addiction.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
Christine Dickson: And the reason I wouldn't call an addiction is because
there's a conscious aspect to addiction.
You know, when you're picking up A bottle of alcohol, right?
You know when you're picking up a drug you may feel powerless to it, but you know,
you're doing it We're talking about an unconscious Program that exists in your
mind That even though consciously you think you're making good choices and not
choosing it, you don't see the red flags because your tolerance level of those red
flags has been trained to be so high that you just don't see it until it gets to
this point where suddenly it's now crossed into the level from the subconscious
into the conscious and you see what's now happening and then it all becomes clear.
But it's not that choice of addiction.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay So if people are listening to this and they're saying well,
okay, but i'm running an equine assisted thing, you know Um, why do I need to
know this or I can see why I need to know this But i've got people showing up who
might be going through something less.
How on earth do I help them?
I want to talk about your work prior to horses first because, you know, we horse
people were very kind of, Oh, well, you've been in this for five to seven years.
Well, I've been in it for, you know, 5, 000 years, blah, blah, blah, blah.
You know?
So people like me, for example, I'll play devil's advocate, you know,
grew up in horse culture, no horses, never, never didn't know horses,
even though my parents actually were not horsey, but I had a horsey aunt.
So I was, you know, And it's been my life, you know, the whole, my whole life.
Even when I've done other careers, it's always been parallel.
So there's never been a time when I wasn't sort of a professional cause I came
out at it, not from the big money side.
So you then have to become a pro, you know, basically first in the sports side,
the training side, and then latterly in the therapeutic side or whatever.
Okay, fine.
So horse people.
naturally have a bit of an allergy when someone comes in and says, well, I've
been doing this quite recently because we know that that can also sometimes actually
lead to some, you know, bad judgments.
This is true.
So I want first for you to talk to us about your life with these types
of treatments, modalities prior to horses, then how did you get started?
Get into them with horses.
And then what can old timers like me, equine dinosaurs learn from some
stuff that you can bring in from completely outside of that world,
and then apply to horses that I could have mentorship for when, when someone
like this shows up in my practice.
So can you talk us back to where you began?
How do you know about all this stuff?
Christine Dickson: So.
Firstly, anybody that kind of, that knows me or has worked with me, I, I really
don't push myself as a horse expert or even a neckline coaching expert in this.
What I know is that what has worked, Or me, but nobody has to listen to me at all.
I'm just going to share what my experiences have been.
And again, like super humble in this area.
Like I would never put myself.
In the position of saying that I'm an expert in this, but I can
share what my experience has been.
So what's funny is this, this whole, this whole life journey began with the
idea of doing equine assisted coaching.
Well, that's not necessarily true.
It began with hypnotherapy.
I really, really wanted to be a a therapist.
That's what I wanted to be.
And when I moved When I moved from Vancouver, B.
C.
down to Los Angeles, and I was in a really dysfunctional relationship and, you know,
very living like paycheck to paycheck.
I was still raising my kids.
I, I had never gone to college, right?
So
going back to school meant that I was going to be in school for a very,
very, very long time before I would be licensed to be able to see clients.
And I just didn't see how I was going to be able to do that because I needed
to get out of this relationship and I needed something that I could.
Make money at and support my children and I wanted to really do something
that was going to help people so I saw an ad for It was the only college in
the country of hypnotherapy and it was in Los Angeles and it was a year and a
half program and I had a residency and it was very I was very on the up and up.
So I signed up for that because that would mean that within two years
I could actually be doing this.
And that changed my whole view of what I wanted to do because I loved that modality
so much because it was addressing that 88 percent which is the subconscious program.
And I had felt like I found my thing.
I found the thing that I love doing.
I love seeing the results of this.
But I was still in the middle of my own dysfunctional relationship and,
you know, one of the markers that makes a person more likely to be in a pathological
relationship or I should say a cluster of markers is one is a high, high level of
tolerance, a high, high level of empathy, really strong level of loyalty to a fault.
Like, you give loyalty to someone who does not give it back and
and those, those a combination of those things and that your
relationships mean the world to you, you know, and having those markers.
Those traits meant that I was always putting, I would always
put everything before myself.
So even though I got trained in this, even though I was so excited, even
though I was starting, I graduated, I was starting to get clients.
At the time, my ex-husband was starting as construction business and convinced
me that if I gave all that up.
And I became the operations manager and ran that company for
him, for us, they would make way more money than my hypnotherapy.
And therefore we could build this up over and it was like,
do this for a year or two.
And then you can go do your little hypnotherapy thing.
And you wouldn't have to worry about money and blah, blah, blah.
Well, I'm sure you can imagine how that went.
I was doing that for five years.
As our relationship disintegrated, it was how and I would, but I
was doing it for this carrot.
You know, there was the carrot and I just kept looking at that
carrot going against everything.
That was my, my intuition was telling me my, my soul was telling me and guess what?
2008 happened and.
Everything was lost.
Five years.
I did that job and it was everything that had been built up
was taken away in the recession.
We lost everything, everything.
And I went through a period where I told myself that this was punishment.
You know, that the universe was punishing me for being greedy because look, I
wanted this really abundant life that I could give stuff to my children
and help my children and all this.
And I was just being greedy.
You should just be happy with the fact that you have somewhere
to live and you have food.
And, and, and it was really hard.
Like I was really depressed.
And I had to slowly figure out who I was because I had given everything
to this relationship and this company and all of this and it all
was not in alignment with who I was.
It was not in integrity.
And now I didn't know who I was.
And I, I read at that point in time, I read The Artist's Way.
And in The Artist's Way, it talks about
journaling, writing morning pages, and having one day a
week that was your play day.
And when I was thinking about play, of course play kind of goes back to
your childhood, so I started using my childhood as kind of fertile
ground to try and remember who I was.
And try to rebuild myself and I would go to museums because they
were free and I was so broke.
I mean, this was in the middle of the recession.
I was so sober.
I was baking bread at home.
It, yeah, it was, I was very, very financially tapped.
So
yeah, this was a slow process.
Building myself back up again.
Rupert Isaacson: Where do the horses come into this?
Christine Dickson: So, when things were really bad, I would go to barns.
I would find public barns.
I didn't know, like, I always loved horses, but I would, I don't know, I
didn't understand why when it was Was
Rupert Isaacson: that, was that going back to childhood?
Was that the little girl who actually wanted horses?
Christine Dickson: Yes.
Yes.
And I would go to the barns and I would just walk up and down the breezeway
and feel better and feel this calming unraveling in my chest and feel like
I could breathe just being there
Rupert Isaacson: with the horse's heads looking over the boxes sort of
Christine Dickson: that's it.
Maybe I'd pet some noses a little bit, but you know, like I was.
Rupert Isaacson: And had you been exposed to horses at all as a kid?
Christine Dickson: Yes.
But not a lot like my, I was a horse crazy girl that never did get a
horse, you know, my grandmother, they couldn't afford to have a horse for me.
So they would take me to like, sometimes like a riding barn where you could, you
know, I got sent to like a horseback riding camp one, one summer for two
weeks that was borderline traumatic.
Yeah, like, you know, I always gravitated towards horses always.
So I had, I had experiences, but I never really, really had experiences.
So that led me to in, in 2007, I read the Tao of Equus
by Linda Kahanov.
And it was like, I suddenly understood why I was attracted
to horses at my darkest moments.
Rupert Isaacson: By the way, for listeners, if you don't know who
she is, go to our Live Free Ride Free podcast and check out the
interview with Linda Kahanov there.
It's really good.
Okay.
Sorry, back to you, Christine.
Christine Dickson: Well, she, reading that was like, Oh my God, I want to do this.
Rupert Isaacson: Like, why, what did, what did the book say to you?
Christine Dickson: Because I have always been so connected to animals.
I've always felt like a deep connection to animals.
And especially horses, but I didn't have a lot of experience with
horses and I loved helping people.
I loved, I loved.
Learning to I love learning about why we do the things we do or
how, you know, how can we heal?
How can we go from suffering and surviving into being a healthy and,
and liberated thriving human and not just someone who now has, well, I,
I healed that pain, but, you know, I'm still kind of in the shadows.
So I saw that I could marry, I could marry my love for horses and my deep
desire to learn because how, like, I didn't know anything about this.
I mean, how fun to learn this and to get that wisdom and then to practice
something that is just, you know.
Like magical and there's an aspect of it that it's not clinical, right?
Like you're partnering with a horse.
So you have no idea what's going to happen.
There's it's always, there's a newness to it and a trust in it and a spiritual
sense that I was very attracted to.
So that went on my vision board in 2007.
That went on my vision board and I always joke about it
because what's funny is, is that.
When I finally got to a place where that was possible because that was the guy
that was a gasoline in my tank Like it was always gonna be I wanted I even ran
the the equine assisted program at the addiction Facility I worked at in Malibu
Partnering with there was a therapist and the horse handler came in and
then I was the one that ran the equine part program by, I brought
the people to it, I participated in it, and it was my job to write the
clinical notes for what took place.
And
Rupert Isaacson: this is sometime after 2008, right?
Christine Dickson: Yeah, this is this, sorry, this is in 2018
to, yeah, for about two years.
But that was saying that was the gas in my gas tank that was on my vision board.
But when I finally got to the place where I could do that, really do that was.
The end of 2020, when I moved into my own ranch and had everything.
And I remember sitting on a chair, looking out at my horses and having this
breath and going, Oh, I'm finally here.
I can finally do it.
And then just having this realization that.
That's not it.
Like, it's a part of it for sure, but the vision of me just doing that,
like everything else falling away and like that was, it, it, it wasn't
it, but it was a really key piece.
And the horses brought me here a thousand percent.
And
I've had amazing experiences with them, with clients.
Rupert Isaacson: Tell us about your current equestrian practice, and then I
want to go right back to the beginning.
Where you're born, how you arrive at knowing about these sorts of relationships
why hypnotherapy, and then why from hypnotherapy to some of the other
modalities that you do, which I think will be useful for our listeners.
And then we're going to come catch up again back to the present.
So tell us, just starting now, tell us about your equestrian practice right now.
What is it?
What do you do?
Christine Dickson: So
when people seem a bit stuck,
I love partnering with the horses because
people will be more genuine and have access.
I mean, they're not trying to not be genuine, you know, no one's trying,
but, but a lot of times are traumas based in other people, to be fair.
So,
accessing trust, developing trust with someone takes time.
Trust in an animal can be immediate.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
Christine Dickson: So,
taking somebody out, let's say like, One of the things that I've done that is, has
been really beneficial has been going out.
So I'll take a couple horses and I'll invite them to come into the arena
and then I will close the arena.
I'll put all kinds of toys and things out there for them to interact with.
And then the client and I will sit, we'll sit outside the arena.
And I give them a patent paper and I won't tell them the names of any horses
or any information about any horses.
And I asked them for about 1520 minutes to just observe the horses.
And then I wanted them to write a little bio about each horse, like, how they
interpret that horse, what they see.
And what they feel that that horse's personality is all of this stuff.
It's amazing because
people will project so much.
On to the horses, but by doing that by taking it outside of their themselves
where they're feeling all the feelings and putting them outside of their
body on to these forces, they gain clarity and perspective around what's
actually going on in their life or how they're viewing things in their life.
Rupert Isaacson: And then maybe the fact that they actually do project
Christine Dickson: exactly.
That's my mother in law.
That's my old boss.
That one thing, you know, that one just bosses everybody around, right?
Where anybody that knows horses would say that one's just playing, right?
Just got a playful spirit.
That one's a bully, right?
That one's, and it can be also projecting parts of themselves, right?
I had one person who was really attracted.
To my mule, who is like a Zen Buddha.
He is, he's just, he loves people.
He's a little man on the totem pole though.
I have another horse that is very confident, swagger.
He's the class clown.
And this person was saying that he really felt a deep connection to my mule.
But he wanted.
To be the confident horse.
And he, and he, he had this almost disgust towards the mule because
he was low on the totem pole.
He was a very empathetic and non confrontational being.
And he, and, and this was a manifestation of, of how he saw himself
as a man because he, he was that.
Loving, empathetic, healing man in the world that values the swagger
and the confidence and felt, and felt like that was what he needed to
cultivate and really had some self loathing around that he wasn't that.
Rupert Isaacson: When you point out to someone, you say, well, that
horse is being a bully, and you say, well, actually, they're just playing.
At some point, you point that out.
Perhaps.
Do those people then get a realisation, Oh shit, I'm projecting.
Fuck, I kind of do this in my day to day life.
Oh.
Absolutely.
Do they get that clarity?
Yes.
Christine Dickson: Yes.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay, that's so interesting because I, I think that that
clarity is almost impossible to get human to human because we, you know, we'll,
we'll die on the hill of our ego, right?
And, and we'll do that because our ego is convinced that that's
what is necessary for survival.
I think we come by it honestly, otherwise we wouldn't all do it.
It surprises me, frankly, to hear that if you were to point that
out, that Someone would accept.
Oh gosh.
I guess I am I do project.
Because then that's you a human pointing it out So therefore, you know, you're
now the adversary and the human, you know, how do you dance that dance?
Christine Dickson: Well, you certainly don't blurt it out, right?
You don't hit him over the head with it.
I I want to delve deep into first What it is they're seeing and, and
let them use their, their own tools to kind of like really flesh it out.
And then I ask questions, you know, I ask them, I will ask them to,
do you want me to tell you the way that these horses present here?
You know, not like this is the right answer and that's the wrong answer,
but do you want me to tell you the way?
How they are seen here at the ranch.
So this guy, he's seen as a clown, right?
He's always looking for play and he's confident and he's, he doesn't have
all the anxiety that some of the horses who have had other experiences with
humans can have he's healthier mentally.
You know, like, and, and I have yet to meet somebody that isn't
fascinated and excited about.
Looking at the differences between their their perception and another
perception of What you're seeing
Rupert Isaacson: and the people that are coming are they I know
you work a lot with addiction
Is that frequently what's brought them through the ranch gate or is it
less that now is it more other things?
Christine Dickson: You know, it's less the addiction now.
It's more the The people who have experienced the other side, which
is the person who has lived with the addict, or the person who has lived
with the person with a pathological personality disorder or growing up
with them or chosen as partners.
Because there's a lot of healing that needs to happen.
A lot of subconscious programming and, and, you know, there's,
I think that there's an aspect that,
how do I say this?
So there's been a lot of emphasis on helping the person who has low self esteem
and low and a low power level or how you want to describe it in relationships,
the, the personal that's more.
Needs to be brought up there.
You know, that's been like so much, the focus of self help books and,
and things is the person who needs to be brought up but not a lot of
talk about the grandiosity and the grandiose that needs to be brought down.
And many times when you're bringing someone up, that's not something that
that person's used to, so they don't have a feel for it, but it's, it's And
when they're trying to quote, unquote, fight for themselves or set boundaries
or do these things, they, without a lot of guidance, they can be not very good at
that and then they can overcompensate and then they can start to become the bully.
Using their pain as justification,
but that's not what they want to do.
It's just that they don't have the framework to be able to have balance
and, and have true, a true place of grounding to come from and not feel
like everything is a power fight.
Rupert Isaacson: Got it.
Are you,
are you using a particular set of modalities in the equine?
I know you are on the non equine.
I'm gonna keep promising to go back to these.
We're going to are you using something like egal National natural life
manship, blah, or are you, are you sort of going with your gut here based
on the work that you did pre equine, if you like, now brought to equine?
Is that more describing what you're doing?
Christine Dickson: Yes, yes.
It's more of partnering with the horse.
And allowing and, and just really kind of setting things up.
I,
I just have a different view, not a different view.
Cause a lot of people have the same view.
My view is that the horses have a ton of wisdom that I don't really have to
have a lot of technical framework for them to be able to do what they do.
I've taken a ton of workshops, read a ton of books.
Had, you know, a few years of active work in this kind of on the job training,
they did do something similar to, like, any gala, you know, where the idea
was, you know, you bring the group in, you divide the people up into groups.
You've got 4 loose horses in the arena.
We have set up a thing in the middle, a circle, you've got
to get that horse in the circle without, you know, how do you do it?
That was kind of, you know, so it was kind of teaching people how
to work as teams and and stuff like that, but it wasn't always.
Utilizing in that scenario, the wisdom of the horses and allowing the horses
to be as involved in the process.
And what I've found is in the way that I, I partner with them,
they don't need a lot of direction.
Rupert Isaacson: They being the client,
Christine Dickson: meaning the horses.
Okay.
I just, you know, and, and I do have to have a framework
to set things up, obviously.
And I have to have an idea of what I'm, I'm trying to get, but I
don't know what is going to happen.
You asked me a question about about how people then have these moments
of realizing that they're projecting.
And I had a woman come out really, really, I really liked her.
She was really cool.
And she wanted to work with the horses.
With me and
she was very intuitive, very smart
and I just, you know, there is, you have to kind of, I think if you have
too much, if I have too much of a, I want to do these things, right?
A framework, then I'm not going to be as in the moment to, to sense and follow
my intuition about what the next step should be because I'm going to have
my checklist that I gotta get done.
And we started off with the whole.
In the arena writing about what you think about each horse,
and she was really spot on.
She was very good at that.
And then we ended with, I had her go into a 24 by 24, like, little paddock
stall with my mule and a brush.
And I just said, just try this.
I want you to brush him, but I want you to I want you to be in connection with him.
I want you to be telling him about what you're doing and talk to him.
Talk to him as though he can understand you and you can share with him anything,
anything you're thinking or feeling,
anything that you want him to get out of this.
And I just left her there and I went far enough away where I, she knew I
couldn't hear anything, but that I could still kind of see what was happening.
And she did that for like 15, 20 minutes.
And then that ended and we came back into my office
and she was, she seemed like she was smiling.
She was happy.
And so we, we talked about a few things.
And then I asked her at the end,
what is your biggest takeaway from today
and what she said, like, just blew me away because I wasn't expecting it.
She hadn't shared any of this.
And she said, you know, I've been in therapy for 30 years.
And for 30 years, I've had therapists telling me that I take everything
personally, and then I have to stop, you know, the, the ideas to stop trying
to see myself through other people's eyes.
I'm always worried about what other people think of me.
I'm always everything I do is to create this image, you
know, and then I'm devastated.
If I think somebody thinks poorly of me and I, and they're like, just
be in your body, be in your body.
And she said that having that time with him and observing him that day
and talking to him about this is that what she realizes that even though
he was low man on the totem pole, he didn't care because he was fully being
himself and that was who he was and there was nothing right or wrong about it.
It just was.
It was right because that was him being fully himself and he did not care.
He had no awareness at all.
He was happy and she finally understood what those therapists
were trying to say to her because she saw it exemplified in him.
And it's like all of that teaching just finally all lined up inside
her psyche and she got it.
Rupert Isaacson: It's very interesting.
You know, I was having a rather similar conversation with someone today.
We were working with my herd and working on classical dressage stuff.
But as you probably know, we do that with a view to creating horses that can also
work with people to make them feel better.
And
this person correctly pointed out that the horse that had been the most
fiery under saddle in a good way was now was, was low on the totem pole.
And I said, it's true, but he didn't used to be.
He used to be top dog and he took a backseat 18 months ago.
And that was who he was then.
But there was a certain amount of stress involved in that for him.
He had to kind of be in control because to be top dog is actually not
just about getting the food first.
It's about, you're supposed to be vigilant.
You're the one who has to make sure all the other horses are okay, basically.
And Now, he's stepped down from that role as another horse has come,
younger horse has come into that role.
And as you say, he doesn't care.
He, there's no sense of despair.
That, Oh my God, I used to be, you know, the top dog and now I'm, you
know, not and under saddle, he's just the same old, Hey, Hey, Hey.
And then when he gets in the, in the field or in the pen,
he's like, yeah, I'm, I'm here.
That's fine.
It's fine.
And would that we could now looked at it myself and kind of went, gosh,
you know, that's beyond wisdom.
That's, that's happiness because that's just to be okay where you are.
You know, we could wish for such peace.
It's peaceful, I think.
Okay.
You came to Horses Latish and again, I keep promising listeners, please hang
with me because we are going to go into Christine's story of how she got
here, which you kind of need to hear But when you come into Horses Latish,
you've got to have mentors, right?
So even though so I'm always when people say oh Roo, you know,
why should I learn from you?
I say well because actually I've got good mentors So if you're if you're
learning from me, you're actually learning from you know, this person
and this person and this person said my You know, say it's in the dressage
thing, then that would be the Valenza family in Portugal, who I know you've
gone out to visit and seen the amazing stuff they do and blah, blah, blah.
Who are your mentors?
Who brought you to your horse knowledge that you can offer your
horses to people, your herd to people?
Christine Dickson: I so I, as I said, I started reading the Tao of Equus.
I just devoured everything.
Rupert Isaacson: Right.
But that doesn't tell you how to keep horses.
That tells you what you'd like to do with horses, but that doesn't tell you how.
Right.
Yeah.
Christine Dickson: Yeah.
So is that what you're asking about?
How
Rupert Isaacson: did you learn your horse skills?
Christine Dickson: Oh yeah.
Okay.
So it's kind of a funny story.
Okay.
So in 2016 Before everything for me really took off,
I was, I had read a book called You Are a Badass by Jen Sincero, and what's
funny is that my ego at the time, because I had read all of these books, you
know, I, I was the shelf help master.
And all of the really heady ones, all the Eckhart Tolles, and the Gary Zukausky of
the soul, and all these very deep books.
And then here's this book, You Are a Badass by Jensen Sharer that I'm listening
to on Audible, and she's such a dork.
She's so, has, and, and self proclaimed, like, she has these jokes
that are like, dad jokes through it.
She's talk everything she's talking about are things like I already
know that I remember being so like arrogant in the beginning of listening
to this book I was like, this is like Self help 101 for people, you
know, I I already know this stuff
So silly the thing about it being delivered in such a fun silly, which you
might identify with light hearted Huh?
Not you.
Yeah.
Not, not at all.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
Christine Dickson: Right.
Right.
Fun, silly, lighthearted, jokey, dorky way.
It made it accessible to me.
Suddenly this was something I wasn't just like intellectually pondering and,
and, you know, from this existential place, this was someone that was
showing how she did these things and, and, and took in these, these
teachings and applied them to her life.
In a really clumsy and not perfect way.
And it just made it accessible to me.
So, listening to that book, in the middle of listening to that
book, it's all about taking action.
What action are you taking?
I want to work with horses, but I don't have the money.
I don't have any horses.
I don't have any access to horses.
What, what can I do?
Like, what can I do?
So I decided to get in the car.
And take the two hour, two and a half hour drive up to flag is
up farms, which is Monty Roberts place, which was up the coast.
I know that his farm is open to people visiting and it's a beautiful drive.
And I was like, I'm just going to do that.
So I did, I went up there, I mean, walked around again, petting some noses.
And I came back and that night
I did a, I co produced a documentary with friends.
Called American street kid, which is about homeless youth in the U.
S.
And we were, we had a nonprofit that came out of that called spare some change.
And our nonprofit was being featured at a at like a band showcase downtown.
So we were going to be the nonprofit.
In the entryway with our stuff and our little table and it was
me and my friend who was one of the producers michelle kaufer?
So Michelle and I were sitting at the table that night.
She's like, hey, what did you what'd you do today?
I said, well, you know, I took this drive up to see these horses because
you know I really want to get involved in this equine assisted coaching and
stuff and I don't know how, you know I don't know how that's gonna happen.
And she's like, wait a minute.
I know somebody that I think I know somebody that does that
Well, that's somebody That she thought she knew was Katie Nelligan
now, I don't know if you've ever heard of Katie Nelligan, but
she's been on works podcast.
She, the reason Michelle knew her is because Katie Nelligan used to work
in marketing at Lionsgate films.
Katie Nilligan had left Lionsgate to start doing equine assisted
therapy, learning, coaching.
And so Michelle hooks me up with Katie.
Katie is work, her, her whole setup is 25 minutes from my house.
We decide to meet.
I took some workshops with Katie.
Katie introduced me to Esther Bernstein, who runs Sapphire Sanctuary at the time.
And so I started volunteering because I was like, I need
to immerse myself in horses.
I don't know anything about body language of horses.
I don't know anything about the care of horses.
So I volunteered at Sapphire fast forward.
I don't know, eight months and the property that Sapphire was
running out of is in foreclosure.
All the horses need to go.
And I adopt one of the horses.
Sapphire took their, they just ran their operation out of this property.
They didn't own it, so they just moved their operation, but I took on one of
the horses that the property had owned.
Fun fact, that property was so depressing.
It had people living out of the cars on it.
It was, it was just a mess for sad, sad horses.
That's the property I live in now.
That property, if you had told me in 2016 that I would live there one day,
I would ask how much you hate me.
Because, there was the joke was there's not enough sage in the world.
To clear the energy out of that place, but the land is you people talk about
they come here and they feel it.
They feel there's a spiritual aspect to this little tiny corner that I'm in.
And so when it got foreclosed on a construction company took
it, they gutted everything.
They cleaned everything out and eventually.
Amazingly enough, here I am,
but I learned about horse care through Esta.
She was my mentor and then over time I got other mentors and learned from more people
and more people found work, Schiller.
And just that's why I said, like, I can't ever imagine.
I don't think if I'm in horses for 30 more years that I'll
ever consider myself an expert.
In horses because it's so humbling like no matter how much I feel like I
learn there is a sea of knowledge that
Rupert Isaacson: Well, and that's that's all of us, you
know that there's a really good.
Quote from the great 18th century classical dressage master francois He
wrote what Which is basically if you do dressage today, that's my What you're
trying to do and he was the keeper of the royal stables for the French king in the
early 18th century And he was approached by a nobleman to train his son And he said
the nobleman said to La GuerniÃ¨re, you know, just you know, turn him into a good
horseman He doesn't have to be like, you know, a total equier as you'd say like a
total expert he just you know, they can sort of show the horse where to put his
feet, you know and La GuerniÃ¨re said ah Yeah, the very same thing I myself have
been trying to do this past 60 years.
I love it.
So no, we're all, you know, constant beginners.
All right, here you are now on this amazing What do you call it?
Christine Dickson: Raven sun ranch,
Rupert Isaacson: Raven sun ranch.
And it's in,
Christine Dickson: it's in Lakeview Terrace, California.
So I'm kind of, you know, nobody knows where Lakeview
terraces, but Burbank is not far.
So it's in the East Valley in the
Rupert Isaacson: so it's sort of in those, that hilly bit that isn't the
Hollywood Hills, but it isn't the valley, but sort of is that bit where
they do actually quite a lot of filming.
Christine Dickson: Actually, Patrick Swayze, his place used
to be a couple blocks away.
I
Rupert Isaacson: sort of know a little bit where you're talking about.
It's a sort of a little hidden gem there.
Okay.
You also mentioned this film, American Street Kid, which I've just been
looking up as you've been talking.
Impressive.
You don't make a film like that, get involved in a project like that
without some sort of life experience.
So now I want to dial the right number.
Listeners right back.
Okay.
Now I want the buyer.
Where are you born?
You know, you talked about, oh, I was in this shitty relationship and you
know, I now I sort of, I'm a client with horses walking up and down breezeways
of barns to feel better, which is a great thing for people like us to hear
because I think we can forget sometimes as practitioners of the equine stuff that
simply being around the horses is healing.
You know, we all know this of course, but we're, you know, we, we get
for the best of reasons, you know.
Tied up with trying to provide the service that we provide and sometimes
we forget actually it's just being there is, you know, sometimes enough
Letting the horses do their thing just by being who they are But okay that shitty
relationship that you're talking about.
I think you're talking about how people survive relationships I know that you're
being rather modest about some of the shit you've had to go through in order to reach
the point where you can help other people going through their shit, basically.
Can you just talk through whatever you feel to talk through that helped?
Because, again, a lot of us that are coming into this equine assisted world,
we're coming from vastly different backgrounds, and, of course, you can't
be a perfect person Human being alive on planet Earth for more than a certain
amount of time without going through some trauma It's just part and parcel of
the experience of being on the planet.
However
Certain types can be more acute than others.
So talk us through Where you begin and then bring us up to now and then why
hypnotherapy and then I we haven't touched at all on the eye stuff and That listeners
is how I really connected with Christine She did her eye thing which he's going
to tell us about with me and it healed Some stuff in me that needed healing.
Bring us please from where you start to where you end Up to
now through all that, please.
And then perhaps how it now informs what you do with the horses.
Christine Dickson: Sure.
I'll try to, I'll try not to turn this into a boring recount of my childhood.
Like, we'll hit on the highlights.
That's the highlight reel.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
Christine Dickson: Where I was born was in Cleveland, Ohio, but that's just
my mom was a hippie and my father was just getting out of the Vietnam war.
But there's a lot of addiction, a lot of alcoholism in my family
and what I've learned as an adult.
There was a lot more mental health issues.
Then I realized because that was my normal.
I didn't have anything to compare my growing up to a quote,
unquote, healthy growing up.
So, this has been an ongoing discovery for myself, but my mother just was
not healthy enough to raise a child.
So my grandmother through court order took me from her when I was 2 and a half
due to neglect.
And other issues.
So
I, you know, I kind of grew up really knowing what it's like to feel like you
don't really have a place of belonging.
My grandmother did her best and she was wonderful.
I am grateful to her every day, but you know, I wanted to be in a family
with other kids and siblings and young parents who did fun things and.
I did get some of that by going to my aunts in summers and, and holidays, but
I think that there was also, there was a, a, a fear of the adults in my life of what
I turn out to be like my mother, because as I grew up my mother's mental health
issues and her manipulation and violence.
And chaos just grew
and she kept having children.
There's five of us with five different fathers.
So it was, you know, always managing the train wreck that my mother was creating.
So
fast forward to when I was in, I lived with my aunt.
In my freshman year and halfway into my sophomore year and you know, to, to
protect people in my family, I won't go into exactly what happened, but there
was a series of events that happened and lies told that cast me into.
A view of looking like I was, you know, you're just like your mother.
I got thrown out of their house ended up at my grandmother's.
My mother at the same time found herself homeless and was living at my
grandmother's pregnant with my sister, Katie, and with my young sister, Kimmy.
Being about I guess she was probably like five or six and so
the idea was I was gonna live with my mother So I get moved in with my
mother and I'll just fast forward to After my sister was born a few months
later My mother was itching to get back to the bar one of the drinking buddy
when I didn't want to go alone So she would leave my little sisters with
the neighbor and take me to biker bars When I was 15, 16, around that age and
I mean, when I talk about this stuff, I have to tell you, it's like I'm
talking about a movie I saw because it's so bizarre to me how much
happened in such a small period of time and how absolutely insane it was.
You know, by bringing me to these biker bars.
I mean, I had guns put in my face, I was in high speed chases I was in vans with
strange men, like, my mother would leave me with strange men, the fact that nothing
terrible happened to me is, I swear I have guardian angels watching over me
because the, the situations I was put in,
and that the fact that that stuff didn't happen is, is just insane.
But.
When you have a young teenager who is living in this chaos, who is
defiant, I was very defiant, I was very angry about a lot of things.
And I never had a father, and I meet this older man who thinks I am just
the best thing since sliced bread.
And takes me under his wing, and I fell madly in love with him.
I was 16, he was 34.
And,
you know, I haven't shared this before, but
the first time I ever did a drug other than smoking weed, which I hated because
it just made me paranoid I didn't get the attraction was with my mother my
mother and the group of people that she associated with were into snorting meth.
And so that was given to me when I was about, I think I was 16 is around
the time I met my kid's dad and so
we, I would go off to weekends with him and we would do math
and I just was enamored with it was followed him off the ends of the earth.
Like, he was.
My God in a way, you know, he was everything and he was in the fact that
he was scary on some really primitive level Because I felt so hurt by the
rejection of my family and the people that I loved and the position I was in
that I think on some level the scariness of him made me feel safe, you know,
because he was strong and Nobody was going to hurt me if I was with him
and one day when we had been away we would go on these like drives
and I never knew what he was doing.
You know, I, we get a hotel somewhere, I'd be left at the hotel.
He would go visit people or do whatever he did, or I'd sit in the
car outside of people's houses.
We're driving back.
He's crashing next to me.
So he's like nodding off.
I was doing the driving, but I didn't have a driver's license.
And we got pulled over and yeah, turns out there was five
pounds of meth in the trunk.
And that caused a complete
jumping of tracks for my life.
I was a juvenile, so I went to juvenile hall and I didn't even know I was there.
I didn't know there was anything in it.
I didn't know why I thought the reason I was held was because when my mother
was mad at me, she had reported me as a runaway because she didn't want
me to go away with him for a weekend.
And so she never took that off.
So I thought I was being arrested because.
I was still on the books as a runaway.
When I figured this out,
I didn't know what to think.
I was more dependent on him now because this was his world, you know, he
was, he had been arrested a million times before and I needed him now
to help me and it kind of forged me.
In this relationship and when the government was going to move to certify
me as an adult we went on the run
and I lived for four and a half years under aliases and moving and.
I had two kids under aliases and during that time, he became addicted
to drugs and became more and more terrifying and abusive and I felt I
had nowhere to go because if I went home, I would be arrested and I, my
family didn't either have the money or the knowledge of how to navigate
the judicial system in this country.
And.
The, and during this time, he was actually going back and showing up for
his cases because he, the search was, it was like an illegal search and seizure.
So he was, he ended up winning the case after 4 and a half years
on the fact that they didn't have a warrant to search the car.
They didn't have, they did a lot of things because they knew who he was.
So, you know, my family found out, no, I'm, I'm jumping.
So
he wins the case.
I had spent from 18 to 22 and a half with, you know, no friends, no, but like, no
life just on hold waiting and then living with this really unpredictable human.
And so I was so excited to move home and so we did I kind of took him
driving and streaming because I was, you know, Moving back, I was going
to have a life and what we didn't know was that five pounds of meth in
the trunk is also a federal offense.
So, even though he had won a state case, the feds had charged him in a sealed
indictment, which meant that when we moved back, we were being surveilled
for a year, followed in airplanes and helicopters and all kinds of crazy
stuff, phones tapped, all of that.
And one day there was a knock on the door and it was the police.
And all of a sudden the agents came out from the woods, they came out
from behind the barn, they came out from everywhere, and I was on the 11
o'clock news, that's how my family knew, so it was a huge bust, huge bust,
Rupert Isaacson: and What were they busting you for at that point?
Because the 5 pounds of meth was years before.
Christine Dickson: Well, it was still that char, so here's, yeah, there's
so much to the story that when I try to whittle it down I can miss bits.
Key pieces.
So because the 5 pounds of meth was also a federal offense.
It's like new charges, even though he won state, those state charges.
Now he's facing the same.
We're both facing the same charges.
Same exact crime, but now from a federal level, but they had also surveilled
him and the during those 4 and a half years that we were living on the run,
he was actually manufacturing meth.
Rupert Isaacson: I see.
Christine Dickson: In order to finance us to live.
And he had friends and people he knew that were working, turned against him because
they had got caught for other things.
So.
There was informants.
This
Rupert Isaacson: is breaking bad, basically.
Christine Dickson: Yes.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
Yeah.
Christine Dickson: And I think he became addicted because when you,
when you make meth in its liquid form, when you're making it it
will go right through the skin.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
Christine Dickson: And because he didn't wear gloves, he was constantly getting it
and then he, and then would want more than start doing, you know, it was a process.
So, but things were, even though we had moved back and even though he was.
Yeah, it was, it was really bad.
So I remember they drove us down.
I got driven down to the Philadelphia they call it pick it's it's the
county jail and there were five wards and 80 women on a ward.
And I,
everyone, all the women in there thought I was in there for DUI, cause they had
no idea why this thing was happening.
You know, 23 year old girl that looks like she's 15 is doing in jail.
And then they saw the news.
And when I woke up, I remember the first day waking up in there.
And the craziest thing was that other than my children who were
staying with friends, other than that, I felt like I had been saved.
Like the thought was, it's finally over.
Because I didn't think I would ever be able to leave him.
I don't know how I would ever get away.
He was terrified.
And he, you know, there was lots of threats.
So I was free.
I was in jail and I was free.
And so it took 15 months.
I had to plead guilty to 20 something felonies,
but he agreed to plead guilty to get me out.
Rupert Isaacson: So he did the decent thing.
Christine Dickson: Absolutely.
He pled guilty.
Got 10 years to get me out and back to our children.
Yes, he did.
Rupert Isaacson: But ultimately, despite the threats, despite all that, when Well,
Christine Dickson: that's the thing
Rupert Isaacson: Bush came to shove, he
Christine Dickson: That's the thing, Rupert
Rupert Isaacson: Interesting
Christine Dickson: That's it, that this is what makes people stay
in relationships sometimes too, is because people aren't all bad.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah, sure.
Christine Dickson: Right?
So we cling on to these aspects.
these crumbs or these pieces that we go, well, these don't add up.
Like this is a person, this is a stand up person, right?
But yet they're my biggest threat.
Rupert Isaacson: Did he subsequently reverse and then
come and become a threat again?
Or from that point on, was he always kind of on your side?
Christine Dickson: He was,
he wanted to maintain control over me.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
Christine Dickson: From jail through.
Rupert Isaacson: So it wasn't completely clean.
Christine Dickson: So.
Which then started me having to move a lot and feeling like I was being sought after.
So
Rupert Isaacson: you sort of had to go on the run again?
Christine Dickson: Yeah.
Rupert Isaacson: And how long did that last?
Christine Dickson: Years, years.
What was interesting is that
I sometimes would question whether I was just being paranoid.
But, you know, he had put that paranoia in me too.
He had told me one time that if people, if certain bad people knew or
believed and thought that I knew how to make math, that they would kidnap
me in order to get that information.
So, and there was a lot of people that were his friends that were not happy
that he pled guilty and that I got out.
And I found out years later that there were places that I had left
and moved and within weeks they had tracked me down to those places.
Now whether or not there was nefarious intent or it was just about getting
me back to bringing the kids.
You know, I also just didn't really
want to be bringing my kids to prisons all the time for visits.
And there was a lot of.
There was a lot of racism and, and horrible views that I didn't want
them exposed to as young children, you know, if, if they get exposed
to that as a, as young adults, they already have the framework,
but I didn't want that for them.
Rupert Isaacson: What became of this person in the end?
Christine Dickson: Oh yeah, so I wish I could say that that was the
last bad relationship I had, but I had to do it again just to be sure.
But.
In probably like
2005, I'm thinking he tracked me down.
He got, had got out of jail and his girlfriend was like,
kind of like super hacker.
Internet genius and anyway, she tracked me down.
She had like Google aerial views of the house I was living in and,
and he convinced his daughter who I always loved very much.
He had four children before we were together and his daughter
was coming out to California.
With her fiancee and he convinced her to come and reconnect with me.
So that was a trippy day within minutes to be on the phone with him after not
talking to him for years and years.
But he I don't think he ever really got over his propensity for meth.
And I think he was probably still doing it.
He, in 2014 15 he died of a heart attack.
Rupert Isaacson: Did you feel a great sense of relief and
did that make you feel guilty?
Christine Dickson: I didn't feel relief to be honest with you.
Because I had already reclaimed my life.
I, he didn't hold any kind of fear for me.
I felt sadness for my children who had been trying their best to have
some form of relationship with him.
You know, nobody goes, he ended up spending more than 10 years in jail
and nobody goes through that without having it affect them in very deep ways.
He was unable to be present at all.
He talked at, at you more than to you.
They had a really hard time connecting with him to have some kind of idea
of who their father was and it was very hard on them when he died.
Not because there was a great love there, but because of what
the loss of what could have been.
And I just felt sadness because of the choices he made.
He could have had so much more love in his life and such a better impact.
But, you know, there's an aspect of him that knew that
he wasn't well, and, you know,
that it was probably good that he wasn't around the kids when he
was young, when they were young.
Rupert Isaacson: You're a young mother, you have your kids on the run, then
you're arrested and you're in jail for 15 months while your children are very small.
Mm hmm.
How did you survive that?
That's enough to
take one down.
You know, talk us through the survival process of that.
Christine Dickson: I had never been away from my children.
I don't think I had ever spent one night away from them.
We were very close.
And, When things like this happen, like, with any disaster that natural
does, you know, everything slows down and you just do what you need to do in
the moment and you don't have time or the luxury to think about the future
or what, you know, and so I think that
once I had once they were picked up from the police station.
My job was to not fall apart in front of them and then I
could fall apart when they left.
And I'll never forget the first conversation I had with my
daughter because she was, she was four and or three, was she?
No, two and a half.
So she was, it was a couple months before her fourth birthday and
the first phone call I had with her took a few days to get to, but she was hysterical
and she was saying, come get me mommy, come get me.
And I broke.
I just,
my knees buckled and
I, there was nothing I could do.
The only thing that I could do was manage their care as
best I could from where I was.
Rupert Isaacson: How, how did you do that?
Where were they?
Christine Dickson: So, you know, it wasn't perfect.
They were at first at.
Their dad's ex, their half sister, brother, or their half
brother and half sister's house.
But there wasn't really a parent in that house during the day, you know, it
was like the teenage kids and it wasn't the, I'm hugely grateful because every
other woman that was in there with me, their kids were taken into foster care.
Rupert Isaacson: Right, that was going to be my question, how come they
weren't taken as wards of the state?
Christine Dickson: Because I had someone that could come get them.
And because, you know, to be honest with you it really could
have been, cause I was white,
really.
I mean, I, to think that that's not doesn't play into people, into
things would be, you know, ignorant.
The other women that I was in jail, they were in jail with me, the women in the
federal system were almost all Latina.
And a lot of them didn't speak English and yeah, and their kids
were taken into foster care.
I don't know if it's because they didn't have,
didn't have representation, if they didn't have people that they could go with.
I don't, I don't know.
I did have a lawyer, pretty.
Quickly.
So,
but they ended up with them and then I had to get them out of there
because it wasn't a good place.
And they ended up going to a friend of my exes who had, we had visited before
and they had a house and a pool and kids.
And from my perspective, it was a stable home she stayed
home and took care of the kids.
He worked.
It turned out to not be as good of an environment as I had hoped, but
other people that were trying to step up, we're only willing to take 1
child and I was not separating them.
So the options weren't great.
But they were the best that I could get and they could have been much worse.
But that's, that's, you know, I've lived.
One of the things that I think is so important when you have something
like this happen in a family is to take responsibility for your
role and to not be defensive.
I've never been, I've always tried to raise my children with the
understanding that their experience is their experience and that.
You know, we could talk about how I was 16 when I met him, but I still
hold accountability for what happened.
And if they're ever upset with me or frustrated or sad, that's their right.
And I'm, I don't defend myself.
I'm not here to change their mind.
I'm here to allow their experience to be their experience.
And because of that, We don't have an elephant in the room.
They don't feel that they can't tell me how they feel because somehow it'll hurt
me so much I won't be able to take it.
So they hold it all in.
Rupert Isaacson: Thank you.
When somebody shares a story that you, like the one that you just shared,
it gives everybody else permission to have lived their
lives too, if that makes sense.
And you,
you create healing.
By,
by sharing and what it also does, I think, for, you know, those of us who are
working in the fields of mental health is, you don't know who's walking through
the door and you don't know what fires they have to put out in their lives.
All you can do is
let the horses do what they do.
And one cannot presume as a human to, it's so interesting is that
we're all empathetic to each other.
We're social creatures.
We are basically empathetic to each other, thank God.
But there's a limit to what we can
offer each other for healing because
of our own fires and egos and, and so on the horse doesn't come with that.
And but by sharing a story like that, you come very, very close
to the role that the horse does, which is you're saying, here I am
having lived this experience.
This allows you to be human too.
I know that's not necessarily what you're consciously saying, but.
I think when I think it's how it gets received and I think that this
brings a very similar kind of healing to the type of healing a horse
would bring or nature would bring.
So for that, I'm extremely grateful.
And I can see why somebody coming to your barn, this being the point of it
sort of doesn't matter that your equine experience might be somewhat recent.
With the type of experience that you've had in life, you are
very well set up to help people.
Now, you then go from this experience and some others
into therapeutic modalities.
I presume to some degree to help yourself out too.
And you find yourself with hypnotherapy and then you find your way to IEMT.
Please talk to us about why and tell us what they do.
Christine Dickson: Yes.
I do want to say 1 thing 1st, because I realized you asked me
a question that I never answered.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
Christine Dickson: Or never fully answered.
And which was around the the idea of how.
What would my maybe, what would I want to share with people who
are doing the aquine work and.
I think the biggest thing I see, and it doesn't matter how many degrees you have.
Or what initials are behind your name.
I see this happen a lot and this is where as any type of mental health
work or any type of supportive work for people is so important to really,
really develop a sense of when we're projecting onto people because we, if
we allow ourselves to do that, we're going to get it wrong at some point and
the way I see this happen is there's, there's Two ways in my experience.
One is,
my mother
was something I survived
and how beautiful is it that there are people in this world
that can't even comprehend that.
And
there's people in this world that get very uncomfortable.
If you say anything negative about your mother, if you tell people that
you have had to limit your exposure to your mother, they can't understand.
And I have had that happen in with people who were doing quote
unquote, like force therapy type work where they projected onto me
this idea that my family.
Was my, were my ancestors and they were part of me and I had to be
grateful for them and I had, and it was, it was not very informed.
Put it that way
and I think that this is.
I've heard of this struggle with other people who have had parents
that are so toxic that sometimes no contact is the only way to protect
yourself and people don't understand and it gets people very uncomfortable.
So, being able to see how we don't project that in our work is, is important.
The other one is when you've been in a pathological love relationship
or even pathological relationship as an adult child with a parent.
There can be really unhealthy things that happen.
One of the things is that the way pathological relations work is very
similar to horse training, or at least the, the, the older model of horse
training that is shifting, which is the idea of pressure and release pathological
relationships become a pressure and release modality, which means that the
uncomfortableness or the anger or the manipulation that's trying to happen.
From the person with the pathological issue becomes a pressure that
the only way we feel safe.
Is that we have to relieve that pressure that could mean paying their bills.
It could mean agreeing to not see our friends.
It could mean a bunch of things.
And those don't necessarily go away when you separate from that
person because it's a power and they're trying to to wield and.
For a long time, mental health professionals did not understand the
dynamic and they would further shame the person who was being manipulated
because they're going, wait a minute.
I don't understand.
You're not even together anymore.
You're not even together anymore and you, and you've just paid
their car payment for them?
Like, what are you talking about?
The person already feels shame for the fact that they did it.
The threat of not doing it and the pressure of being able to resist
all of the manipulation and all the ways that that person has
shown you that they will burn it to the ground if you do not comply.
Well, then it's a choice.
That's not really doesn't feel like a choice.
Do I want to die on this hill?
Do I want to invite this in?
It takes time and Sometimes those are the relationships like these are not
clear cut These types of relationships are ones that people do that women
do get killed the the you know People will say in abusive relationships
Oh, why didn't you just leave?
Or when you read about women who poisoned or, or, you know, ultimately
killed their abuser and they'll go, why didn't they just leave?
They could have just left.
And what they don't understand is, and this, this isn't just to
women, this is men too, men are in these relationships as well is that
the point to which you are most vulnerable is when you decide to leave.
Because you have started to demonstrate that you're no longer under the spell and
you've connected to the fact that you have power and that's the thing that has been
fought, has been the whole MO is for you to never believe that you have agency.
And so when you start to believe that that needs to be taken down,
and when you take that action is when
the big retaliations can happen.
So it's not true that people can just walk out and people don't have
the support that there, it just doesn't exist in a lot of ways.
So
this is the one thing I wanted to say about the people that show up.
Because a lot of times people who are in these relationships will show up for help.
And you have to be careful of what help that you're suggesting, because if you
don't know the actual situation and you suggest someone leave it without proper
support, which is going to definitely go beyond your, your skill set, they could be
getting into a more dangerous situation.
And this is a type of brainwashing that takes years to undo.
It's not intellectual.
They already know they're being manipulated.
They know that things don't add up and that they're stuck.
They just don't know how to get out of it.
Because it's a grind.
You got ground down.
So that, that is something that I feel very passionate about.
And that I would say anybody, any other person doing this work
that has any questions, if I would be happy to answer them.
Answer.
Rupert Isaacson: Well, this is going to be at the end of this.
I'm sure I, and I'm sure a lot of people listening to say, can
we come to you for mentorship?
Because
without a doubt, there are people who are facing this and as you say, it's
male and female, as you say, it's all walks of life, as you say, you know,
and I don't think there are many people with the skill set that you have who
can advise on these things like you can.
So we, we will get to you.
There will be, so listeners, there will be a contact that you can go to Christine
and get further mentorship on this.
Talk to us about the hypnotherapy now and talk to us about the IEMT, please.
And then how does that inform recovery?
Christine Dickson: So hypnotherapy, we talked about the 88 percent being
the subconscious and that's where our programming is the, the ways of
seeing ourself and the world that let's say we didn't consciously choose.
They were, you know, downloaded into us as children and society, all of these things.
So the beauty of hypnotherapy is that you get access to that subconscious
programming so you can start to make suggestions into the subconscious mind.
To create knowns in the subconscious that will support your conscious decisions.
So, if you know, if I want to like working out, you know, if I want to,
I want to start working out, well, it's going to be helpful to have some
suggestions made to the subconscious that connect you to the subconscious.
Feelings, the why, the feelings of after a workout, the feelings of why I want to
do this, what I'm, I'm reaching for health wise or body wise and feeling strong or
what I'll be able to do and how I'll be able to support my body versus the pain
being the forefront thought of the actual working out of how we don't want to do it
or it's boring or it's this or it's that.
So it's kind of like, you know, eating, eating foods.
That you don't want to eat is very similar, sweets and stuff like that
is very similar to drinking alcohol because we want that positive feeling
that we get right in the beginning and our mind completely gaslights us
about what the effect is afterwards.
It doesn't even show it to us.
Don't think about what's afterwards.
Just let's just focus on that initial feeling.
And then after we do, it's like, we wake up and go, now we're
dealing with the after effects.
And it's like, why was I, I was like under a trance before.
Well,
Rupert Isaacson: dopamine, dopamine is a strong thing, right?
Yeah.
Christine Dickson: Yes.
Yeah.
So that's, so that's the, that's just a little aspect of hypnotherapy.
IAMT, you know, I've, I've, I've been exposed to a ton of other modalities.
What does IAMT
Rupert Isaacson: stand for?
Christine Dickson: It's Integral Eye Movement Therapy or
Integral Eye Movement Technique.
IAMT So,
Rupert Isaacson: how's it work?
Christine Dickson: How it works is
our mind's body, our mind's body.
Wow.
Our mind's First and foremost goal is to keep us alive.
Rupert Isaacson: I love our mind's body
Christine Dickson: Our mind's body.
It was it was almost like a
Rupert Isaacson: body.
Our mind does think of our body as its property.
Yeah, it's very interesting Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
Okay So
Christine Dickson: now the interesting thing is that because it wants to keep
us alive, it wants us to avoid pain because logically pain can lead to
death, but the mind doesn't differentiate between physical and emotional pain.
Pain is pain and pain needs to be avoided.
So the way I see it is that when, if you know anything about internal
family systems or I have IFS, the premises is that when we're a kid.
This almost internal family gets formed in our minds and the predominant.
Role is the manager and this is what it looks like.
I'm a little kid.
I'm three years old.
I'm wide open, right?
I'm wide open.
Hey, I don't have any defenses.
I don't have any protections up yet And I find a frog in the backyard and i'm so
excited and I take my frog in the house and i'm like mommy Mommy, look at my frog.
Look what I found and she's like I told you to get out of here
I'm in the middle of something.
Why are you such a pain in the ass all the time get outside and play?
Well, all of that openness, that is like a collapse.
It's a collapse.
It is a deep, deep wound.
And in that moment, a manager gets formed,
because we don't want to feel that pain ever again.
And the manager goes, stupid, look what you did, stupid.
Don't do that again.
Just play with yourself.
You don't need anybody else.
And that manager from that point on is always looking for ways that
that stupid part of you is going to be open and get hurt again.
And that part of you that got hurt becomes what they call the exile
and it gets put in a box and it gets thrown in the dungeon and it is exile.
We cannot trust that part of you.
And as we all know, children learn how to regulate their nervous
system through co regulation.
And when you don't have a parent.
That you can go to when either you're super happy or super sad or super scared
that will hold you and listen to you and let you use their nervous system to bring
yourself back down and you go, well, I'm just going to have to do it for myself.
You can't do co regulation for yourself, but what you can do is you can dissociate
and that starts to feel like a superpower
and you become more and more intellectual and you intellectualize things and you
go, you know, that doesn't hurt me.
Yeah, I don't get bothered by that stuff.
It's not that you don't.
It's that you have dulled that to the point where when it comes in, it's so
automatic that that gets put in a box and put away that you never even experience
you bypass the whole experience.
So we have, we all have all these managers, right?
So this is how I describe IEMT.
So
now when that happened, right, let's imagine that what you heard
that manager is saying is that nobody wants to hear from you.
That creates kind of a tuning fork within your psyche.
It's like a, it's like a lens.
Every situation after that point is going to be scanning for how
no one wants to hear from you.
If someone that, you know, just says, Hey, what's up?
And like, and just walks past you and keeps going.
It's not that they're busy.
It's not that they're it's that they're avoiding it because
nobody wants to hear from you.
Right.
We go into every situation with this anxiety that nobody wants to hear from me.
Every situation we see goes to that lens and validates.
So now this memory that created the manager, well, the mind
kept that memory as being sharp.
So what I mean by that is the memory lives in the hippocampus,
but it has a direct link right into the amygdala, which is
the nervous system, the body.
So mind and body are connected in that memory.
You cannot intellectualize your way out of the effects of that memory.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
There's going to be cortisol.
Yeah.
Christine Dickson: Yeah.
It's, it's, it's connected.
So
what I am T does is it's a, it's, it's simplistic in its approach.
And the whole goal is to dial down or disconnect that connection between
the hippocampus and the amygdala.
And the beauty of this is that when you take the negative charge away
from that fast memory, You get to now have perspective on the memory
because you're not activated.
When we're activated, our wise mind, our ability to have perspective and,
and to see it from a bigger, see the bigger picture is, is almost non
existent because we're activated.
Take away the activation.
We can use our own wisdom and our own views to put perspective on something that
I don't know like it was so triggering.
And now, oh, wow.
Yeah.
God, my mom was doing that to all of us.
All the time.
She was so stressed out, you know, and I know what was going on then.
And, and
yeah, I can see.
But, you know, like you just start to see it differently.
And then all of those domino effect.
The domino effect of everything that you built on top of that.
That all starts to fall away.
And.
This works amazingly because you know what the thing is, is that the whole
system, this whole system was created in our evolution to help us as children
when we're in an environment to survive the adaptive child needs to adapt and
survive the environment, but those tools that it created do not necessarily
service as adults when we have agency,
you can keep the wisdom of a past experience.
Transcribed
without needing the charge.
So let's say you like to apply this to horses.
Let's say you had a accident on a horse, you know, you, you were riding your horses
and then you have this terrible accident and you got really hurt or sometimes
you didn't even have to get really hurt.
Sometimes people have small accidents.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah, they make, it doesn't care that
threat is real or imagined.
That's the.
Getting a pretty score.
Yeah.
Christine Dickson: And then now you have anxiety about writing,
but then you have anxiety about having anxiety because anxiety leads
to more crashes and more issues.
So, and then you're trying to force yourself to not be anxious
or pretend that you're not anxious.
And then you have shame around now that you feel bad about that.
And, and so being able to take away the charge is just this It's an opening.
It's just, it creates an opening for this, these charges to leave and the
wisdom and perspective to come in.
Rupert Isaacson: How do you bring that into work with horses and people?
Are you doing this work with the rapid eye movement, following your finger,
et cetera, while they're working with the horse or on the horse, or you're
doing this away from the horse in another, context, but it's the same
client and you're offering a knock on an equine thing within your practice.
Christine Dickson: Yes.
And, and, and, you know, I will say that the majority of my clients, we don't have
the equine part because they're virtual.
They live all over the place.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
Christine Dickson: The only people
Rupert Isaacson: that you can do this over zoom.
Christine Dickson: Oh yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely.
Rupert Isaacson: Do you hear that everyone?
Christine Dickson: Yeah.
Most of this, most of my work is done through zoom.
That's why Also that I say, like, the the equine part isn't as big of a role because
it only I can only offer it to the people that are that are in my area or I also do.
I do weekend intensives 1 on 1.
so people will come and stay with me for a weekend.
And they will work with the horses, but
Rupert Isaacson: okay, I'm just thinking I can imagine doing this.
on a horse.
I'm just now imagining being on a horse in a nice situation with a nice
horse, with a horse moving nicely underneath me, or perhaps a horse being
static and peaceful underneath me.
And you taking me through this rapid eye movement way to dis, dis,
Remove the hippocampus amygdala connection.
And if I am someone who likes that environment, horses, perhaps I'll also
maybe like to do it under a tree perhaps.
I'll also maybe like to do it in water, perhaps.
You know, people have their different
happy places, but obviously if wee horse people, that's ponies I could see.
A double power because I could see, I could see a subconscious reaction
going, Oh, well, I'm being listened to because I've been placed in
the, even if it's by myself in the environment, that is the best for me.
Sensorally, emotionally, and so on.
So I could see a real power in doing this with the horse, but I could also
see what's great is that you could also do this completely without because,
You're not always with the horse and as you say, you can do this over distance.
What, what it seems that you're describing here is a shamanic process.
So when I've had the experience with.
Shamans in indigenous cultures, there is a, it's, it's usually conflict
resolution and that conflict is often internal, but it can be also external.
So the shaman could be addressing conflict within the group, for example,
or conflict between two people equally.
It's conflict.
You know, if there's a health issue, that's still a
conflict, it's still a dilemma.
And the idea is to resolve that dilemma.
And I think that one of the things which is tricky for us, all of us in our
culture, and by our culture I don't just mean Europe and America, I mean everything
that is post agricultural in the world and is not hunter gatherer, basically.
Anything that has gone through this process of kind of, Becoming
processed in a funny way.
Removal from nature, which is also a deep wound.
Is we've, we, we, we cannot be other than mentally ill in that situation.
Because, so therefore we must all be, because we're all suffering,
we're all animals in a cage.
And sometimes the cage is nicer than the other cages, but it's still a cage.
And we lack community, and we lack the, the good shaman, but we also
have gone from The predator being, or the danger being, obviously the lion,
the tiger, the whatever, but also, say, the elephant or the black mamba.
But not, in the hunter gatherer culture, your fellow human.
And the, even though humans are as funky in hunter gatherer life as they
are in non hunter gatherer life, there is a process to defunkify and, keep
those conflicts cleansed so that the community doesn't fragment and people
don't get eaten by hyenas basically.
Now we've replaced the hyena with ourselves and this sends us mad
because it's not how it's supposed to be and yet we have to navigate this.
And it's almost impossible.
It seems to me that what you're describing particularly with
IEMT is a way to in our society
have that shamanic conflict resolving cleansing reboot
that allows you to navigate and that sounds incredibly useful.
What I can also say is, you know, having tried it.
Because remember in Birmingham, I was like, all right, then do it.
And you threw it and you did take me through it and I was
like, oh, that did actually take the sting out of that memory.
That's cra That's amazing.
And it was so And then you
Christine Dickson: overslept . Yeah.
It
Rupert Isaacson: was so, yes, exactly.
Yeah.
It's like, then I, yeah, then I slept.
Like I hadn't slept in, I don't know.
But the, so if people are coming into equine assisted work, do you think, would
you recommend, because I think this is something anyone can learn, right, IEMT,
would you, would you, would you recommend that as, as a modality that those of
us who are working with mental health should, you know, In whatever field
should should look at do you teach it?
Christine Dickson: So, Here's the funny thing about amt is that when
it was first when it was first shown to me I mean I was laughing because
I was like, what did you just do?
Like, that's crazy.
And I was like, I have to learn this.
And,
and so because it works so clearly for me and it works so easily for
you, I had this vision of like getting trained in it as being super easy.
Like that was really easy.
That was really straightforward.
It is not.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay, I can believe it.
Damn.
Christine Dickson: Because, because, that's when everything goes right.
But remember we all have those managers, and let me tell you something.
I've been working with someone where I'm looking dead in the face of
their managers and their managers are going, Oh, she thinks that
we're going to let her let this go.
That's hilarious.
I don't know what you think you come here to do lady, but there's
no way you're getting past us.
Like you have to have, you have to have all of the different ways that this can
go and know how to navigate through to find Ways around these things because
I've had to go all different directions.
So because it was easy, like for me, as, as with you and really direct,
like, I thought, oh, it's just going to be learning about the questions
and how the, you know, to move people's eyes and, and that'll be it.
But it's not to say that if you do this work, that.
As you, as you've done it, you're as a client that you can't take
aspects of it and do it for yourself.
And, and if you don't get the result, you know, like, you're not going to hurt
yourself if you don't get the result.
That you're looking for, then you would know that you maybe
need some extra help on that.
But yes, I think that once you experience it a few times or maybe
more than a few, but like, then you can get a feel for it and use it.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
Also, maybe you could, let's say you're an equine practitioner.
You're listening to this.
You're thinking, well, you know, I like the sound of this, but I haven't
got the time to, you know, I've got to feed all my horses and I haven't
got the time to go learn this.
Modality, which Christina's just divulge is perhaps a little bit trickier to learn.
We were hoping like everything, but perhaps I could team up
with someone who has that, that who has learned that modality.
And then perhaps we could join forces within the practice.
Have that so let's say I mean obviously I'm in Germany you're in California but
let's say you were down the road from me.
I could see saying Okay, Christine.
Could we join forces here?
I'm doing this thing.
This is this horse boy thing.
This is this movement method things is this ticking thing Would you please can I
please send clients to you or could you?
Come sometimes in certain sessions with certain people and bring
that resource to the table.
Is this, is it easy to find people who are trained like you are in this?
Christine Dickson: It started in the UK and so it is there's a
lot more practitioners in the UK.
It's really only recently starting to get more and more attraction in the US.
I think right now I'm one of, one of two listed practitioners in Los Angeles,
the other one being my daughter.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
I thought it was more widespread.
Yeah.
Christine Dickson: Yeah, no, it's but it's really, as you saw, like, you know,
with your own experience, it's really getting traction now and people are,
are seeking it out because it works.
Rupert Isaacson: So someone could say, you know, IEMT
practitioners or therapists near me.
Yeah, there's
Christine Dickson: a, because once you get your certification,
you're listed on the website.
And so you, you can put, yes.
Like I actually had a client on Saturday who found me through
reading about IEMT on Reddit.
And then Googled IAMT practitioners in Los Angeles, and I came up
and that's how she found me.
So, yes, and, and, you know, you have a lot of really good questions about
doing stuff more with the horses, right?
You know, these are all ways that, you know, who knows if that, you know, it
doesn't, you don't have to have the horses because this is an inside job.
You know, this is all about how you're, you know, Your mind and body are
connected, but who knows ways that it could be expanded through actually being
in the field with the horses or being there's so many, so many different things
that you could try, you know, and I we are planning we have been planning.
We're going to do it this year, but now we're doing it next year.
Is a retreat where I'm kind of the on the human realm and she's working on the horse
realm and by pairing up we get to support people in the work that they're doing.
They want to do the work with the horses, but we all know our own personal work
is just a Completely interwoven with that so not only the mentoring stuff
and the other stuff, but if we come up against something that is rooted in
that nervous system from a past memory, we could clear it out in real time and
then what you're what what the people are there to learn about the horses.
Doesn't have the roadblocks from the internal barriers anymore.
Like everything can, can actually sink in and be more accessible.
Rupert Isaacson: I think we need to try this.
Okay.
So listeners with your permission, Christine, should we decide to do
this and invite people to come on a.
Retreat like this in a workshop.
Let's do the horse side.
Let's do this side.
Oh, I can't do this side, but you can do this side and let's see what happens.
Why don't we do one steak side and one I'd be intrigued to
see what people come away with.
Maybe this would be something for professionals, you know, that coming
from whatever side of the equine assisted field to be exposed to this.
Something which we didn't get into, and we haven't got time to get into it now,
because I think maybe we need to have you on again is I know that you've done
a lot of work with addiction, people with addiction, celebrities with addiction.
I know that you ended up building a large practice.
That's had to, you know, you've had to protect people's anonymities.
You've worked sort of at that level a bit in Hollywood, and that's given you
a, an insight into How tricky it can be.
This word navigation comes up again to help people who are in the public sphere
and therefore can't, you know, go out there and be frank about what they're
facing and what they're dealing with.
Just because we're heading into towards towards the sort of natural
end of this particular iteration, but I think we had to bring you back on.
Can you just talk to us a little bit about.
What that, how that has helped you, where you have to sort of, in your
practice, where you have to help someone, but you also have to kind of keep it
secret that you're helping them, that you have to, you have to dance around.
You're talking about eggshells, you know, that these are very real ones
suddenly, where you actually have to protect the people that you're working
with, and at the same time, you know, get them through what they're doing.
How has that particular, those years of doing that, helped
you to help ordinary people?
More deeply because it just adds a layer of complexity.
Christine Dickson: It does.
It does because, you know, a lot of people who are artists in
entertainment are sensitive people.
And one of the things that I think that we've seen really explode
around social media is that.
The dehumanizing of others and the fact that celebrities, we would talk about and
weigh in on a celebrity's life in ways that we would never do to someone that
we knew or someone's face, like it there.
It's just like
Rupert Isaacson: that's projection again.
Yeah.
Christine Dickson: Yeah.
It's very bizarre.
Social experiment that's, that's really has, but it has real life
consequences depression, suicide and addiction being some of the ways that
people end up succumbing to this mass.
Feeling energetically that you are despised or ridiculous or shameful
on talented, whatever it is.
And, you know, I don't even pretend that I know what that's like, but I can
say that when I did go through the rest and was on the news and all of that
stuff and sitting in the courtroom and in an unveil hearing the prosecutions
can say anything about you without.
And so the things that they said were horrifying to me.
I wasn't prepared.
I didn't know any of that.
And it felt like, and this was in the news, and I mean, it felt like you were
hated by the world and you were being seen in a way that was not even true.
And it's a very trippy feeling to have this like unknown, like faceless, you
know, Enormity that now suddenly sees you has honed in on you and is projecting
this negative energy towards you.
So,
you know, there's a difference when you're dealing with someone who is
a public figure in any way, because in addiction, you talk about, you
know, there's a saying that says you're only as sick as your secrets.
So there's an aspect of ownership of being true that goes with healing, but
I can't tell someone else whether that's what their experience is going to be
if they come out to the world and share this aspect with them because it doesn't
look like a lot of that is always true.
Now, a lot of people who have done this have found that the amount of support
they got way outweighed the negative comments, but this is more about.
Navigating this internally and finding the forgiveness and finding the freedom
and Knowing that that is your decision.
I'm
not sure if I answered that fully because I kind of just lost my train of thought
Rupert Isaacson: Well, it sounds like what it gives you is compassion and perspective
Christine Dickson: Yeah for sure for sure
Rupert Isaacson: and perhaps a
a greater level of it because you went through it personally and then you
ended up having to help people who were either also going through it personally or
in danger of going through it personally.
I think what you're talking about here is kindness.
Christine Dickson: Empathy.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
Yeah.
It's easy to forget that section, even in this line of work.
And God knows, you know, we horsey people can be A bossy judgmental lot and
it can creep up without even noticing.
Christine Dickson: I have a theory about that.
Rupert Isaacson: Go on.
Christine Dickson: And my theory is, is that a lot of children
who grew up in dysfunctional homes found solace in animals.
Rupert Isaacson: Ah.
Christine Dickson: But.
Did not learn nervous system regulation healthy communication, which people
never think about learning communication.
We just think it's just downloaded to us, but there's actually tools that you could
learn to really help your relationships around healthy communication.
We didn't learn that.
We never felt what it was like to have power agency.
So we, that feeling of being susceptible to everyone else and everyone else's
thoughts comes with us into adulthood, no matter how powerful we actually are.
So then our reactions to people are oftentimes overblown.
We feel attacked by different opinions.
Questioning can feel threatened by someone doing things differently or
seeing things differently judged you know, it's that thing where we, we are,
we can become very in tune with our own feelings or the feelings that we feel
the animal is having and have a lot less compassion for the other person.
How many times you hear people say, I.
I love animals and I hate people.
Yet we're people.
You're a people.
We're all a people.
And so either you have a grandiose version, view of yourself that feels
like you're the only good person in the world and everyone else is terrible.
Or you have internalized a real negative and unhealthy view of yourself as human.
And either way, it's, it's, you know, you don't have community.
You don't have.
The beautiful aspects that you can only get from having a relationship
with another human being.
Rupert Isaacson: Wise words.
And yeah, that is a statement you hear so often and often from people who are
supposedly in the equine assisted field.
Or canine too, you hear that with dog people too and so on.
And yeah, it does, that one always gives me pause.
It's like, well then why are you, why are you doing it?
Why are you working with people then?
You know, yeah, deep down we're all
searching for, crying for that connection.
And we know it's there, we know it's possible.
And I wonder if that statement that gets made is a way of, is actually an
unconscious statement of grief, when saying, you know, I love animals but I
hate people, meaning, I seem to find with animals what I can't find with people,
but what I know I ought to be able to find with people, because they are my species.
And I feel this grief of being unable to connect with people.
With my species and this is a soul wound and I'm expressing
it with these words Even though it's coming out in a weird way.
Does that make sense?
Christine Dickson: It's my it's my sword and shield, you know I say
that Those walls that you built to protect yourself Also keep you on
the other side of everything Yeah.
That you want.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
Oi,
oi, oi.
Better saddle up and go for a contemplative ride in the forest.
On my list for tomorrow.
Listen, Christine, it's been amazing.
I think there's more questions have come up in my mind.
And I think, you know, as you know, and some of our listeners know that we
have another podcast called Live Free, Ride Free, and I think I'd like you
to please come on that and talk in a more biographical way about how you've
managed to kind of self actualize.
From the equine side, I think.
Those of us listening definitely are all very curious about the IEMT.
We're very curious about how you bring what you've learned about
addiction and also hypnosis and so into perhaps ways we can inform our own
practices and to do what we do better.
I certainly am always looking for mentorship.
How do we find you?
How do we reach out to you?
How do we engage you to help us learn this stuff?
Christine Dickson: Yeah, sure.
Well, my email address is On the path, C as in cat, H as in
horse, T as in Tom, CHT at gmail.
com.
So it's on the path, CHT at gmail.
com.
My website is on the path coaching.
net and you can find me on social media.
Christine Dixon on Facebook.
I have an on the path on Facebook business page.
I have.
Rupert Isaacson: People can reach out to you for mentorship people.
People can.
Yeah.
Christine Dickson: Yeah.
And on Instagram, it's a it's on the path underscore mentor.
And then I have a my personal is Christine Dixon underscore on the path.
But yeah, you can find me can mention me any way.
I mean, and we're
Rupert Isaacson: going to put these links in, you know, on the written
thing at the end of this too.
Christine Dickson: Yeah,
Rupert Isaacson: but
yeah I'm certainly going to be signing up for some mentorship.
I could use it.
Christine Dickson: I've had the idea and maybe it's something that we can
talk about too, is the idea of like putting something together for trainers,
for people who are working in this.
Because look, I'm not saying that people can't be grind, you know, it,
you know, when you see, especially if you identify with the horse's pain and
suffering, and then you see people show up with the same ignorance, the same
ignorance, the same ignorance, it's easy to lose your compassion for the
person and connect with the feeling of that building on itself, instead of.
Connecting with the idea that how great more and more people who believed this way
are coming to learn things differently.
How great is that?
As opposed to I can't believe another, you know, like there's
and that's just one example.
Like, it really it's a lot of the way we're viewing things
that creates our own suffering.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah, it's a reframing that we have to
go through, but you know, it.
One can't do that alone.
And one needs, you know, one would have had the shaman, one would have had
vision quest, one would have had, you know, those night, those vigils alone
on the mountain, that sort of thing.
But we don't anymore.
So unless we, unless we deliberately stick that in some way and create it.
Yeah.
So absolutely.
Well, I think we should put something together for.
our fellow professionals in the field in a sort of a not we're here to teach
you stuff more like a let's explore.
How we might want to deepen our practices
Okay, brilliant.
I
Christine Dickson: love that.
Yeah
Rupert Isaacson: to be continued then
Christine Dickson: to be continued.
Rupert Isaacson: Thank you christine
Christine Dickson: Thank you so much for inviting me on here.
I could talk to you for 10 hours and maybe take a nap and
Rupert Isaacson: yeah, I think, I think, I'm sure, I'm sure, you know,
I think most of the listeners would love to hear more from you too.
There's, there's a lot more here to explore and unpack.
So, let's maybe think about a round two.
Until then, I'm grateful.
And we see you next time.
Christine Dickson: Thank you so much.
Rupert Isaacson: Thank you.
Christine Dickson: Thanks everybody.
Rupert Isaacson: thank you for joining us.
We hope you enjoyed today's podcast.
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