Anger

Anger can't be a pointless emotion, or we wouldn't have it as part of our repertoire, but boy sometimes I'm angry that I get angry! I'm writing this at just gone 11pm while the rest of the household sleeps and I wait for Philip to fall peacefully asleep again. For months now (well, he's not quite five months old bless him so I guess it can't be that many months!) he's settled to sleep really well by 7pm and then slept peacefully until after midnight. I'm someone who really doesn't do well on not enough sleep, yet strangely and unexpectedly I have no problem with these early-hours-of-the-morning wakings, in fact I look forward to them as cuddle time.
But this past week he's started waking up before midnight. Normally again I make the most of the extra cuddle time, but for some annoying reason, tonight the fact that I've been woken unexpectedly has triggered anger in me. It's most difficult for me when I've literally just fallen asleep and he wakes up. I squash the anger of course, and cuddle him and love him with all my heart and he's soon happily in the land of nod again. It got me thinking though, about anger and how irrational it can make a person, and how that can affect their behaviour towards others, human or animal. Some people lash out physically, some verbally, most have a way of controlling their anger so they don't lash out. But perhaps the reason not to lash out has to be stronger than the urge to do so, and I think sometimes horses get a bit of a raw deal.
The most common reason I know for people lashing out in anger is them (the person, not the horse) not knowing a solution to the problem. In my case, I know I don't want to let Philip cry himself to sleep, there are more than enough studies proving that's a bad idea. And I know how to get him back to sleep relatively quickly and easily. But I don't know how to have him sleep through in the first place (and the reality, of course, is that he doesn't need to until he feels ready to). In the horse world, loading is one of the areas you most commonly see people lashing out in anger (sadly often physically), and its almost always because they don't know how to get their horse into the lorry or trailer. They know that once he's on the trailer he'll travel comfortably (or at least, that's what they believe), and they know that he'll enjoy the hack or show they're heading for, but they don't know how to get him into the trailer in the first place. They might have read the books, watched the DVDs, listened to the experts, but when they come to try it with their own horse, it just doesn't work! Working as part of the team at the Monty Roberts demonstrations in the UK, I regularly hear people say 'I've tried everything, but nothing works'. I say to them 'If you gave your horse to Monty to work with, do you think he'd be able to get it in the trailer?'. The answer, of course, is yes. So it's not that nothing works, it's that we don't know the answer.
If you're in the horse world then you're in luck, the Intelligent Horsemanship Recommended Associates can come and work with you and your horse to give you individualised advice to help you get back on the right track. In the meantime... 'quiet down cobwebs, dust go to sleep, I'm rocking my baby, and babies don't keep'.