Support Systems

By Ange Bean

Wednesday I woke up unmotivated and feeling ‘heavy.’ I just wanted to curl up on the couch and play games on my phone. Luckily, Wednesday is my non-barn day (I'd love to call it a day off, but Wednesdays I generally attend the ever-growing office work pile), so I did. After about an hour of petting my cat, Gavin, crushing candy, and having my feet occasionally licked by Fritz, my dog, I was feeling recharged enough to do some correspondence and start on the office work.  

Since my last blog, there's been a lot of discussion around depression, burnout, and mental health. I'm very humbled my words have reached so many. Even those with less-positive responses, you are thinking about these things or you wouldn't take the time to reply.  

To those who know me in the real world and have reached out, I'm doing well these days. I couldn't have written my last blog when I was in my darkest time. I just didn't have enough perspective. Here's where my perspective has brought me.

Everyone who is bitten by the horse passion understands that horses are a high-emotion conduit. The joy of a great ride, or a soft nuzzle is truly wonderful. The heartache when your horse is injured is brutal.  With our emotions this exposed, of course we are going to experience periods of emotional unrest. Generally this shows up as some form of depression. 

Depression is an intimidating topic, especially as there are several types of depression, depression doesn’t always look the same, nor is it always of the same intensity.  Plus, since periodic mood oscillations are normal, often it's hard to know if the 'heavy' is actually depression.

For some people, their emotional oscillations run on the low side, or they get stuck in the bottom of the mood oscillation. The doctors title this ‘major depression’ or ‘persistent depressive disorder,’ depending on the exact symptoms.   Causes can be genetics, emotional, or physical trauma. Regardless of the cause, for people with these types of depression, finding the right medications, therapies, and lifestyle adjustments makes all the difference, and monitoring their emotional state is part of their life. 

Then there is what WebMD calls ‘situational depression.’  The brain experiences some trauma, either an ugly event, repetitive stress, or a hormone shift and the brain’s normal mood oscillations get affected. Sometimes, if the stressors go away, the brain goes back to normal. Sometimes, even if the stressors go away, the brain stays stuck in ‘injury’ mode. So the brain needs some help for a while, whether that be counseling, meds, herbs, lifestyle changes, or some combination. 

Then there's an occasional case of the blues.  Because of stress build up, or emotional trauma, or hormones, we feel a bit ‘not ourselves.’  Our emotional oscillation runs a little lower, or stays low a little longer than normal. Time and self care often bring things back on line. I jokingly call these small bouts of ‘heavy’ a ‘brain cold.’

The tricky part is knowing which you are experiencing. They all feel ‘heavy’ from the inside.  

My personal method for assessing is to ask myself a few questions:

1. Did some event happen to trigger this?
2. How long have I felt this way?
3. How well am I taking care of myself?

If something has happened or I've felt ‘heavy’ for only a few days, I will treat it like any illness -- get enough rest, eat well, do things that recharge me.  Sometimes that ‘something’ is as simple as the end of a crazy show season and I'm run down. Sometimes it's losing Reine, my best dog, or Silhouette, my favorite horse. Sometimes it's the ups-and-downs of this industry getting to me. More important than the ‘something’ is my ability to heal.  If the ‘brain cold’ lasts too long, or gets worse, or I start having trouble functioning, then it's time to get help.  

The first place I go for help is my support system.  I have a few close friends I can count on when I need to talk, or just sit with me in my ‘brain cold.’ Sticking to my routines and maintaining good sleeping and eating habits goes a long way, but connection to people I trust has been the real key for me.  

I didn't have this a few years ago when things got really ugly. Sure, I had friends, but I was too guarded to have solid, trauma-surviving emotional connections.  In my mind, I could best meet the needs of my clients and staff by staying strong. Strong with lots of walls.

Breaking down those walls has not been easy, nor is it a finished job, but it is worth it. My circle of close friends is small. I appreciate every one of them. Without them, I could easily have spiraled into situational depression last year when I rearranged my business, or when I lost my mare and my dog. Thanks to my support system, a ‘heavy’ period didn’t become paralyzingly black and ulgy.  

Thankfully, Wednesday's ‘heavy’ start was not the beginning of a ‘brain cold,’ but most likely fatigue from Tuesday's long day. But if it was, I now have a plan for treating it.

Professional costs

I love my job. I really do. I get to spend my career following my passion.  But like most things, it comes at a cost. So many professionals have died lately, and more are opening up about their battles with depression, I feel the need to pull back the rug a little and try to show that cost.

Most recently, Teresa Butta died on New Year’s Eve.  We were acquaintances--we moved in the same circles, rode with the same instructor, attended the same clinics and shows, and were about the same age.  We had big dreams.  

I can’t look at her death, and look at my health breakdown two years ago, followed by necessary business and life changes, and not think “there, but for the grace of god, go I.”

The horse business is tough - everyone says that. But those words don’t even touch the surface.

Working in any highly competitive performance-based industry, be it athletics, the arts, academia, some corporate settings, is tough, because you are always, always trying to be the best. Not your best, but THE best, in order to survive. Any performance-based industry has a “what have you done lately?” mentality. Recent show results are much more important than awards won 20 years ago. 

Dressage riders are hard-wired with a type-A, perfectionistic, it’s-never-good-enough mindset--professionals even more so.    Even when we win, our score sheets detail areas to improve. The impossible standard of a “10” leaves every single one of us with a healthy dose of imposter syndrome. 

In the horse industry, we get the double-whammy of working in the service industry.  Unless a trainer is quite fortunate with sponsors or family money, the lights are paid by other people’s horses, other people’s dreams, other people’s goals.  Supporting client’s dreams and goals, often while we watch ours be sidelined by time, injury, or finances, is emotionally quite heavy. 

So heavy in fact that in the CBS article dated June 2016, entitled “These Jobs have the Highest Suicide Rate,”  agriculture/farming workers (which all of us who manage a farm are part of) ranked #1, and service industry workers ranked #19.

The finances in this job add to the pressure--this industry runs on insanely small profit margins.  The overhead is crazy high. Board generally breaks even, and owning a competition horse isn’t cheap.  Even when the long-term goal is sales, the carrying costs, promotion costs, and training time aren’t paid until the horse sells.   Most horse trainers are one colic surgery, one expensive truck repair, one lost training client away from sleepless nights and robbing Peter to pay Paul.  When clients drive up in late-model expensive cars and complain about the cost of a lesson, not getting bitter is an active choice, one that’s really hard to make at the end of a cold, wet, physically-tiring 12-hour day.  

We all walked into this career knowing we weren’t going to get rich, but we expected it to be fun.  Being close to burnout all the time isn’t fun, not even a little. 

Most often we are head trainers, or work alone, and the saying “it’s lonely at the top” is real.  When trainers do get the rare luxury of gathering with other pros, our competitive, perfectionistic nature makes it hard to let our guard down.  Talking about how many horses are in your program, how long your days are, how many days you’ve worked without a day off is a status symbol. Rarely do we ask each other if we are having fun, or what we do outside of the barn. We are so used to keeping up the veneer of success for our clients, that we can’t even let it down in front of our peers.  It’s really a wonder that more of us don’t crack.

In our late 20’s and early 30’s, these stressors are much easier to swallow. Big-tour horses still fill our dreams.  But as trainers near middle age, and you look at your meager 401k, and see USDF and USEF gearing so much funding and programs to the “young professional,” dreams of CDI gallops no longer have enough shine to pull you through the hard times.  

As trainers approach midlife, our priorities are often forced to shift.  The sacrifices we made in our 20’s and 30’s to make ends meet no longer seem worth it.  Because at the end of the day, no one asks how much we sacrificed or how hard we worked, only if we achieved our goal.

I have watched so many of my peers change their goals, and find other lines of work to have a more stable income source. They shift to part-time, or leave the industry all together.  All to achieve some form of stability, and hopefully a work-life balance. But when we’ve been our own boss most of our working career, in a field that most of the world doesn’t even know about, this transition time is really, really hard. 

I am saying all of this because knowledge builds empathy, and empathy builds connection.  And connection is a big key to handling stress.

Right now, with Teresa’s passing on our minds, my peers are discussing how to help each other.  But I think this discussion needs to be opened to the dressage community and friends of the dressage community.  We are all looking for concrete ways, big and small, to prevent the stresses of the job from creating stress fractures.  All ideas are welcome here, please comment below or on the Straight Forward Dressage Facebook page.

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